DID YOU EVER NOTICE?

DID YOU EVER NOTICE?

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 13, 2009

NOTE: I take a daily peripatetic walk of about four miles, now in 94 degree heat, but I don't mind because thoughts come to me, and I record them as I walk. Sometimes I edit them, but often I don't. This is the case of the latter.
JRF

* * *


Did you ever notice that baldness in men was once an embarrassment? Now Dons of universities, executives, congressmen, doctors, lawyers, and especially athletes go in for the bowling ball look even if by heredity they have a full head of hair.

Did you ever notice that tattoos were once the curse of outsiders, the motorcycle gangs, the disestablished, and renegades? Now, fat old men with their bellies hanging out over their belts, and in Florida shorts, can be seen to have tattoos on their legs, arms and necks as if members of the disenfranchised. Ladies, too, sport these symbols which once separated the losers from the winners, the rich from the riffraff.

Did you ever notice the fist bumps that everyone displays today instead of handshakes? This is a way to show how cool and in touch you are. It reminds me of an orangutan mimicking a baseball player, where the practice originated, suggesting there isn't much evolution in the species.

Did you ever notice people interviewed on celebrity television shows wear rumpled clothing in casual contempt of savoir-faire. They are careful, of course, to be always wearing recognizable designer threads costing thousands of dollars for the more discriminating crowd.

Did you ever notice that there is not a single person no matter how stratospheric the I.Q., or the nature of the expertise that can speak without a collections of “you knows”? Even President Obama, the successor to the “Great Communicator” President Reagan, cannot master the tick.

Did you ever notice how popular music has gone into the toilet, but yet awards are given and “Hall of Fame” distinction to its artists?

Did you ever notice that the “f” word has become cool for nice girls to say in their intimate crowd? It is meant to be liberating but of course has quite the opposite effect.

Did you ever notice that women who want to get ahead, who have the advantage of superior intelligence, insight, intuitive leadership, and emotional courage to that of men, dismiss this advantage of their gender and try to be more male than men are?

Did you ever notice that men, mainly husbands, get their wives and families into desperate straits, and then blame their partners for not having a positive attitude, claiming the reason for the desperation is this and not the lame brained business they orchestrated?

Did you ever noticed that kids who say they are bored are likely to have all the advantages and live in the womb of self-pity with no sense of the reality most kids have to face? More than half the kids in our society live in quiet desperation without the luxury of boredom. It is not because they want to be so disadvantaged. It is because they have no other choice.

Did you ever notice that kids who have to raise their own parents because their parents are on drugs or are drunkards often turn out to be the leaders of our society?

Did you ever notice people who have a problem invariably think the problem is other people's problem? They choose to believe they are the victims of circumstances when they have created the circumstances to which they have victimized others.

Did you ever notice people who always tell lies start out a conversation by saying, “to be honest with you”?

Did you ever notice people who are always talking about sin and sinners proselytizing others to be more religious are actually turning people off, totally, from the whole idea of religion?

Did you ever notice we are most attracted to what we are not? Many entertain the idea of a desperate escape from what they are. Criminals often want to be cops, egregious sinners often want to priests, the lame want to be professional athletes, the stupid want to be scholars. Celebrity is but a frantic attempt to escape from self-knowing and self-acceptance to live in a surreal world.

Did you ever notice that television evangelists always shout? Yet, the only way to get through to people is in a whisper.

Did you ever notice that people who have the grandest homes are the ones getting their names in the paper for dubious deeds in these difficult times?

Did you ever notice when people delight in malicious gossip, most of which you know is fantasy, are the ones most likely to talk disparagingly about you when you are out of ear shot?

Did you ever notice when people say, “everyone thinks this” about this or that it is likely nobody does other than the speaker?

Did you ever notice that the people who are the funniest and most entertaining are likely to be the most disturbed and depressed in their private thoughts?

Did you ever notice people who belong to everything fail to belong intimately to the people closes to them?

Did you ever notice the name or face or disposition of the person serving you in the restaurant or department store? These people struggle to make a living. They must always have a smile on their faces, despite the fact their own lives may be falling apart.

Did you ever notice the maintenance men in the store who walk around doing the job seem to be invisible?

Did you ever notice what a joy it is to be you, right now, without a hairpiece or some other cosmetic contraption, but just you, right now, living and breathing, and wondering?

* * *





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THINK AND GROW UP!

THINK AND GROW UP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 11, 2009

One of the many reasons we’re in an economic downturn is because of excess. We’ve operated for more than a generation as if there were no limits to our expectations or no consequences to our actions.

No matter what we did there was always a safe landing. Executives had their golden parachutes, autoworkers, their union, and others could withdraw from their 401-K’s with penalty, of course, but not to worry for the stock market would continue to rise. There is no downside to an affluent society.

That myth was pricked in 2008 with all the air let out of our inflated egos and the hubris that drove it. We believed we could do anything without consequences.

In my long life I’ve encountered few grown ups because they didn’t have to be. People like me born in the 1930s in the era of the Great Depression had no choice but to grow up. Here is what has worked for me:

1. DO WHAT YOU LOVE AND THE MONEY WILL FOLLOW. I started out as a chemist because I was trained as a chemist. My professors in college said I had a talent for writing and didn’t belong in science, but I stayed in science because I feared I couldn’t make a living otherwise.

As an industrial chemist, I lacked the mechanical aptitude required for experiments, but liked chemical theory. I applied for and won a fellowship to pursue theoretical chemistry, only to realize the stipend would not be enough for my wife and two babies.

So, in the short term, I became a chemical sales engineer discovering I had a talent for selling. This found me rapidly advancing in the company with graduate school permanently on hold.

Only in my early thirties, I was traveling the world as an international executive landing in South Africa, where I facilitated the formation of a new company. It was the era of Afrikaner apartheid, which caused me to take a hard look at my life. I resigned and retired for the first time at age thirty-five.

After a two-year sabbatical in which I read books in psychology and philosophy, religion and anthropology, and wrote CONFIDENT SELLING (Prentice-Hall 1970), I went back to school for six years, year around, consulting on the side to earn a Ph.D. in organization and industrial psychology.

Entering the corporate world again, I joined a high tech company as an organizational development (OD) psychologist, rising again to a senior executive landing in Brussels, Belgium. There I worked with national subsidiaries as the European Economic Community was taking hold.

At the end of that assignment, I retired again, now in my fifties, and wrote WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (The Delta Group 1990).

Today, now in my seventies, I still write books, conduct seminars, and give keynote addresses having taken a rather circuitous route to doing what I love. This is true of most people who do what they love and the reason I share it with you here.

2. BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND. To have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. We are programmed to this simple equation:

Belief + Belonging = Behavior

The problem with belief and belonging is that it is often in support of second hand beliefs and other people's criteria and not our own. Behavior is predicated on what others think of us rather than what we think of ourselves, and not necessarily on what is in our own best interests or based on our experience.

