WHY THE REVEREND JERRY FALWELL'S LEADERSHIP LEGACY IS IMPORTANT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2006
"Early on, a leader learns that he is in essence the complete follower. He comes to understand that no leader can lead anyone where they haven't already decided to go; that leadership is not all about the leader, but all about the led."
James R. Fisher, Jr., A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (2007)
AN UNSTUCK MAN IN A PERIOD OF STUCKNESS: 1956 - 2006
We live in an era without leaders or demonstrable leadership, stumbling along in the palaver of rhetoric against the constant torment of violence. This is driving us deeper and deeper into an irrevocable abyss.
This pathology has become so ingrained that it is not recognized. It has come to be considered normalcy, contaminating not only American institutions but also that of our entire Western society. Everyone and everything appears to be accelerating while nothing is moving at all. We are stuck with our toys and tools but without the motivation to move forward.
We have lost our moral compass and thus our way, that is, with the possible exception of one man, whom some saw as a buffoon and others as a joke while he was on his way to creating a leadership legacy that cannot be denied, and which we would be well to study.
The critics and supporters of the late Reverend Jerry Falwell are lining up now to sing his fulsome praises or vent their passionate anger.
The critics suggest he was homophobic, xenophobic, and an intolerant religious extremist if not also a racist -- he claimed sympathy for South Africa's apartheid policy. They see him as having formed an unholy alliance with Reagan and then the Bush father and son presidencies, placing him at the door of this triumvirate responsible for most of our current problems. No question he has made it easy for his enemies to justify their enmity.
Supporters are of another mind. They don't dodge his damning evidence, as he often confused and confounded them, yet they have never wavered in their belief that we as a people are most like him, as he is most like us. In a word, he made connection.
Obviously, there is merit to both these views as he was not an icon but a man who understood what leadership was and wasn't and for that it would be well to pay attention to his leadership legacy.
Recently, on the PBS "News Hour with Jim Lehrer," there was a discussion of the reverend's legacy with a graduate of his university and an evangelical Christian critic. The latter agreed with much of Falwell's theology but not his politics, while the former student claimed Falwell had changed his life.
The most interesting comment made during this exchange, however, was that by his critic. "Falwell's success," he suggested, "could be attributed to the fact that many, who would not openly want to admit it, shared his sentiments on same sex marriages, miscegenation, abortion, gay rights, homosexuality and lesbianism and other moral concerns." This connection with the silent majority commenced fifty years ago.
A MODEST BEGINNING
In 1956, the Reverend Jerry Falwell opened the Thomas Road Baptist Church with only thirty-five members. He quickly saw the advantage of spreading The Word via radio and then moving into television with the "Old Time Gospel Hour." Ironically, he was preaching to white middle and lower class Americans a message that had already been created and resonated with African Americans, which he borrowed from observing their ministries.
Unlike many leaders in the exploding evangelical movement, he never suffered from the belief that "it was all about him." To the very end, friend and foe alike, found him a gentleman, courteous and humorous, never taking himself too seriously, or his leadership role for granted, or as a right unto himself.
He let nothing diminish from his focus or his mission. It remained crystal clear to him to the end as he combined vision with service.
In 1971, he didn't build a religious village as Jim Bakker did, but Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. Today, the university serves a community of twenty-thousand students. Currently, a member of the US Congress is a graduate of this university.
In 1979, he founded the lobbyist group the "Moral Majority" with the goal of "exerting significant influence on the spiritual and moral direction of our nation."In 1983, US News & World Report, a newspaper not known to take shortcuts to the story, deemed him one of the 25 most influential Americans.
When Jim Bakker's PTL Ministry collapsed in 1986 consumed in scandal and debt, he didn't turn away from the problem but guided it through bankruptcy. He was much more charitable than was I:
"Only in America," I wrote, "could two otherwise ordinary people rise and fall so quickly as did Jim and Tammy Bakker. Their 'Praise the Lord' (PTL) television club was a resounding success, largely due to their commonplace familiarity. They were like the couple next door. But somewhere between their house and the homes of million of Americans, Tammy's mascara and war paint and Jim's cherubic grin became diabolical. Essentially nice people, they got caught in the war of ratings and the insatiable appetite of television for dollars. Long before Jim's sex scandal surfaced, the PTL Club had become 'show biz,' departing from its religious and spiritual intent. It became entertainment with a capital 'E.' When that happened; the Bakker's commenced to behave like superstars with other people's money. The mansions, the Mercedes, Tammy's shopping sprees -- all became part of the scam that led to Jim dalliance with Jessica Hahn. When that happened, they became a born again disaster."
(Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches, 1990, p. 121)
The fall from grace of the Bakker's has happened again and again, not only to the religious, but also to virtually every other institution in these United States without exception. Scandal has become commonplace especially to those in leadership roles.
VARIATIONS OF FAUST AND MEPHISTOPHELES
People in leadership roles have repeatedly misread their role demands being often flummoxed by their self-demands. The desire is not so much for knowledge, as it was with Goethe's Faust, but for power. It would appear they have come to see leadership as all about affluence, influence and celebrity, or all about them when leadership is always all about the led.
Such leaders would lead on the sense of how people should be not as they are, and as an instrument to the leader's will and not necessarily that of the people's. This is a universal problem impossible to place in a locale or time, as it exists today as it has always existed with self-indulgent leadership.
The Reverend Jerry Falwell has seldom fallen into this trap.
He lost his appeal to the US Supreme Court in 1988 when he challenged the 1983 parody of him in the adult magazine, Hustler. This came at a time when his broad base "Moral Majority" had already been galvanized into a political movement. So successful was this movement that it was given credit for the rebirth of the Republican Party, and conservatism, as well as the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency for two terms.
Smarting from this Supreme Court defeat, what does he do in 1989, or ten years after the Moral Majority was founded, and now a force to be reckoned with? He dissolves it, saying, "Our mission is accomplished." He never confused role demands with self-demands. His personal angst was not allowed to contaminate his leadership mandate.
No doubt Falwell appreciated the wisdom in Lord Acton's remark, "Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely." He would have no part of such corruption.
ALL TOO HUMAN
That said it seems equally apparent that his life was consistent with Nietzsche's suggestion that we are "all too human." This was displayed in his inability to save himself from being used, or, indeed, to save himself from himself.
Syndicated columnist Cal Thomas says it is not inconceivable to imagine Christian fundamentalists, evangelical Christians and conservative Roman Catholics ever mobilizing into a voting block without his leadership; nor can Thomas see Reagan being elected twice, father Bush once, and son Bush twice without his "Moral Majority."
But what so often happens to good intentions is that the means become the ends, in this case, as the focus was shifted from theology to politics, from moral renewal to getting Republicans elected to congressional office. The good reverend allowed himself unfortunately to be used.