If we are our own best friend, we are in relationships and work that esteems us. We are guided by self-interests in a culture, climate and company that nourish our maturity and growth. Too often we stay in life situations that diminish us because we are afraid of what others might think, failing to listen to our own hearts.

Another equation is this:

Risk + Pain = Consequences

Consequences may be positive or negative, but they are equally important as learning experiences. As long as we are our own best friend, we will do what is in our best interest.

3. KEEP HOLD OF YOUR MONITOR AND MORAL COMPASS. With a moral compass, you are in control, a happy camper with the confidence of self-direction.

We are often programmed to meet the needs of the organization at the expense of our own. An organization attempts to keep peace, harmony and stability by controlling human variables. If this is congruent with our values, beliefs, interests and expectations, it is one thing. It is quite another matter if it is not. Being in the wrong place can be stultifying, delimiting, frustrating and cause unnecessary anxiety. A working moral compass alerts us to this fact.

There is also implicit pressure to keep people in place in the pecking order. Today everyone is said to need a college education when many college graduates are without aptitude or attitude to do anything. Professionalism dominates whereas amateurs have made the greatest breakthroughs through time because they are apt to take the greatest risks.

Life is about making choices and taking risks. With a healthy moral compass, those choices and risks will be in our best interest, and by extension in society’s as well.

Choices are driven by expectations. Notice people of influence find their children moving into positions of influence. It is even evident in sport. Currently, the Molina brothers (Bengie, Jose and Yader) are all Major League catchers in baseball. The chances of a boy making it in this sport are less than one in 100,000, yet these three brothers have made it to the big leagues and have stayed where the average salary is $2.5 million a year. Some 350 brothers have been MLB players.

Achievement is predicated on expectations, belief, discipline, sacrifice and dedication, all aspects of a functioning moral compass and directional monitor.

With an internal monitor, the emphasis is on the process not the outcome. The outcome takes care of itself if we dig deep into ourselves, and show the patience and fortitude to complete the task one-step-at-a-time. This is how dreams are realized.

Should we compare and compete being obsessed with the success of others, we could get lost in imitation and lose our way. The moral compass and direction finder keeps us on course.

I come from lower middle class Irish American Roman Catholic people with only one uncle slipping through the crack to attain a Ph.D. in economics and psychology, and then successfully pursuing an academic career. He became my model and mentor and gave me permission through his achievements to elevate my expectations for myself. A reference model breathes encouragement into our soul.

Imagine how African American children must feel today seeing Barak Obama President of the United States. He is a man who rose from a broken home and mix race parents to develop his mind showing the tenacity of spirit to realize his vision.

4. PLEASE YOURSELF FIRST AND YOU WILL BE USEFUL TO OTHERS. I’ve never been a sacrificial lamb that would exploit myself to the advantage of others. To do for others what they best do for themselves only weakens their resolve and diminishes them as persons, but it also weakens us in the process.

You cannot be strong, resolute and confident if you do not have a sense of your own worth and authentic self.

The inclination is to be all things to all people ending up being nothing to everyone, including ourselves. Without self-respect, it is impossible to genuinely respect others; without self-acceptance it is impossible to see the flaws and foibles in others, or to see and accept them in ourselves. Tolerance is a function of self-acceptance.

5. DON’T OWN OTHER PEOPLE’S PROBLEMS. We all have problems and we all have a need to share them with an empathic ear to get them out of our head so we can see them for what they are.

The moment we give advice, money, or help in any form, however, we are placing ourselves in jeopardy. We are working our way into making other people's problems our own, and creating a counterdependent relationship. This can become extremely toxic and debilitating for both parties.

More than a year ago, a young family I know with recently born twin boys let a high school classmate stay with them "for a week" until he got back on his feet. He has never left. He has disrupted the family, turned the husband against the wife and blanketed the children in constant tension. This "guest" spends his leisure time drinking and wallowing in reminiscent with his obliging host.

Now, they don’t know how to get rid of him, and it is doubtful if the marriage will survive. Tens of thousands of people reading this can relate to variations of this theme.

In the most intimate of relationships, when a person shames himself, and asks for forgiveness, does nothing to change behavior, but expects us to share his burden of guilt, and then to carry the consequences of his transgressions, we are owning his problem, a problem we cannot solve, and a problem that will likely exacerbate and be repeated ad infinitum.

6. NEVER BE AFRAID TO SAY “NO!” As my children can attest, I’ve never been afraid to say “no” nor have I been afraid to say “no” when colleagues have used it as an implicit threat, implying if I didn’t say “yes” it would be career limiting.

If you have a healthy moral compass and self-monitor, you will not get caught in this no escape situation where only a “yes” suffices to keep the peace.

Implicit in the need to say “yes” is the need to be seen as a hearty fellow well met, a good parent, good person, an obliging colleague, and a team player. That is all right providing it is not at the expense of our self-respect and self-preservation.

Should a person show contempt for you once you say “no,” then that person never had genuine regard for you in the first place. He intended to use you for his purposes irrespective of your own.

When I was a young chemical sales engineer, and accounted for 80 percent of the new business in a district sales force of eight, the most veteran salesman called me, and said, “You can buy my window air conditioner.” I said, “I don’t want it.” He countered, “Why not, you’re making all the money?” In other words, I was obliged to buy his used air conditioner because I could afford it. I didn’t buy it, and he seldom spoke to me again, which was to be expected.

7. BE A STUDENT OF WHAT YOU DO. This means doing the duty and the diligence to learn as much as your faculties will allow. I’ve done this and taken pride in acquiring knowledge but have learned a powerful lesson:

Never punish others with what you know but use it to teach, guide, coach and mentor them to lift them off their bottom and on to their own two feet.

You should never carry others, or do the heavy lifting of their work. That is their burden and not yours. You role is to get them vertical so they can move off the dime under their own power.

When I was in high school where I was a student-athlete, and would sit in the gym while my teammates roam the campus at lunchtime, and help students with word problems in algebra and trigonometry, I discovered that it made me a better student so it was a self-interested strategy. Often, in my university days, students helped me in the same way with me marveling at what good teachers they were.

* * *

This is how I see thinking and growing up, but with a caveat. My children were born in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. They have not had it easy. They are all still struggling. They have not grown up.

They have been more influenced by their peers than by me. Their peers have come from homes in which the parents, as a rule, came from money and never had to grow up. These parents smoked and drank and partied, whereas I have never been similarly inclined. My children got into a crowd that took it as their right to do as they please and to behave as if there were no tomorrow.

These parents that played hard and worked hard and burned the candle at both ends are not with us anymore, whereas I am in my seventies and in good health. I walk four miles four or five times a week, eat healthily, maintain a stable weight, and live the life I have chosen, reading, writing, and consulting with a happy relationship with my wife of twenty-three years.

I have had an easy life with many careers: professional, academic, consulting, executive, and publishing. It has been an easy life because I have been guided by my moral compass and have lived consistent with its demands.

My parents installed this monitor in me when I was quite young. It has guided me to know where I was, and where I was going. It has given me an understanding of my options and the lay of the land.

It hasn’t been a journey without bumps in the road, or unanticipated potholes. I have taken false steps, but have never lost my focus of effectively utilizing my inherent ability, recognizing I was the son of an Irish Roman Catholic brakeman on the railroad with a seventh grade education. He once said, “The day you deny that, Jimmy, you won’t know who you are, and everyone will own you.” I’ve worked hard to avoid that possibility.

* * *

GOD AND SCIENCE -- AN EXCHANGE!

GOD AND SCIENCE -- AN EXCHANGE!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© August 11, 2009

“The further the spiritual evolution of mankind advances, the more certain it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge. In this sense I believe that the priest must become a teacher if he wishes to do justice to his lofty educational mission.”

Albert Einstein

* * *


A WRITER WRITES:

Gee, Jim,

I thought the student was you?

Phil

REFERENCE: The God vs. Science debate!

* * *

The atheist Professor of Philosophy pauses before his class and then asks one of his new students to stand.

'Let me explain the problem science has with religion.'

'You're a Christian, aren't you, son?'

‘Yes sir,' the student says.

‘So you believe in God?'

'Absolutely.'

‘Is God good?'

'Sure! God's good.'

'Is God all-powerful? Can God do anything?'

‘Yes''Are you good or evil?'

'The Bible says I'm evil.

'The professor grins knowingly.

'Aha! The Bible! He considers this for a moment. 'Here's one for you. Let's say there's a sick person over here and you can cure him. You can do it. Would you help him? Would you try?'

'Yes sir, I would.'

'So you're good...!'

'I wouldn't say that.'

'But why not say that? You'd help a sick and maimed person if you could. Most of us would if we could. But God doesn't.'

The student does not answer, so the professor continues.

'He doesn't, does He? My brother was a Christian who died of cancer, even though he prayed to Jesus to heal him. How is this Jesus good? Can you answer that one?' The student remains silent. 'No, you can't, can you?'

The professor says. He takes a sip of water from a glass on his desk to give the student time to relax. 'Let's start again, young fella. Is God good?'

'Er..yes,' the student says.

'Is Satan good?'

The student doesn't hesitate on this one. 'No.'

'Then where does Satan come from?'

The student falters. 'From God'

'That's right. God made Satan, didn't he? Tell me, son. Is there Evil in this world?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Evil's everywhere, isn't it? And God did make everything, correct?'

'Yes'

'So who created evil?' The professor continued, 'If God created everything, then God created evil, since evil exists, and according to the principle that our works define who we are, then God is evil.'

Again, the student has no answer.

'Is there sickness? Immorality? Hatred? Ugliness? All these terrible things, do they exist in this world?'

The student squirms on his feet. 'Yes.'

'So who created them?'

The student does not answer again, So the professor repeats his question. 'Who created them?'

There is still no answer. Suddenly the lecturer breaks away to pace in front of the classroom. The class is mesmerized. 'Tell me,' he continues onto another student. 'Do you believe in Jesus Christ, son?'

The student's voice betrays him and cracks. 'Yes, professor, I do.'

The old man stops pacing. 'Science says you have five senses you use to identify and observe the world around you. Have you ever seen Jesus?'

'No sir. I've never seen Him.'

'Then tell us if you've ever heard your Jesus?'

'No, sir, I have not.'

'Have you ever felt your Jesus, tasted your Jesus or smelled your Jesus? Have you ever had any sensory perception of Jesus Christ, or God for that matter?'

'No, sir, I'm afraid I haven't.'

'Yet you still believe in him?'

'Yes' 'According to the rules of empirical, testable, demonstrable protocol, science says your God doesn't exist. What do you say to that, Son?'

'Nothing,' the student replies. 'I only have my faith.'

'Yes, faith,' the professor repeats. 'And that is the problem that science has with God. There is no evidence, only faith.'

The student stands quietly for a moment, before asking a question of his own. 'Professor, is there such thing as heat?'

'Yes.'

'And is there such a thing as cold?'

'Yes, son, there's cold too.'

'No sir, there isn't.'

The professor turns to face the student, obviously interested. The room suddenly becomes very quiet. The student begins to explain.

'You can have lots of heat, even more heat, super-heat, mega-heat, unlimited heat, white heat, a little heat or no heat, but we don't have anything called 'cold'. We can hit down to 458 degrees below zero, which is no heat, but we can't go any further after that.

‘There is no such thing as cold; otherwise we would be able to go colder than the lowest -458 degrees. Everybody or object is susceptible to study when it has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a body or matter have or transmit energy. Absolute zero (-458 F) is the total absence of heat.

'You see, sir, cold is only a word we use to describe the absence of heat. We cannot measure cold.

‘Heat we can measure in thermal units because heat is energy. Cold is not the opposite of heat, sir, just the absence of it.'

Silence pervades across the room. A pen drops somewhere in the classroom, sounding like a hammer.

'What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?'

'Yes,' the professor replies without hesitation. 'What is night if it isn't darkness?'

'You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it?

‘That's the meaning we use to define the word. In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?'

The professor begins to smile at the student in front of him. This will be a good semester. 'So what point are you making, young man?'

'Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with, and so your conclusion must also be flawed.'

The professor's face cannot hide his surprise this time. 'Flawed? Can you explain how?'

'You are working on the premise of duality,' the student explains… 'You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought.'

'It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing.

'Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it.'

'Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?'

'If you are referring to the natural evolutionary process, young man, yes, of course I do.'

'Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?'

The professor begins to shake his head, still smiling, as he realizes where the argument is going. A very good semester, indeed.

'Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?'

The class is in uproar. The student remains silent until the commotion has subsided. 'To continue the point you were making earlier to the other student, let me give you an example of what I mean.'

The student looks around the room. 'Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?' The class breaks out into laughter.

'Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelled the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir.'

'So if science says you have no brain, how can we trust your lectures, sir?'

Now the room is silent. The professor just stares at the student, his face unreadable. Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers. 'I guess you'll have to take them on faith.'

'Now, you accept that there is faith, and, in fact, faith exists with life,’ the student continues, 'Now, sir, is there such a thing as evil?'

Now uncertain, the professor responds, 'Of course, there is. We see it every day. It is in the daily example of man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of crime and violence everywhere in the world. These manifestations are nothing else but evil.'

To this the student replied, 'Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil.

‘Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light.'

The professor sat down.The student was Albert EinsteinAlbert Einstein wrote a book titled "God vs. Science" in 1921.


* * *

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Phil,

As you know by year 1921, Einstein was near the end of the most creative period in science in the twentieth century. In the golden year of 1905, the 26-year-old Einstein wrote four major articles that forever altered physics. The most famous is “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,” which introduced the special theory of relativity. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921

You flatter me, however, associating me with this particular dialectic, but you've known me all my life and have that advantage.