On the other hand, he correctly identified the rage of the rank and file middle Americans in the 1980s with the liberal intrusion on their sacred traditions. Americans had had enough of the Hippies, Yuppies, X and Y generations and the "me" self-indulgence that accompanied narcissistic consumerism. In the midst of this mania, he, alone, cut black from white and attacked the gray, as America was stuck in crass materialism and Teflon spiritualism.
FALWELL'S FAUX PAS
Where he overstepped the mark was when he got obsessed with the Tinky Winky. This character of the Teletubbies on children's television, according to him, displayed a veiled homosexuality. Then he made matters worse with his outrageous statement that pagans, homosexuals, abortionists, the ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) and other groups were partly responsible for the September 11 terrorist attacks of 2001. He later would apologize but the damage was already done.
His failure on a personal basis was not recognizing when his views were laced with nonsense; his failure on a corporate basis was not recognizing when his movement and the church were being perceived and used as an appendage to the Republican Party. Thus, unwittingly, his influence was interpreted as yet another instrument to pamper and forgive a special group for its excesses. He proved in the process that leadership is human and not always heroic, that a leader's fragility is forgivable if not his dalliance with the truth.
LESSONS LEARNED FROM FALWELL LEGACY
Leading is a lonely profession, and the temptation to exceed the role and responsibility is always with the leader. Remember how the devil attempted Jesus on the mount. No leader is ever immune to possible corruption.
The second thing is that a leader can never get heady with his power, influence, impact or success. He is an instrument of the will of the people and never rises above that ground level.
The third thing is that the goodness that resonates with the people must make connection with the goodness in the leader's own heart. If goodness has been cauterized from his soul in his rise to leadership, once he gets there, he is doomed. There is no help for him for there is nothing left in him. He cannot see the motivation and requirements of the led because he is walking in a desert in which his own heat is already destroying him, and will in turn destroy the people.
The fourth thing is to recognize people think in terms of their own satisfaction, which is often at the expense of that of others. The leader must recognize and weigh through this to discover the crystal of commonality because he cannot be swayed by special interests.
The reason is clear; the majority is often wrong. It is wrong because it does not think but often acts like a mob. The mob never considers or thinks about the minority, except in terms of bias and stereotypes. The leader can ill afford for the majority to get too locked into self-interests. Human combustion is a function of this locked in-ness, fueled by a leader's weakness of will and vacillation in crisis.
A leader can be guided by, but not become summarily trusting of polls, pundits, personal advisers, or loved ones because they have a vested interest and limited vision of the now. The leader must consider his decisions in the more encompassing framework of the not yet now.
The fifth element of leadership is courage. Courage is not the absence of fear but the embrace of it in body of instinct. A legion of a hundred thousand voices of the past will visit the leader, not in his ear, but through his bones because he is an evolutionary phenomenon. Leaders have struggled before him with the same riddles and questions.
Every leader who is in touch with himself knows of what I am speaking.
These voices of the past are schooled in experience, culture, history, success, failure, salvation and damnation, death and resurrection, defeat and renewal.
Courage is the recognition when to advance, when to fall back, and when to do nothing. Courage is the quality of embracing apprehension when fear is the leader's only companion.
Courage is the recognition that no situation is ever impossible or as improbable as it may seem; nor is any situation exactly like any other before it, and therefore must be judged with naked eyes and an open mind.
The sixth thing is that the leader walks with destiny. In his every action, he is writing his and his people's history, and therefore can never have the luxury of worrying about what people think, say, or write about him in the immediate, or even threaten to do to him.
A leader is as likely to generate as many enemies as friends, as many who hate him as love him, as many who see him as their destroyer as their champion, making all such preoccupations meaningless and counterproductive.
And finally, the leader who leads establishes and leaves a legacy, something upon which to build into the future.
LEADERSHIP REDUX
The most fatal flaw in current leadership is that it is all about the leader, all about the charismatic pretense of his character. The leader has become a media performer.
Unfortunately, leadership is not a beauty contest, not about a glib or anecdotal mind with sound byte fluidity; nor is it necessarily in our prevailing image and likeness.
A leader has the presence, knowledge, will, courage, and decisiveness to make the strategic moves with the most telling long-term consequences that the well-defined problem demands. This is not likely to happen when role and self demands are confused, or when history is misread, misused, or ignored.
We are moving out of a half century of stuckness caused by this lack of leadership and we have called it everything but leaderless leadership.
Reverend Jerry Falwell, flawed as he was as a human being, never became confused about leadership, and his legacy of Liberty University is proof of that fact. He never forgot leadership is all about the led. His goodness drove him and it made connection with the common good.
_______________
Preorder information: A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: checks in the amount of $20 to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
OUR CLICHE CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
OUR CLICHÉ CULTURE COMES HOME TO ROOST
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© May 2007
“Small causes are sufficient to make a man uneasy when great ones are not in the way. For want of a block he will stumble at a straw.”
Jonathan Swift (1667 – 1745), Irish satirist
THE MISCHIEF OF METAPHOR
We see people “looking at the glass half full or half empty” as a convenient way to identify their disposition, but what does the expression mean? What does it tell us, if anything?
It is an expression outside of us provoking no action but suggestion an inside preference.
Likewise, our inclination is meaningless if we judge the situation outside its context. There are times when optimism is healthy and times when it is sick, as there are times when pessimism is healthy and times when it is sick.
A situation is never an either/or proposition. Take self-esteem. Books, videos, and a constant barrage of television gurus promote formulas for self-esteem. But you cannot wish yourself esteemed. You must earn it. You earn it by fighting through low esteem. And you do this by getting unstuck.
In point of fact, it is dangerous to view every situation as optimistic when clearly there are good reasons to see some situations in pessimistic terms. We need the dark clouds that promise rain as much as we need the cloudless skies that guarantee sunshine. It is as unnatural to be always “up” as it is to be always “down.” Life has a rhythm to it and we are designed to be resilient, not rigid. When we claim to always be on top of everything, it suggests we are stuck. There is an old popular song about “laughing on the outside and crying on the inside” that is closer to the mark.
What determines whether we are stuck or not is a matter of how we look at and define the situations we experience. Stuckness is the rigidity of a mind that will resist seeing the situation and circumstances for what they are.
This is not a matter of talent or genius or the generosity of circumstances. It is simply a preference for seeing conditions, as they should be not as they are. When we are rigidly judgmental, we are either stuck in optimism or pessimism, which are equally damaging.
Stated another way, when we stop growing, we don’t vegetate. We start to die. There are people in their teens embracing the dying process, which they call “boredom,” whereas there are people in their seventies and eighties that are still growing.
Sometimes, the metamorphic glass is indeed half full and other times it is half empty. So, to suggest it is half full when it is half empty is to stumble over it as if it were a metaphoric straw.