I enjoyed this amusing piece, and thought I knew the source as I read it, which was confirmed at the end.

What a beautiful man is Einstein. I’ve often referred to this summary of his:

"Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."

He often displayed humor regarding our limitations, writing, "All men dance to the tune of an invisible piper,” as our inner experiences consist of reproductions and combinations of sensory impressions through the use of this instrument called “a brain.”

As I was reading this, I could not help but think of the struggles of Aquinas. He argued:

"Philosophy examined the supernatural order in the light of reason, and theology examined it in the light of revelation. Although reason was used in theology," he concluded, "revelation did not fall into the province of philosophy. And philosophy could not contradict theology because truth could not contradict truth."

For Aquinas, then, faith and knowledge were not mutually exclusive. Belief took over at the point where knowledge ended. He summed it up: To believe is to think with ascent.

* * *

I also thought of the struggles of Augustine with "duality." Born of a Christian mother and pagan father, he first followed the Manicheans, an extreme form of Gnosticism, which looked at things with religious dualism.

Augustine never outgrew this influence as he had bias towards dualism all his life.

Incidentally, I can recall my first introduction to dualism during summer vacations at Higgins Lake in Michigan, when my uncle, the professor at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit school, tired of listening to his son, Robert and me arguing baseball, and decided to lecture us at lunchtime on the great religions of the world.

What made an impression on me from these sessions was his description of Zoraster's struggle between good and evil, lightness and darkness, and concluding in the end that good would banish evil and universal lightness would banish darkness.

Since Zoraster walked the planet six centuries before Christ, it was heady stuff for a ten-year-old to hear, but somehow it stuck. Imagine years later my reading Nietzsche's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," and the whole thing coming back to haunt me again.

As Einstein shows in this piece, there can be a fallacy in arguing the "God thing," yet the argument springs eternal with questioning man.

For some reason reading this, I was thinking of thermochemistry in thermodynamics, which I studied so long ago, realizing how our little minds absorb information in a certain way in our long struggle towards awareness.

There are readers in my email address book who are atheists and agnostics, renegade Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and also devout members of these three great religions, and all of them caught up in the mythology of time that Einstein also explained so well.

Three months ago, I spent three weeks working on a piece on the mythology of time in the context of the space-time continuum, explaining Einstein and Godel as I understood their work, and then contrasting this with how we are slaves to chronological time as opposed to psychological time. I pushed the wrong button on my computer and lost the essay!

I was so depressed that I told myself I would never write another essay, but, alas, I continue to do so. It is my way I procrastinating from writing A GREEN ISLAND IN A BLACK SEA on South Africa in 1968.

Good to hear from you, and

Always be well,

Jim


* * *

THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE -- ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW!

THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE – ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW!

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

© August 10, 2009

“There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables” – as it does on the sitting rich for stealing the company store, yet both are equally guilty of corruption.”

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D., “The Problem with Hope”

A RESPONSE FROM A READER TO "THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE"

Hello Jim,

I hope you’re happy. Sorry for the passive wish that puts the burden on you to achieve happiness. Although, I believe your spirits are lifted when you receive a response from one of your readers.

You offer challenging and insightful thoughts on hope.

Actually, the Hooters patrons had no hope or faith. Think about it. If you were forced to leave a restaurant in the middle (or at the beginning or end for that matter) of your meal for any length of time, would you really want to return and resume eating what you left unattended? Would you pay for a service or meal you could not eat? It is unfair to include this among your examples of theft.

Even more revealing is the owner’s lament over the loss of several thousands of dollars. That’s not likely. At best, he had twenty tables filled at about $75.00 per table. That’s a gross of $1500 of which maybe $750 would be net income. Double it and it still is not a lot. He could recover the cost of lost food through his insurance.

More revealing still would be his concern for the waiter staff, busboys and cooks who lost a portion of their tip income. They are the victims of this “crime.”

I know the Hooters story is minor to the whole and meant as an example of a crime of convenience. I can’t say what I would have done as I don’t know all the details.

The other criminality you describe is not done out of boredom. It is born in desperation. When people are hungry, need shelter and are concerned for the well-being of their families, the stress of those worries pushes them over the brink. In a big city, confronted daily by examples of affluence, the stress of being unable to provide is compounded.

This empathy is not meant to excuse the crime. Crime is the “short-cut society’s” path of choice. You’re right. In many cases, it’s the poorer robbing from the poor. The real concern is that those people are hopeless.

That is why I have difficulty believing most people would steal if they knew they wouldn’t be caught. Thieves are created every day and not caught. It’s hopelessness that leads to compromised morals or situational ethics (which are not at all ethical). A majority of us harbor realistic hope.

A huge component of hope is belief. Hope is not blind. It is a view of the future in which you see attainment. Hope is the source of courage, not a weak surrogate. How does one gain the courage to forge ahead in dark times if not for the view that a good end is possible?

Incarcerated criminals rehearse their empty speeches of change and hope in preparation for the parole board. As you learned, many are verbalizing intentions they do not have nor believe. What is their better future? What has the system taught them? What trade have they learned to provide the vehicle to that better future? They are not given any reason for real hope and, therefore, never develop the courage to face the real world.

Your best writing makes me think as this piece has. Thank you for doing that.

Michael

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Michael,

The rationale you provide would be fitting if the United States of America were it a Third World Country, like Nigeria. I reference that country in this piece where the best paid working class workers – oil rig workers – are paid $50 per month or $600 per year, whereas most workers make less than $1 a day.

Need and survival may be the predicate in such circumstances to steal, but not Americans, not anywhere for any reason. That is the psychopathological rationalizing their plight.

With regard to the Hooter’s Restaurant, and the interruption of the meal by a fire emergency that didn’t materialize, I have trouble with your logic. I, for one, in good conscience could not justify leaving without satisfying my bill. I just could’t. The fact that many did – and this is a very large Hooter’s Restaurant on the water – cannot to my mind be justified.

Criminal behavior is criminal behavior and law-abiding citizens are no less obliged to pay the consequences of their actions than are professional criminals.

You contend that crimes are not done out of boredom but out of need or desperation. Even in these difficult times, there are tons of jobs daily advertised in the newspaper that might neutralize such desperation. But so many people, thanks to being hooked by advertisers, cannot give up their cigarettes and booze, or keep themselves in a state of health pursuant to a job, but instead live a self-pitying existence moaning their lives away hoping for things to change.

The lady next door lost her husband not yet fifty years old to brain cancer, then the economy tanked, and now she is cleaning houses for a living. Yes, a lady used to an easy life has bit the bullet and righted herself by doing honest work without humility or complaint. She still smiles every day, and keeps a stiff upper lift.

As for stress, Americans have forgotten that stress is “the spice of life,” as Dr. Hans Selye puts it, for without stress we all would be vegetables, or dead.

It is distress that is the culprit and distress lives in the false hope that things will change miraculously, when they never do.

Some take a detour from hope by anesthetizing their bodies and closing down their minds with drugs or work or profligate activity to escape the reality of their situation. Nietzsche was right. We are all too human!

Americans have had a fifty or sixty-year cushion from reality and now it is breaking through and they don’t know how to deal with it. The short-cut-itis to which I refer is the incipient toxic character to the American disposition at all levels and in all institutions.

As for hopelessness leading to moral compromise, I prefer to see these in reverse. Moral compromise generates hopelessness. The Hooter patrons that rationalize they don’t have to pay their bill because of its inconvenience, an inconvenience that they did not cause, etc., are making a moral compromise.

Michael, you and I live in a society that has never grown up because it has never had to grow up, that is, until now!

We cannot hope that it will grow up nor can we play the semantic game that hope is the other side of courage because courage is that woman cleaning houses for a living when she never had to work before; courage is embracing our fears not justifying our anxieties; courage is getting off our asses and doing something, anything, and not complaining how much stress we have, or how wrong life has gone for us; courage is digging deep into our psyche beyond our fragile ego to realize time is passing and this is the only life we have to live.

It pleases me that this has made you think.  My aim is that only that.

Be always well,

Jim

The Peripatetic Philosopher discusses THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE!

  THE PROBLEM WITH HOPE!

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

© August 8, 2009

“He that lives on hopes will die fasting.”

Benjamin Franklin

AUDACITY of HOPE -- an oxymoron


Much is being made of the current economic meltdown but it can be shown that habits of the heart find people grasping for reality as if it were a wave. They hope for a long and durable life supported by imaginary points of bliss. Such people ride these waves to ruin, and then wonder why their lives are spinning out of control.

Credit card debt, buying houses they cannot afford and being puppets to Madison Avenue advertisers so that “the miserable hath no other medicine but only hope,” as Shakespeare puts it.

Main Street blames Wall Street for the crash but it takes two to tango, and Main Street has been a willing dancer to Madison Avenue’s tune. It goes deeper. It is easier to deny reality than to embrace it, easier to ratchet up hope than to find the courage to face despair.

President Barak Obama wrote, “The Audacity of Hope," which helped to launch him into the White House. Hope resonated with readers because hope rings eternal, but hope is a passive vehicle stalled without the engine of courage fueled by the spirit to make necessary change possible.

A better titled and challenge would have been “The Audacity of Courage,” which is always in limited supply. We cannot live on rhetoric, empty promises that matters will change of their own accord, or the consoling promise of optimism without courage.

The “other within,” which I wrote about recently, finds us more inclined to ladle our conflicting self with a dash of hope rather than a pinch of courage. The latter requires that we act differently, learn from our mistakes, embrace our failures, and take risks in order to climb out of our despair. There is no other way.

It is essential that we hit rock bottom, naked and alone, forcing ourselves to find the courage to climb out of the rut we have created for ourselves, shedding our personal baggage that sunk us in the first place. For that attention, we have better than an even chance of “growing up.” Otherwise, we most likely shall give credence to the Italian Proverb: “The man who lives only by hope will die with despair.”

IDENTITY and COURAGE

In Dade and Broward County, Florida, African Americans have been there for centuries. In the late 1950s, Fidel Castro came to power in Cuba with the Cuban Embargo following in 1962. Cubans fled to the Florida peninsula. Now, some forty years later, the Miami-Dade area is little Havana.

The dominant culture in Broward and Brevard County Florida is not American. It is not African American. It is Hispanic. It is so in language, architecture, religion, culture, values, music, food, dress, and expectations. Cubans are energetic, and have no existential identity crisis as described in the “other within.” They have not embraced the American culture. They have defied it displaying the courage to change the culture to suit them, leaving African Americans once again the minority group of the region.

There are as many Spanish speaking television and radio stations as there are those in English. There are as many books, magazines and newspapers in kiosk stands in Spanish as in English. Cubans have colonized the southern tip of Florida and made it their own. .

There are many reasons for this, but the one I am addressing here is that Cuban-Americans have had the courage to establish their Cuban identity irrespective of the wider American culture. They have been able to do this without relying on hope. Of course, they weren’t programmed in conflicting identity as have African Americans.

It is no accident that the Internet has become a conduit for people to live in nostalgia. People of a certain age made redundant by society live often in passive lives. The irony is these “golden years” have not always proven as golden as when they were working.

We are not a society comfortable with leisure. It is one reason in retirement we are constantly on the go. Traveling, I find, is harder work than I ever did on a job. We are programmed to associate work with economic necessity failing to realize it is equally a psychological necessity.

There is nothing wrong with venerating the past. The problem is when we live in the past and cannot escape its grip on us. Nostalgia played a role in the success of IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE (2003), which I wrote as a memoir of the 1940s when I was a boy. What spurred me to write the book was the early death of a boyhood friend whose memory I cherished.

The book was replete with real events in real time with the names of real people of the era, which piqued interest. Although I spent years researching the book, I found many contemporaries remembered the past far better than I did. I am not a nostalgia buff, per se, but wanted to capture a moment in time. Many I sense have not left that time.

Nostalgia in a possible reason hope is so dominant and courage so often an afterthought. Hope rides on the waves of fear (death and dying) and the delusions of misspent dreams. Hope requires no action or unforgivable consequences. Courage requires action and unforgettable consequences.

The generations of The Great Depression and World War Two were conditioned to boundaries and rules which provided identity. There was a line in the sand that once crossed brought about certain consequences with little give. Courage rose to the occasion for survival.

I remember in high school a boy was caught rummaging through another boy’s locker. He was sent to Eldora, the Iowa boys’ reformatory. It was his first offense. I saw countless students in college caught cheating and expelled without ceremony. A teacher or coach could hit you on the side of the head, and that would be the end of it. Parents could give you a good thrashing and nobody heard about it. Some actions had consequences; others didn't. Everyone understood. There were no soft landings.

Nearly everyone I grew up with, mostly lower middle class kids went on to college and have led productive lives. If they failed, there was no one to pick them up. If they got into trouble with the law, there was no one to bail them out. If they found themselves in debt, there was no one to cover their debts. Boundaries and rules were implicit, understood, respected. No one had to make a case for them. Hope wasn’t in their vocabulary.

The upside of this reality was that they were in control. They were not dependent on others for their well-being. They were free, freer than any generation since. They were grownups in the bodies of children. They had no choice. They have moved off stage now with only their children and their children’s children navigating the sandy turf without borders or sand marked boundaries. They are ruling the day, living on hope and fueling hope with sophistry as the main philosophy of the “Information Age.”

WHEN NO ONE is a "GROWN UP"

Longshoreman philosopher Eric Hoffer once said if you want to understand a society, study the games they play and how they play them. If they play them for re-creation and creative respite from the drudgery of life, it is one thing. It is quite another thing if play is reduced to spectator sport, or mainly passive celebration and activity. Or worst case scenario, play and games are taken more seriously than life and reality, and violence is added to this theater.