It was in reflecting on this as I had a coffee at McDonald’s today waiting for my Beautiful Betty to join me to select luggage for our European trip. My mind turned to wondering why we always seem to look at problems from the outside or the same perspective. We do it so repeatedly that two puzzlers came to mind while trying to think over the cell phone chatter that surrounded me.
THE CLICHÉ OF LEADERSHIP
Having just left Barnes & Noble, after inspecting new books on leadership, including a new one by Lee Iacocca and several by John Maxwell, the leadership guru, as well as others of note, I could not help but notice these books were all about the leader and not one of them about the led. They were no less leadership prescriptions than books that came out of post-World War II from such authors as Douglas McGregor, or Robert Blake and Jane Mouton, in other words, indicators of our stuckness in leadership style.
Maxwell has a fetish about the “leader within” while Iaccoca addresses the problem of leadership as if he is the Supreme Pontiff of ecclesiastical leadership. Iacocca does not appear a bit self-conscious in issuing dogmatic encyclicals from his exalted throne, whereas Maxwell sounds like a retread of a priest of the 1970s who was then harping about the “child within.” The good priest never thought it an incongruity to bypass that elusive “adult within” in his quest for personal validation.
Should the reader be able to clone himself into Iacocca or to discover the leader within of Maxwell, the problem of leadership would still remain unresolved because it is the wrong focus.
When only ten percent of the workforce was well educated, and workers obediently marched to the beat of their masters, workers could be duped into such cadence. Not anymore.
Ninety percent of the workforce now is as privy to everything as is its management, plus better educated than most managers who would claim to be their leaders. Therefore, it behooves leaders today to recognize that leadership is all about the led, and not about the leader. This is true of students, parishioners, the military, buyers and the voting constituency.
The focus of leadership should be on the led, and what the leader can glean from that focus to make the led all that they could be.
This is not epiphany stuff.
Peter the Great in the early eighteenth century could already see that there was a disconnect between the ruling class and his people. He wandered among them incognito to get a sense of this, and to assess the trust level of his leadership. He needed this to gauge a momentous disruption of stuckness in feudalism. He could see the handwriting on the wall. Russia was a crumbling feudal empire and the West was leaving Russia in its dust. He knew leadership was not all about him but all about the people. His pressing problem was how to use this understanding to pitchfork his people into the changing modern world. Once he got a sense of his people, he embarked on a series of sweeping military, fiscal, administrative, educational, cultural and ecclesiastical reforms, many of them based on Western European models. All classes of Russian society suffered from the impact of these reforms, including his own son who died leading a conspiracy against his father. Becoming unstuck exacts a price. No platitudes are going to engineer a necessary process to completion. This can only be accomplished by embracing our natural resistance to change.
THE CLICHÉ OF POVERTY
There was a great economic depression in the late nineteenth century, but even a greater one in the early second quarter of the twentieth century. The Great Depression of the twentieth century put the focus of capitalistic democracies on the elimination of material poverty.
The United States came to stir the world’s drink as Europe was decimated by the destruction of World War II, while the United States was left intact with its industrial and management might operating at full steam unimpeded by such devastation.
A new mentality rose out of this conflagration. Economic Man with the mindset of progress was now committed to obliterate material poverty. To a considerable degree it was successful in the United States as many who had been poor for generations came to capture something of the “American Dream” in wealth and relative luxury. A vibrant middle class seemed to have been created, but was it so vibrant?
Americans, it would seem, have never associated luxury with rest but instead with the pursuit of more. This has translated into new activities; new acquisitions and symbols of new status with “bigger and better” becoming the new mantra.
For more than a half century, this has been going on with many new problems, problems that never existed when material poverty was a lifelong status. Ironically, we were a happier and more integrated society when we were poor. Wealth has made us poorer in spirit as a function of our material prosperity.
Similarly, the functional family has been replaced by the dysfunctional family; the active individual has been replaced by the obese couch potato; the comfortable stability of regional heritage has been replaced by everyone and every place looking the same; while the center of life which once rotated around the axis of family, church and school has been replaced by a potpourri of distracting activities that are centrifugal rather than centripetal.
The most egregious sin in America is for an activity to be an end in itself, such as reading a book, pruning roses, or going to school. Everything must have instrumental and terminal coordinates or the activity is judged a waste of time. We are an action-oriented society even if we delude ourselves with passive participation.
Consequently, one size does seem to fit all as the richest and poorest in quest of eradicating material poverty are as likely as not to be involved in crime, violence, illegitimacy, drug addiction, divorce, obesity, AIDs, homicide, suicide, corruption, and every other expression of spiritual poverty.
Spiritual poverty has been ignored as if the magnitude of material abundance and prosperity would be sufficient to eliminate it from the face of the earth. We make a big deal about philanthropy when it would not be necessary if our values were a little more in balance.
For instance, the welfare system treats those that use it as second-class citizens. Some gravitate towards it because of need, others because it is easy. The irony is that it is a sin to be materially poor, but being spiritually wanting doesn’t seem to get much attention; yet the evidence suggests that as a society we are.
When all the energy and focus has been put on progress, there is little energy left for spiritual poverty. The charge could be made that the welfare system has kept more people in place (and down), or spiritually impoverished and dependent than any other factor.
No one feels good about getting something for nothing. We feel good about ourselves when we are respected for our contributions.
When we either have too little or too much, society suffers a spiritual breakdown.
We see this as good paying jobs are sent abroad. We see this as young people drop out of school. We see this in the failure of young people to be trained in skills to qualify them for well paying jobs. We see this in young girls reaching puberty too early, and having children while still being children. We see this in adults in trusted positions in the home, school, church, workplace, government and military abusing their positions and compromising or corrupting those around them by their actions. Scandal has become so normal as to suggest the normalcy of pathology.
The evidence is overwhelming: the rich and poor of this nation are equally spiritually impoverished.
Spiritual poverty has been beyond the pale of society-at-large to do anything about it. We have created a society where no one is in charge, where boundaries are meaningless or nonexistent, where continence is considered repressive, and self-control oppressive; where freedom is considered doing whatever one pleases when that is the greatest enslavement.
Leaders are looking for a formula on how to be successful instead of learning how to lead the led, while people chase the buck thinking that wealth is the palliative to all their spiritual and material poverty.
Such stuckness is another reason why I wrote A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PREORDER INFORMATION: checks in the amount of $30 (plus $5 S&H) for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
WHO AMONG PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES WOULD MAKE A GOOD PRESIDENT – A READER’S QUESTION CONSIDERED
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"It is not enough to have great qualities, we must also have the management of them."
Francois Duc de La Rochefoucauld, French Seventeenth Century Moralist
A reader of my piece, "THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP," asked the question whom among the presidential candidates do you think would make a good president?