Oscar Wilde, author of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1890) gave a cogent analysis of his novel in which the portrait of Gray in the attic grows old, but the man remains young. The book was published 120 years ago, but human nature can’t seem to evolve beyond Wilde’s analysis. To wit:

“The moral is this. All excess, as well as all renunciation brings its own punishment. The painter, Basil Hall ward, worshiping physical beauty far too much, as most painters do, dies by the hand of one in whose soul he has created a monstrous and absurd vanity. Dorian Gray, having led a life of mere sensation and pleasure, tries to kill his conscience, and at that moment kills himself. Lord Henry Wotton seeks to be merely the spectator of life. He finds that those who reject the battle of life are more deeply wounded than those who take part in it.”

In our pervasive celebrity culture in which the few provide vicariously escape for the many, Wilde’s story resonates revealing the dangers to a second hand life. When hope is the window to the soul, when identity is a reflection of the success of our favorite teams, the people with whom we associate, or the prestige of our careers, then our authentic self is lost in second and third hand responses to life. Passion so displaced can grow legs to the irrational.

In July 1994, angry at Columbia’s elimination from the World Cup Soccer Tournament, a gunman shot and killed Andres Escobar, 27, the player who accidentally scored a goal against his own team in a match with the United States, which helped seal the team’s fate, losing to the US by a score of 2 to 1. Barely 48 hours after returning home from Los Angeles, the young man was shot to death outside a restaurant in Medellin.

Riots have broken out at sporting events across the globe when teams favored to win, didn’t, or when fans, angered at the officiating, became a mob with people injured or killed in the chaos. Recently, in China, players in a soccer match attacked the game officials, who were saved from serious injury by the intervention of the police.

A WORLD OUT OF CONTROL

Mayhem has been associated with sporting events since the days of Rome. Mock violence is the appeal of the World Wrestling Federation. Car crashes delight NASCAR devotees, while monster car crashes are the main attraction of demolition derbies. Visceral juices flow when destruction is on display. The brute in us has never died. Take the virtual reality mayhem of video games that delight my grandson. I asked him, “Where is the fun in this?” He looked at me as if I were senile. “Grandpa, killing bad guys is cool!”

Two thousand years ago, Rome used the coliseum to vent the frustrations of restless Romans. They lacked jobs and productive lives. Games were a way to defuse the crowd and avoid mass hysteria. People were bored to death so death became entertainment. Seeing Christians torn to shreds by wild animals starved for days made them feel alive, watching gladiators fight to the death made them feel as if they were shedding their own blood. Even the chariot races, often involving terrible crashes, delighted the fans. We think them barbaric, but actually, it is the same sensational paradigm.

Passive participation in the cares and sorrows of the world has found electronic escape by sitting in front of a computer for hours playing games or surfing the Internet, tweeting a BlackBerry, or talking on a cell phone to displace the anxiety of boredom. I sat next to a lady on a recent cross continental flight and she never took her head up from her laptop, not even to pee, as if she was carrying the weight of the world in her lap. I wonder if she will make it to age fifty.

Obviously, people in a doctor’s office are bound to be a bit anxious. I deal with my anxiety by never going anywhere without a book, not even to the supermarket. People sitting with their hands in their laps would look at me suspiciously as I would contently read on. Invariably, they would react in the same fashion – they would get on their cell phones. The place would come alive with the chatter of anxiety in white noise.

My wonder is crime not a function of boredom. Here in the Tampa Bay Area, murder, forcible sex offenses, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft are the staple of daily local television news. Perhaps one person in a thousand, or perhaps 10,000, or 100,000 is involved in some kind of crime, but crime is news. It titillates the souls of the good people in the larger demographic who have little else to do then devour these statistics, or so it seems.

If all the television stories were about these good people, there would be no television news because nobody would be watching. We are more interested in the exception than the rule. Besides, bad as things are, we want to see how much worse they are for someone else. And the shame of it all, well, that’s especially good copy when it is someone prominent from the larger statistics.

Too many people have too much time on their hands, filling the void with worry about something that is unlikely to happen, which is the definition of anxiety. It is demonstrated in talking incessantly on cell phones, tweeting, or checking emails constantly, which, at best, is mainly superfluous. Then bored to tears deciding to bring some excitement into their mundane lives, they do something stupid, and make the nightly television news, the front page of the morning newspapers, usually with their picture, and now they are somebody. Why is it people don’t realize the greatest freedom of all is anonymity. That is why I like a large city.

A PERSONAL ASIDE

For six years while I was a chemical sales engineer in the Industrial Division of Nalco Chemical Company, I serviced the Prison System of Indiana, doing engineering studies and power plant chemical testing, and of course dealing with and talking to those incarcerated.

In a maximum-security prison, for example, people in the powerhouse were all for some reason former murderers. They seemed just as normal as anyone you might meet on the street. In fact, most prisoners from high to low security facilities were representative of a cross section of American society.

When they would talk to me, and often they did with great candor, they had high hopes for the future, great plans to change their ways once out, but most of these high hopes went up in smoke. They were back in prison almost before you could turn around. That included the murderers, who had murdered again. They had hope, but little courage to change their profile. They claimed the “system” was against them, and to a degree they were right, but they forgot they were part of the system.

We are a “short cut” society, which is likely the modus operandi of CEOs as well as criminals, people on Mains Street as well as Wall Street. We are inclined to justify short cut behavior as if we are hard wired to be no other way. I’ve listened to convicts and corporate executives explained their faux pas and the only difference is the vocabulary.

We have seen this in the current economic meltdown as automotive executives and Wall Street investment bankers have explained their problems away. Some of them could take misdirection counseling from inmates who do it with style.

My nephew when he was in college was a pizza delivery driver using his own vehicle to deliver pizzas to customers. He was robbed several times, a crime of convenience. He was lucky he was never harmed.

Across the Tampa Bay area in recent months, there has been a rash of break-ins into newspaper machines to steal the nickels, dimes, and quarters in the machines. Newspaper vendors get up early in the morning to load these machines eking out a slim living. I wonder if this is a crime of the poor stealing from the poor, or someone else feeling life owes them a living. I’m not sure.

Recently, a luxury craft caught on fire in Tampa Bay and was moving close to shore threatening a Hooter’s Restaurant. The Tampa Fire Marshall ordered all people out of the restaurant to avoid possible injury should the burning vessels not be contained. It was. Scores of people who had been dining did not return to the restaurant. The Hooter manager claimed the restaurant lost thousands of dollars in revenue because people walked out on their checks.

You would think Hooter customers would not behave as common criminals. Now, why is that? Why are we surprised at this behavior? Studies have shown that law-abiding citizens have admitted on surveys they would steal if they thought they could get away with it. Morality takes a holiday when the common good, the sense of responsibility, and the desire to do the right thing is missing.