In my book WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS (1990), I claimed we were a one-dimensional society with an aversion to greatness, which was best demonstrated in our leadership. I see no reason to change that assessment now.
This aversion is first demonstrated in our educational system. I have a grandson who is going to an exclusive prep school in which it sets his parents back about $17,000 a year, and he is just finishing the seventh grade.
From what I've seen during "Grandparents Day" it isn't the equivalent of what I got at St. Patrick's Grammar School in Clinton, Iowa decades ago for nothing. I examined the workbooks, the lesson plans, the posted materials on the board, and witnessed the exercises presented to us, and I was under whelmed in all instances.
Education today is geared to impress. It is geared to tests, not to learning, to high SAT scores and not to conceptual understanding, to high GPAs whether than insight into the material covered and the world beyond where everyday experience complements the classroom.
Curiosity in school isn't pricked, but appetites and status are. Children go to school “because they have to” not “because they want to.” They take education as a right, which they can accept or reject, and not the privilege that it is, and therefore not appreciated, as it should be. Politicians demonstrate every day precisely this characteristic of our society. They not only fail to speak with clarity but with little sense of learning.
The best and the brightest are not the equivalent of decades ago even though they have wondrous electronic facilities and consummate skills at manipulating these electronic wonders. Thinking is not a text message.
Technology is not education. It is a tool too often used as a toy. Consequently, the equivalent of comprehension is not necessarily a subset of problem solving skills. That is why we keep repeating the same problems as if discovering them for the first time.
Education should not be boring but stimulating, yet it is both boring and iterative, which would appear to commence with a hard wiring process that results in cheating.
A one-dimensional society is a cheating society, and the greatest sufferers for the cheating are the cheaters. Kids will do anything to have high SAT scores and impressive GPAs. Cheating has become a cultural dimension of our society in its one-dimensional inclination. When artificial indexes, such as IQ and SAT scores, are taken to be the measure of intelligence then man is truly mismeasured to the extreme.
The other night on a TV program a father saw the SAT envelop of his daughter empty, and assumed her scores were low, immediately going to her head of school to see if she could take a review course to bump up her scores. Actually, the daughter had impressive scores but had taken it out of the envelope to show her mother. The idea that a parent would do anything to bump up an artificial index of his child speaks to one-dimensionalism.
NUMBER ONE
SO THE FIRST QUALITY OF A GOOD PRESIDENT WOULD BE HONESTY AND INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY AS A LEARNER AND NOT A KNOWER, AS A LISTENER AND NOT A TELLER, AS A THINKER AND NOT AN IMPRESSOR.
Leadership is not an egalitarian pursuit, but a quest to develop one's house of intellect to become a mansion of many rooms, rooms that are amply furnished with diverse and varied cultural artifacts.
To be able to converse with and understand everyman a leader must first converse with and understand him or herself. This takes the combination of a quest for “knowledge building” leavened by incrementally sound supportive and corroborating experience. School is never out for a leader and often he or she doesn't get passing grades, but accepts the occasional shortfall as the price for leadership.
NUMBER TWO
SO THE SECOND THING IS THAT A PRESIDENT HAS TO GET BEYOND OUR VOCATIONALLY ORIENTED MATRICULATION. THIS IS AS EVIDENT IN THE IVY LEAGUE AS IT IS IN THE MOST MODEST OF CITADELS OF LEARNING. THE CONSEQUENCE OF VOCATIONAL TRAINING IS VOCATIONAL THINKING AND LEADERSHIP. THIS TRANSLATES INTO SHORT TERM UTILITY THINKING INSTEAD OF LONG TERM TERMINAL ASSESSMENT.
Leadership is impossible if the culture is organized against leadership and our society is so organized.
We are systemically committed to and depended on wealth creation. Progress is our most important product and no one seems to questions the insanity of this quest, especially with the reality of diminishing resources, disappearing specimens of wildlife, and all the consequences of an increasingly overcrowded planet.
We think of value in terms of wealth rather than the wealth of values. There is little room for trust, sacrifice, love, compassion, virtue, and kindness when they are all subsumed under competitive advantage.
In a one-dimensional society, the people most likely to rise to leadership positions may have little talent or aptitude for leadership other than wealth creation. They can be glib but glibness requires no depth, and leadership does. They can be physically attractive but leadership is not identified with surface beauty but inner quality. They may have great physical courage but leadership is more a function of moral courage, which is not the same as physical courage.
In this one-dimensional orientation, the person or persons who are most successful at raising money are the most likely to win elected office, which includes the presidency.
This is because in a wealth creation society the king and queen of worth are media in all its forms bombarding the senses until one is senseless, and finally capitulates to the poll posters and votes what is believed to be his or her conscience when all it is is their respective fatigue.
NUMBER THREE
SO THE THIRD THING IS FOR A PRESIDENT TO EMERGE ABOVE AND BEYOND THE POPULAR SPHERE OF INFLUENCE AND TO DEMONSTRATE THE VISION TO SEE AND CAPACITY TO SERVE THE INTERESTS OF ALL, NOT SIMPLY IN THE NARROW CONTEXT OF NATIONAL INTERESTS BUT IN THE GLOBAL CONTEXT OF INTERNATIONAL REALITY.
Preparation for this role of leadership is not likely to be found in one of the more prestigious business schools, nor is it likely to be found in law, engineering or science, but in a person that has the foundation of a liberal and therefore liberating education.
This person would be fluent in the culture and language of his or her own culture and language as well as that of at least two other prominent cultures and languages of the international world with an affinity to grow in that comprehension and beyond. If this suggests a “liberal scholar,” it would be in the lower case.
Business schools are consumed with wealth creation; law with order; engineering with conformity; and science with value free analysis.
To a considerable degree, these are all one dimensional disciplines and orientations. Liberal arts leadership has enough acquaintance with these disciplines to see that they are integrated into multidimensional service.
NUMBER FOUR
THE FOURTH QUALITY A PRESIDENT SHOULD DEMONSTRATE IS THAT OF THE READER, A STUDENT OF HISTORY AND SCIENCE, MYTH AND RELIGION, AND GREAT MOMENTS OF GREAT MEN.
I provided a shortlist in WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS that would aid in the development of a multidimensional international perspective:
(1) Homer's THE ILIAD, THE ODYSSESY
(2) THE BIBLE
(3) THE TROJAN WARS
(4) THE TORAH
(5) THE KORAN
(6) Aristophanes THE BIRDS
(7) Euripides CYCLOPS
(8) THE BHAGAVAD GITA
(9) Sophocles OEDIPUS REX
(10) THE HOLY CRUSADES
(11) ALEXANDER THE GREAT
(12) Julius Caesar THE GALLIC WARS
(13) St. Paul THE EPISTLES
(14) Marcus Aurelius MEDITATIONS
(15) Edward Gibbons THE HISTORY OF THE DECLINE AND FALL OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
But perhaps the most evasive characteristic of leadership whose absence has plagued American society throughout its history is the lack of a secure moral center and moral compass of that leader to guide and direct the leader through the inevitable chaos that accompanies a leader’s time.
Sycophants and sybarites can sense this lack and provide the leadership with flattery and debauchery. They are essentially invisible for when history writes of the debacles of leaders it seldom finds cause to mention them. Yet it was their presence and manipulation of that leadership that forced the fiascos or disasters that became manifested.
NUMBER FIVE
SO, IN THE FINAL ANALYSIS THE PRESIDENT MUST HAVE A STRONG INTUITIVE SENSE THAT CUTS THROUGH THE NONSENSE OF ADVISERS AND SELF INTERESTS TO STEER THE PROPER COURSE FOR THE GREATER GOOD. HE OR SHE MUST HAVE A DECISIVE MIND AND LITTLE PATIENCE WITH PROCRASTINATORS OR PROCRASTINATION.
PREORDER INFORMATION:
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD: $20 with checks made to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504
Saturday, April 28, 2007
THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP
THINKING ABOUT LEADERSHIP
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."
Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)
I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."
This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.
MARCUS AURELIUS
No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.
Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.
Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.
It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.
Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.
Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.
At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.
From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.
Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.
Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."
"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.
In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.
His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.
As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.
NOTE:
SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.
PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.
Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.
Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.
Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.
All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.
None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.
Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.
True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.
Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.
Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.
Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.
Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.
Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.
With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.
There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.
Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.
Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.
President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."
There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.
Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.
While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.
NOTE:
Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.
Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.
He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.
He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.
And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.
DICK CHENEY
There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.
There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.
It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.
Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.
Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.
Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."
They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.
They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.
Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.
They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.
NOTE:
The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.
The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.
The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.
Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.
Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).
American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.
It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.
It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.
Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.
Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.
Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."
For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.
We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.
TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ
"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man."
Charles Sumner, American statesman (1811 - 1874)
I have written elsewhere "we are not happy campers. We have lost our moral compass and our way."
This phase entered my consciousness as I walked today. Then without notice three men popped into my mind: former president Andrew Jackson of the early nineteenth century, emperor Marcus Aurelius of the second century and Dick Cheney of the twenty-first century. All display variations of leadership and all were students of failure as much as success.
MARCUS AURELIUS
No one can read his "Meditations" without a firm sense of morality and the conviction of a man of moral authority.
Marcus Aurelius was a loyal subject and devoted student to law and philosophy, especially stoicism. When he rose to authority, he voluntarily divided the government between himself and his brother by adoption, Lucius Aurelius Verus.
Verus was a bad apple: self-indulgent and dilatorious in the conduct of his duty.
It was not an easy time in the reign of Marcus Aurelius. He suffered from constant wars, though in Asia, Britain and on the Rhine barbarians were checked, but permanent peace was never secured.
Rome was spiraling into chaos. It suffered from pestilence, earthquakes and floods as the Roman armies fought against northern barbarians on the Danube. The Roman army was humbled and almost annihilated while retreating across the Danube in 168 and 173.
Verus died after the first retreat in 169, solidifying Marcus Aurelius as emperor. Once victory was won over Germanic tribes, Marcus Aurelius was summoned to the East to deal with the rebellion of its governor. On his way home, he visited Lower Egypt and Greece.
At Athens, he founded chairs in philosophy for each the chief schools: Platonic, Stoic, Peripatetic, and Epicurean.
From there, he went to Germany and then Italy. In 176, he quelled uprisings along the way as he returned home.
Never of robust health, he died in Vienna in 180 at the age of 59.
Retrospectively, Marcus Aurelius is remembered, as perhaps Rome most "perfect emperor." This is largely due to the survival of his writings, principally "Meditations."
"Meditations" is the record of a man's innermost thoughts who happened to be the supreme leader of his time. It documents his loneliness. But it also indicates that he did not allow himself to become embittered by his betrayals and defeats in life. The poetic thoughts resonate with learning and sophistication, and should be read and contemplated by anyone today that finds him or herself in a position of leadership.
In a profound sense, it is introspective and honest, passionate and compelling, putting the reader, without knowing it, in contact with his or her own most intimate longings.
His death was a national calamity mainly because his rule contrasted so demonstratively with the past and disastrously with the period that began with the accession of his unworthy son, Commodus who established an imperial anarchy.
As all Christians know, Constantine I called "the Great," made Christianity the national religion in the early fourth century (312), which marked the beginning of the Christian era and Western civilization, as we know it.
NOTE:
SEED PLANTERS: Leaders plant seeds sometimes in parched earth, seeds that do not die, but wait for the soil to be blessed by sunlight and rain, and care and cultivation as was the case of the seeds planted by Marcus Aurelius that blossomed in the reign of Constantine.
PRESIDENT ANDREW JACKSON
I have written extensively on president Jackson elsewhere emphasizing that he was an "outsider" from birth forward.
Jackson's parents died when he was not yet a teenager. Soon after, he and his brother were captured by the British as prisoners of war in the Revolutionary War.
Without the benefit of any formal education, he picked himself up by the bootstraps to put his stamp on his time.
Jackson was tall (six foot) but terribly thin (135 pound) but with a sinewy physique and psychological courage that could move mountains. He had the will of a lion, the appetite for justice of an elephant, and the tenacity to stalk his way to the truth, which was his truth as he saw it and no one else's. He was Destiny's child and knew he would prevail because he never questioned his survival.
All his predecessors in power from George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams before him were part of the eastern establishment; all well educated and programmed in Eurocentric leanings and learning.
None of these leaders reflected the pioneer spirit or manner in dress, deportment or philosophy. He did.
Jackson was actually an embarrassment to the elite, no one more so than the urbane Jefferson who made scathing remarks about him in the United States Congress.
True, he didn't speak or write well, didn't have the social grace or decorum expected of a gentleman or a man in high office. What is worse, his marriage to a pipe smoking woman had the taint of scandal and suspect legitimacy.
Jackson, however, was totally his own man; totally self-made, and totally believing in the wisdom of his convictions.
Although having the appearance of being fragile, his steel blue eyes suggested a surprising physical as well as moral courage, which was displayed in a resilience many times when he appeared at death's door.
Characteristic of his personality was evident when he conquered Florida (1818) without the approval of president Monroe. He was of that self-made school that believed it was easier to ask forgiveness than permission for an action. Therefore, he apologized for his impudence after the fact. It should be noted the United States, however, never gave Florida back to the Indians or satisfied the British or Spanish for their claims to the territory.