We have grown into a legalese society where the emphasis is on what is legal, but not necessarily ethical. Ethics be damned! Ethics are not germane to a short cut society.

There is no such thing as a little corruption. It has the same toxic impact on the walking poor for stealing silverware – remember Victor Hugo’s “Les Miserables" – as it does when the rich steal from the company store. Both are equally guilty of corruption.

Nigeria is an oil rich country but one of the most impoverished on the globe. The people are blessed with this black gold yet petroleum workers make $50 a month or $600 per year, while those in charge live in luxury making millions. Across the globe this behavior is repeated. Why? Is it politics? Yes. Is it culture? Yes. Is it the political risk of change? No.

Nonetheless, people retreat into hope for change as no one in power has the courage to change.

You cannot hope for change. History has proven that. It takes action. People have been diverted to games, to fads and fancies, to fan worship, and to self-indulgence, and so the beat goes on. The problem of hope extends from one side of the globe in a boundless universe in a world out-of-control standing on its head spinning like a top with the calculus of change stuck in rhetoric.

* * * *

MADNESS, SOCIETY IS CAUGHT STANDING ON ITS HEAD SPINNING LIKE A TOP!

MADNESS, SOCIETY IS CAUGHT STANDING ON ITS HEAD SPINNING LIKE A TOP!

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© July 28, 2009

“Life in contemporary society is like an open-air lunatic asylum with people cutting and spraying their grass (to deny untidiness, hence lack of order, hence lack of control, hence their death), beating trails to the bank with little books of figures that worry them around the clock (for the same reason), ogling bulges of flesh, bent over steering wheels and screeching around corners, meticulously polishing their cars, trimming their hedges, giving out parking tickets, saluting banners of colored cloth with their hand on their heart, killing enemies, carefully counting the dead, missing, wounded, probable dead, planning production curves that will absolutely bring about the millennium in thirty-seven years (if quotas are met), filling shopping carts, nailing up vines (and spraying them), and all this dedicated activity takes place within the din of noise that tries to defy eternity: motorized lawn mowers, power saws, electric clipping shears, powered spray guns, huge industrial machines, jack hammers, automobiles, and their tires, giant jets, electric shavers, motorized toothbrushes, dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, vacuum cleaners. This is truly obsessive-compulsive on the level of the visible and the audible, so overpowering in its total effect that it seems to make psychoanalysis a complete theory of reality.”

Ernest Becker, “The Birth and Death of Meaning” (1971), p. 149, written in 1963 during the Vietnam War.

* * *

THE MADNESS OF NORMALCY

Carlos Ruiz Zafon in his novel “The Shadow of the Wind” has a character say, “The only opinion that holds court is prejudice. Like the good ape he is, man is a social animal, characterized by cronyism, nepotism, corruption, and gossip. That’s the intrinsic blueprint for our ethical behavior. It’s pure biology.”

Novelists provoke; social anthropologists describe (see Ernest Becker quote above). .

Their incisive revelations complement each other to reconcile the fundamental contradiction to life between behavior and belief, action and rhetoric, confidence and doubt, blind obedience to social authority and personal loyalty to experience. Society, author Becker (1925 – 1974) insists, fears more the death of meaning than the death of the body itself. He sees us repressing this fear in evasive activity.

This tragic comedy gives one the impression society is stuck standing on its head spinning like a top unable to move off the dime because it keeps repeating the same errors failing to learn from experience. Philosopher Alan W. Watts describes this “forward inertia” as having our foot to the floor on the accelerator and break at once, burning up rubber and going nowhere. It was why I wrote “A Look Back To See Ahead” (2007). We seem to have a tendency to stay the same, ignore the changes and to leave the future up to manipulators.

Niall Ferguson’s PBS “Ascent of Money” shows this in a financial history of the world. The housing bubble, the stock market plunge, the global economic meltdown, and shady financial dealings go back as far as John Law’s financial manipulations in France in the early 1700s to the Enron debacle to the high jinx of 2007 – 2008 with Fanny Mae and Freddie Max, Lehman Brothers, AIG going belly up, to the Ponzi schemes of Bernard Madoff to the frantically conceived and delivered stimulus package to bail out of Wall Street firms “too big to fail” to the automotive industry that never seems to get it, and so the beat goes on.

Leadership has become leaderless as style has replaced substance and correction, contribution. Those in charge are winging it but with elaborate algorithms and well-schooled staffs. This is the madness of normalcy.

* * *

Political journalist Robert Woodward, who has written four books on George W. Bush during his presidency, was recently talking to Charlie Rose on his PBS show about the president, Barak Obama. Rose asked Woodward to assess the new president to date. After a pensive pause, the author spoke in that level staccato of his giving the president high marks for his confidence, clarity of thought and rhetoric, but failing to see this aptitude translating into practical actions. “I still have little sense of his center of gravity,” he concluded. Unfortunately, Rose didn’t explore this observation.

Under the best of circumstances, our center of gravity determines our equilibrium, our equilibrium gives order to our thoughts, and our thoughts give rise to behavior that answers the perennial question: “Who am I?” Self-knowledge is necessary to understand how self and society are woven out of the structure of meaning. It is difficult to experience equilibrium when “existential identity” gets in the way of "who we are."

The Woodward interview took place before the recent commotion at the Cambridge (Massachusetts) home of Harvard Professor Henry Louise Gates, Jr. Dr. Gates returned from China and had to break into his own home, as the front door was stuck, only to have a neighbor call “911” with the police answering the call, leading to the arrest of the jet lagged tired professor “for disturbing the peace.”

Days later President Obama was holding a news conference on his push for a new comprehensive health program, when asked about the incident. He said Skip Gates was a friend, and that the police acted stupidly. The top has been spinning out of control ever since with equilibrium but a myth.

In an obvious way, the incident revealed Woodward’s concern for the president’s center of gravity. The president’s remark captured the essence of a clash of color in a society that likes to think it has moved beyond racial subjectivity and social stigma. The tension between class and race remains with us for reason. Society has been turned upside down and inside out with some of the most powerful people now people of color. That said “existential identity” smolders under the surface of the most sophisticated for past sins of discrimination. This can break through the patina of the most controlled minds, the president’s included.

* * *

Jewish philosopher Yirmiyahu Yovel provides some perspective on this in his new book “The Other Within” (2009). It is about the Spanish Marranos, former Jews forced to convert to Christianity in Spain and Portugal some 600 years ago. The author uses this to describe a subjectivity that emerged leading to split identity and giving birth to what we now call “modernity.”

His story begins during Holy Week in 1391 in Spain in the Jewish quarter of Seville with the “forced conversion of Jews to Christianity.” According to Yovel, these converts could not commit themselves wholeheartedly to any religion. Those who wanted to be Christian could not achieve a natural integration into Catholicism since their belief was an act of will, which is often severed from the person’s actual life. As for those who yearned for Judaism, they could not return to it openly without risking death or going into exile. This dilemma threw Jewish society in Spain on its head as it gave birth to subjectivity, “existential identity,” and “the other within.”

Dual or split identity led to secularism, and ultimately to “existential identity,” which fifteenth century Spain called “race.”

Jewish converts to Catholicism over the centuries were no longer Jews and yet not Christians other than in mock behavior. Belief was suspended in deference to ritualistic conformity. Jewish Catholics developed “split personalities” externally conforming to the demands of religious authorities but internally being incapable of submitting to the tenets of the religion, thus the split identity.

Yovel sees this self-negation and self-deception giving birth to modernity. Split identity was no longer an exclusive condition known only to Spanish Jews, but was spreading across the world as old compact identities were collapsing and being forced to assimilate new identities and cultures. From the fifteenth century on, Europe was rushing to convert and colonize continents across the globe. Discrete boundaries of race, religion, ethnicity, culture, and national orientation were in crisis. It is no less a problem at a personal level in the most advanced societies today.

Consider the bizarre and tragic life of the late pop singer Michael Jackson. He was a handsome and talented man who happened to be black, living in a dominant white culture. He spent his short life struggling with a split identity. He tried frantically to remold himself into a mirror image of whiteness, revealing in the process the conflict of “the other within,” which could never be resolved. Far from being the exception, the pressure to fit and conform is familiar to all minorities, but also to most members of the working class whatever the color or culture.

* * *

In 1803, president Thomas Jefferson made the Louisiana Purchase from France for $15 million, which was twice the Federal Budget. It doubled the size of the United States, which now stretched across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. He commissioned Lewis and Clarke to explore the North West Passage. He also forced American Indians from their eastern homes and sacred grounds to be relocated westward. Jefferson saw the United States as a country of mainly whites with European roots speaking English as the common language. This implied conformity “or else.”

Some thirty years later, the relocation of the American Indian westward would be the muscular policy of president Andrew Jackson, but Jefferson established the precedence.

American Indians and African slaves were forced to adopt, assimilate and abide by the white American culture at their peril. Small wonder that scars remain hundreds of years later in these two races. Yet, we register surprise when “the other within” shows its mind in a Freudian slip. This happened with First Lady Michele Obama when it appeared her husband would win the 2008 Democratic Party nomination. This African American lady of distinction said, “I’m finally proud to be an American.” It was no less consequential when President Obama painted the actions of the Cambridge police as “stupid” in the Professor Gates Affair.

Our subjectivity wins out when our existential identity breaks through its conscious barrier. Class and race were on display here but in a society turned upside down, that is, race was personified in an accomplished African American professor and the President of the United States, and class was displayed in the working class white Cambridge police officer, Sergeant Crowley.

* * *

The German philosopher of modernity, Hegel, identified the subjective mind. He claimed it asserts itself against forced assimilation by finding solace in the interior self while resisting the exterior apparatus of culture, religion and behavioral constraints. Hegel saw the Lutheran Reformation as a demonstration of this placing more value on the interior and subjective mind over the external dominance of the Catholic Church.

History has proven him right about the principle of subjectivity but wrong about its character. Modernity has not reconciled the mind to itself with a higher unified identity as he envisioned, but quite the opposite. In terms of religion, Yovel shows modernity has weakened Catholicism, which early Jews were forced to adopt, but also weakened Judaism with those Jews who chose to abandon it. This hasn’t stop here.

With the world melting into a heterogeneous soup, modernity has given rise to inner life, irony, secularism, mysticism, private devotion, atheism, careerism, tolerance, curiosity, and intellectualism, as well as the notion of the self, capitalism and rationality.

Society today is standing on its head spinning like a top feigning self-confidence while affirming it no longer is prostrate before any church or any God. Modernity claims to be liberating, but is it? It would seem that integrity or uprightness is on trial and losing.

The sheer volume of books, articles, films, and the Internet traffic suggest society protests too much. The subjective or interior life has not found peace but has instead demonstrated perennial angst. Too often what appears to be generated is hatred, mistrust, xenophobia, and worse of all, patricide, suicide, homicide and genocide. Terrorism, which is the great fear of the day, is split identity on display. Modernity has become a homeless mind with no resting place in the universe.

People have increasingly retreated into the surreal world of drugs, alcohol, work, profligacy, crime, corruption, duplicity, chicanery, fantasy, and war. A life without boundaries has become like a book without a spine. We make things out to be what they are not.

The thrust to life seemingly is to fit when that is not possible; to belong when it is often at the expense of self realization; to pretend to value what is valueless; to join the herd of true believers going nowhere. In modernity’s quest for itself, it has settled on existential identity. Yovel points out Jews have been on this road of dual identity – of what they are and what they are forced to be – for centuries. This was the impetus to a secular and modern world. Confidence now is in professional powers, worldly knowledge, and careers measured by stature, wealth and influence. This has proven an empty vessel devoid of spiritual content and authentic cultural identity.

Confident man of secular society owes much to what is quintessential Jewish: positive outlook on work, personal effort, learning and money, sober logic, rough Jewish common sense, a prodigal drive for achievement and success, and an emphasis on striving to excel in everything that matters to the host society.

Jewish Diaspora is now a common experience to us all. We are all interlopers, no longer genuine insiders but only a collection of striving outsiders. Race, religion and ethnicity once gave spiritual identity and orientation. This has become seamlessly subsumed under secular “capitalism” with the ascent on money.

Yovel challenges the assumption the Protestant Work Ethic gave rise to capitalism. He sees the forced conversion of Jews to Spanish Christianity as capitalism’s driver as Jewish calculating reason and hyper rationality became common to the Christian West.

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Professor Henry Louise Gates, Jr. racial epithets when treated shabbily by police exhibited “existential identity.” The president’s remark did as well. He happens to be an African American, but with a white mother, while his friend, Dr. Gates, is African American married to a white woman with mixed race daughters, and has white blood himself. You see the conundrum. “Existential identity” is more of a puzzle today between whites and blacks than Catholics and Jews. The irony is that whites and blacks have enriched each other’s culture, but not without conflict and unease.

Yovel’s book, “The Other Within” gives pause to consider modern Western and Jewish identity. One of his philosophical conclusions is that split identity, which The Spanish Inquisition persecuted and modern nationalism considers illicit, is a genuine and the inevitable shape of human existence. Split identity is endemic to us all whatever our color, creed, character or nationality. Yovel is saying Jews are free to accept or reject other more saturated Jewish forms of religion, nationality, community, and culture, but not without a price. This holds true for us who are non-Jews as well.

No external force has its right to impose its “we” on others or to recruit them to its cause if they have a mind to do otherwise. Existential identity is no longer the discriminator it once was although subjectivity remains contentious, as the Professor Gates Affair illustrated. Will these barriers between race and religion continue? Likely. The next six hundred years look to be just as difficult for people to find their center of gravity as the top keeps spinning and people of color increasingly come to dominate the new day.

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