Earlier (1814), he saved the American nation as much as Lincoln did in the Civil War with his decisive defeat of the British at New Orleans. The irony is that a treaty of peace was being signed at Ghent in Belgium at the same time.
Still, Jackson's victory at New Orleans was an exclamation point, and the British (or the French or Spanish) never gave the United States any trouble after that.
With Jackson, there was no gray area; everything was either black or white.
There was little compromise in his spirit, and he had an appetite for taking on such politicians as Henry Clay, and Daniel Webster.
Clay, whose picture was on Lincoln's law office wall in Springfield, Illinois when he was a lawyer, was always a "president-wantabe" much in the fashion of Robert Taft in the mid twentieth century.
Webster was a man of grand rhetoric but little action.
Jackson played these two like a fiddler and in the process expanded the power and prestige of the executive branch of government to its present status.
President Martin Van Buren, who was hand picked by Jackson to succeed him, continued what historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has called "The Age of Jackson."
There was a cruel and insensitivel side to Jackson that is often overlooked. Schlesinger overlooked it in his Pulitzer Prize winning book. It has come to be known as "the trail of tears" (1813 - 1835) and involved the breaking of treaties with American Indians and displacing them from their sacred lands to an exodus of thousands of miles to the Northeast. Scores of men, women and children died along the way.
Presidents before Jackson pussyfooted around the American Indian issue, but not him. He was determined to make the American continent a country for American pioneers and he did.
While showing a disdain for the elite and the Eastern Establishment, Jackson was popular with the common people in the hinterland. It is interesting that politicians have been as well ever since.
NOTE:
Were it not for the personality, mindset, courage and focus of Andrew Jackson, the United States today would be a very different country.
Author George Wills calls the actor John Wayne "America's Adam." He may be for the Teflon generation but not for the American common man. That "American Adam" is Andrew Jackson.
He made Congress and the Supreme Court cower to the Executive Branch of Government and the presidency, and that condition has continued to this day.
He also gave inspiration to people born poor but of a singular mind to pursue the American Dream and make their mark.
And finally, he made Americans proud to be a separate culture and community independent of their European forebears.
DICK CHENEY
There is a ruthlessness to this man that does not appear to be leavened with respect for anyone except those members of his social and political circle.
There appears an arrogance that is not guided by study and knowledge, philosophy and science that was so apparent in the Founding Fathers and the elite of our land.
It would seem this is a blatant arrogance without the sagacity or intution of Jackson or the humility and perception of Marcus Aurelius.
Perhaps it is unkind to identify these characteristics as the exclusive property of one man when it is, in fact, the generic quality of leadership in general in the geopolitical as well as domestic arena today. We witness such hubris across all levels of enterprise from academic to religious, from commercial to industrial, from social to governance.
Conditional to this closed loop orientation is looking for confirmation of previously held views rather than insight into reality.
Such men and women surround themselves with people of like minded orientations and views seeing all others as misinformed, misguided, ignorant, or the "enemy."
They equate wisdom with wealth, and importance with power, having a cynical view of intelligence in general and people in particular. Their "best friends" are members of the Fortune 400 list of the richest people in the world.
They are guided by what is legal, not what is ethical, by the use of power irrespective of its hint of corruption or hit on moral authority.
Consequently, plans are evaluated in terms of risk factors rather than ethical considerations, or on what will fly instead of what should fly.
They focus on the 3 to 5 percent that are devious or criminal instead of the 95 percent or more that are law abiding and good because fear is their game, and dividing and conquering their aim.
NOTE:
The human heart could not love it did not have a capacity to hate. Both are always present and it is up to leadership to determine where the fulcrum lies.
The American culture is now on a slippery slope cascading to chaos and calumny. It has been on this slope since the end of World War Two. We have never gotten beyond the nostalgia for that surreal time.
The evidence is striking. Leadership has collapsed to leaderless leadership. We see it every day in every aspect of American life. This inclination now impacts and contaminates the world.
Peter Drucker and others as well as yours truly (e. g., in such books as Work Without Managers, The Worker Alone, Six Silent Killers, Corporate Sin, and soon-to-be-published A Look Back To See Ahead) have written on this subject.
Corpocracy has lined its pockets with the hard earned money of American workers that man the jobs across American society. As a result, the few get richer and the majority poorer (only last month it was announced that 250,000 American had a net worth of $5 million, today one million Americans have such a net worth).
American executives are sending American jobs overseas rather than train and upgrade the skills of workers. This is a failure of education; a failure of the church; a failure of industry and commerce; and a failure of governance.
It has seen these same leaders lobby Congress for concessions, tax breaks, and forgiveness for failing to upgrade physical plants and technologies to remain competitive with emerging industrial nations.
It has seen war being used as fear tactics to sell "the war on terror" in its many forms: from the Iraq and Afhganistan War to the War on Drugs, to the creeping terror of immigrantion of this immigrant nation. They want to build a wall across the south to keep out immigrants. Erasmus would deem this "praise of folly" as it is folly beyond belief.
Tim Russert said recently that the answers are in the people but you won't hear from them because they could lose their jobs.
Something is wrong with this picture when people in the know are committed to silence, like lambs going to the slaughter.
Even the former CIA director, George Tenet, who has a new book out, admitted weakly that when Dick Cheney misspoke about so many things to justify the preemptive invasion of Iraq, "I should not have let silence imply agreement."
For more than forty years, I listened to people with answers as an internal and external organizational psychologist/ Like Cheney, my clients picked and chose what fit with what they already thought.
We are not only paying for this now, but creating a legacy.
TO MAKE YOU THINK, READ
"A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"PREORDER INFORMATION: CHECKS IN THE AMOUNT OF $20 TO DR. JAMES R. FISHER, JR., 6714 JENNIFER DRIVE, TAMPA, FL 33618-2504
Thursday, April 26, 2007
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD -- "this & that"
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD - this & that
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.© April 2007
"Very few men are wise by their own counsel, or learned by their own teaching; for he that was only taught by himself had a fool to his master."
Ben Jonson
One time an executive that I had mentor when he was a budding student confessed to me when he was elevated to CEO to a Fortune 500 company, "I always wanted to own a red corvette. So, when I finally reached this pentacle of success, I indulged myself and went out and bought one. Imagine my surprise when it seemed that at every stoplight I saw another red corvette when previously I can't recall seeing any."
It is like that when you write a book, especially a book such as A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. Stories and television programs bombard your senses reinforcing what you have said, giving you the distinct feeling that you are not alone in saying these things, and what's more, can take little comfort in the fact, as saying them doesn't change anything. People do.
Last night (April 25, 2007) I watched the stimulating PBS program of "Bill Moyers' Journal." It addressed the subject of "buying the war." The war in question was the Iraq War and "weapons of mass destruction (WMDs)."
The program demonstrated how fear tactics worked as well on journalists as they did on the public with the iterative mantra: "the smoking gun and the mushroom cloud."
Sadam Hussein was supposed to have chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction as well as being in the process of developing a nuclear bomb, none of which proved to be true. But the mantra was effective because fear does not have to be supported by facts, and most people alive know the "smoking gun and mushroom cloud" is reminiscent of WWII and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Cold War.
Several prominent writers and journalists were interviewed among them Walter Isaacson, current author of the superb "Einstein" and former CEO of CNN as well as Dan Rather . Isaacson said that "thumb suckers and pundits" had replaced journalists because journalists pounding leather on the beat across the world cost money.
Rather, who had been known as a liberal skeptic, admitted that he caved into the times when Colin Powell, the most respected man in the military and in the Bush administration pleaded the US case before the United Nations.
"He (General Powell) had been in Viet Nam, Desert Storm, he knew war up close and personal," Rather said, "and I trusted the man." Rather was also caught up in the dilemma that if you were patriotic you had to support the war even if you questioned the rhetoric.
The most damning revelation of the program was that the two most respected newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post and The New York Times would give front-page coverage to Bush administrative "leaks." Then, on Sunday television news programs, these same Bush officials would quote these stories as confirmation of the facts they were then presenting to a national Sunday television audience. These "facts" often proved bogus to the extreme - a variation of "catch 22."
The exception was the "Ritter Syndicated News Service," a service outside the Washington, DC beltway, and one that was also outside the surreal world of Washington "make believe." As I show in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, it is "outsiders" that get us off the dime and unstuck, and it has always been so.
One of the most moving clips of the program was that of senator Ted Kennedy . His speech before the senate in opposition to the preemptive war proved prophetic. Virtually everything he said, in retrospect, has come true, including the quagmire that the US is now in.
As one analyst put it, "over the period of 9/11 to the war in 2003, more than a million words were printed by The New York Times. Of senator Kennedy's speech, it printed only 36 words."
Another interesting development was that of Phil Donohue. He had a show on MSNBC, which was canceled when he put a critic of the war on his show along with an advocate. He was told that that was an unsatisfactory case of two liberals against one conservative, him being the other liberal. The sentiment after 9/11 was such that no negative opinion was apparently acceptable. Moyer reflected, "It was a case of patriotism." Donohue added "and also a case of business."
Perhaps the most embarrassing moment was a clip of an Oprah Show in which she had some two Kurdish expatriates giving their opinions on why the war was necessary and, again, indicating that they knew with certainty that Hussein had WMDs. A young lady in the audience suggested that she thought they were expressing opinions but were providing no hard evidence to confirm their suspicions. Oprah immediately shut her down going to a commercial. It was not pretty.
One of the more humorous moments, if there can be such a thing in something as consequential as this review, was the British government's publication of pictures that suggested that uranium enrichment facilities did, in fact, exist in Iraq. It turned out that the pictures were lifted from an American student's work at Oxford on his Ph.D. Where did the student get these pictures? From the Internet? He threatened to sue the British government for plagiarism.
Back to my thesis of A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, or the more things go around they come around, illustrating our stuckness, it was indeed Bill Moyer, himself, who was press secretary to president Lyndon Baines Johnson who provided that president with his spin to the press. This reached a crescendo when the sham of the Gulf of Tonkin Bay Resolution was first manufactured, and then presented to Congress, with congress voting to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
Historians now dispute the legitimacy of the grounds for this resolution. North Vietnamese torpedo boats reportedly attacked US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin in North Vietnam.
President Johnson immediately ordered retaliatory air strikes on Hanoi-Haiphong. Congress then quickly approved the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (August 7, 1964), authorizing the president to take "all necessary measures" to win in Vietnam. This allowed for the war expansion ultimately to 525,000 men on the ground, and the fiasco that followed. Another demonstration of stuckness.
THAT WAS THEN THIS IS TODAY (APRIL 26, 2007)
Syndicated columnist Thomas Sowell today (April 26, 2007 in The Tampa Tribune) sees Virginia Tech and Columbine shootings as carry over guilt from the 1960s.
Sowell does make a valid point that since then the intelligentsia has depicted American society in collective rather than individual terms.
This resonates with Moyers' "buying the war," as he shows how politicians repeat the same lie until it has the ring of truth and then is accepted as such. In A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD , it is shown that we have been programmed to look for authority for our individual destiny outside ourselves rather than trusting ourselves to have discriminating minds and therefore relevant views to accurately access the reality of our experience.
As Sowell correctly points out, with this rationale if we find ourselves lacking, it is society's fault.
To put this in some context, I have often had people come up to me when I have spoken, and say, "I'd have done what you have done if I had had better teachers."
In my whole lifetime, I think I have had about five prominent teachers and two were my parents and one was a coach, leaving only two others.
The best teacher I ever had was myself as student. I had the benefit of coming from a poor family and if I didn't do it on my own it wouldn't get done. I had no safety net, no financial support system to fall back on, and consequently, I am as frugal today as if I didn't have two dimes to rub together.
Therefore, I agree with Sowell that banning or restricting guns is not necessarily going to solve the problem of Virginia Tech or Columbine. His answer is that we have to find our way to individual responsibility from collective responsibility, and I concur.
George F. Will, the pedantic journalistic pundit that loves to use remote language to illustrate the quality of his thought (such as using "ineluctable" instead of inevitable) has a column in the same newspaper. He, who was incidentally duped by the Bush administration's WMDs argument for war, takes the complementary position to Sowell's. He sees collective responsibility or commercial culture dictating the future. China is used as an example.
Will does have a point. People do tend to think the collective of capitalism in China as the eventual corrective if not the cure to communism. I remember when I worked in South Africa a businessman suggested that commercial culture was the answer to the problems of the world. The late great senator Patrick Moynihan wouldn't have agreed. He once said Westerners are likely to be more impressed in China with the absence of flies than the absence of freedom.
We should read Sowell and Will, Moyer and me, or anyone else, and see how the information fits with our own experience and the shape of our mind.
Someone noted that it took millions of years to reach 3 billion souls in the world, and only 50 years to double that amount. We are moving faster and faster as we inevitably move closer and closer together. It is so easy to forget that half that world of six billion souls doesn't have a cell phone nor do they make as much in a month's time as its upkeep of that electronic wonder. It should give pause.
Eric Hoffer once said the most revolutionary thing is to feed a starving man a crumb of bread. That starving man is close by if not at our door, and we have to start thinking in terms of inviting him to dinner and at our table as an equal.
Finally, an aside, Tim Russert of "Meet the Press" is an engaging fellow and kind of an inside-outsider. I say that because he mentions with pride that he is a "blue collar guy," having come from that kind of family in New England.
He said something on the Moyer program that resonated with me in my organizational development (OD) work.
"If you want to know what is going on, really going on in an organization, you have to talk to the people doing the work, the workers and managers where the action is."
Moyer said, "Why don't you have those people on your show?"Russert smiled, "First of all they wouldn't want to be on my show to save their life. And secondly, it would put their jobs in jeopardy."
I have written several books directed to top management on this very subject, attempting to explained to them that the spin they get from their direct reports, human resources, and consultants is all self-serving, as Moyer explained is the case in Washington, DC.
It was my job to go talk to these people and then to formulate what they said into a narrative or remedial recommendation. This was then presented to top management. The ideas I expressed were never my own, but always those of the people in the trenches (see WORK WITHOUT MANAGERS: A View From The Trenches 1990). Most of the time, these data were ignored, and so on a smaller scale, chaos reign supreme. This was not unlike the case presented in "buying the war" in Bill Moyer's Journal alluded to here. Go figure!
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxPREORDER INFORMATION: Checks of $30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 for A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617 - 2504
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
WHY I WROTE "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD!"
WHY I WROTE “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD”
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© April 2007
“Revelation is a telescope kindly given us, through which reason should look up to the heavens. Good reasons must, of force, give place to better.”
Shakespeare
An email correspondent wrote, taking exception to my premise, that we are stuck with the justification, "We have always been stuck. We've been stuck for thousands of years.”
Obviously, I don't agree with his point. “A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD” concerns itself with the past thirty or so years, but I see us essentially stuck in the twentieth century.
My emailer continues, "What it was like thirty years ago or three thousand years ago, it is all the same."
Well, is it?
Man got unstuck when he discovered fire.
Man got unstuck when he discovered the wheel.
Man got unstuck when he discovered religion.
Man got unstuck when he discovered agriculture and formed communities.
Man got unstuck when he developed laws and leadership to control and guide communities.Man got unstuck when he discovered America.
Man got unstuck when the Pilgrims came to Plymouth.Man got unstuck when he invented movable type and the printing press.
Man got unstuck when he challenged the authority of a corrupt and self-indulgent church with the Protestant Reformation, which, in turn, used the new printing press to disseminate the word.
Man got unstuck when he used the translation of the bible into his native tongue so that nations could form around a common culture and language.Man got unstuck when The Protestant Reformation led to the celebration of the individual and individual achievement, giving rise to a new economic system to replace feudalism called "capitalism."
Man got unstuck when he formed guilds and developed craftsmen and craftsmanship on a grand scale producing such artifacts that exist as quality antiques to this day.
Man got unstuck when America declared its independence and wrote a constitution and a bill of rights that represented a blueprint for democracy.
Man got unstuck when he developed the steam engine and the internal combustion engine, which led to steamships and international trade on a grand scale, forging the Industrial Revolution.
Man got unstuck when he developed the tools of communication such as the telegraph and telephone, radio and motion picture forming a network of tools to connect people to common interests.
Man got unstuck when he created the automobile and airplane.And then the twentieth century rolled around.
Nearly all of the inventions of the twentieth century were invented during the first decade of that new century or before. In 1905, for example, a German named Einstein came up with four short scientific papers that unstuck science from its 300-year dependence on Newton.
But stuckness started to become engrained in the twentieth century: WWI followed that first decade, which was then continued with the "Roaring Twenties" and the "Great Depression," which in turn was followed by WWII, and then the Korean War followed by the Viet Nam War followed by the First and then Second Iraq War and the Afghanistan War.
Sure, we have the nuclear energy, the computer, the Internet and microprocessors of all descriptions, but none of this is actually "new" in the sense that it wasn't previously conceived and perceived before the twentieth century.
We celebrate progress now but progress is not considered in terms of man being unstuck and reaching a new iteration of himself.
Progress is seen in faster cars, faster computers, faster lifestyles, smaller handheld devices, cell phones and on and on, all of which isolate man personally by imposing electronic wonders in the mix as surrogates to the personal touch. We have become strangers to each other, but more importantly, strangers to ourselves.
Stuckness is shown in the sickness of society, in the flabbiness of society, in the lack of stimulating music and literature, in the lack of breakthrough art, in the lack of leadership, indeed, in the lack of anything resembling a breakthrough in originality.
Instead we have anger in music and literature, anger in art, anger in leadership, and anger with life itself. It is "in" to reduce everything down not raise anything up. We have become a competitive society, worldwide, with bigger GDPs and more pollution leading to an increasingly unstable environment.
Nations imitate each other to the point that they all rest on the stuckness of the dime. They all look alike, speak alike, think alike, behave alike, and build towers across their skies as they rape their environments alike. The monsters of the time are inanimate skyscrapers dwarfing and smothering people in their shadows.
Stuckness is shown in that we cannot control crime; we cannot control drug abuse; we cannot control obesity; we cannot control terrorism; we cannot control violence, we cannot control disease; we cannot control pollution; we cannot control global warming; we cannot control immigration; we cannot control spending; we cannot control immorality; we cannot control poverty; we cannot control ourselves.
We want to take comfort in the fact that it has always been that way throughout history and therefore it will always be that way into the future.
We don't consider ourselves pessimists. We consider ourselves realists. We give both words the emptiness of meaning that stuckness generates.
We are not doers anymore but reactors to crises. We manage these crises and then congratulate ourselves on our management and leadership skills in managing them failing to see that they never should have occurred in the first place.
We congratulate medical science on all its wonderful work when much of what it does is compensate for what it didn't do in the first place. The largest contributor to longer life and quality of life is not modern medicine, but public health.
And public health was a result of people that were not medical professionals but men who could see that safe drinking water and sewage treatment as well as sanitary working and living conditions provided such advantages.
You don't hear about these heroes today, but they are the ones that have created public health.A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is written for thinking people, college age students, professionals, mothers and fathers, everyone that has a stake in the future. We are in trouble and to minimize the fact is not the answer. The answer is embracing our resistance to stuckness. That is why the book was written.
PREORDER INFORMATION:$30 (plus $5 S&H) or $35 with checks to the order of Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 336117-2504
Sunday, April 01, 2007
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
NOTE: This is kind of a routine exchange I have with Joseph Brown, lead editorial writer with The Tampa Tribune of a Sunday. Joseph is a Chicago boy who graduated from my alma mater, the University of Iowa. So, we have a connection. Also, I worked for Nalco Chemical Company, a Chicago international firm.
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
I share it with you as it is apropos to A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD, which is still in the preordering phase.If interested in receiving a preorder autographed copy of this book, send a check(s) to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504 in the amount of $20 (S&H included) within the US, and $30 (plus S&H) outside the US. All checks in US dollars.
__________________
Subj: How do we expect blacks to overcome 142 years when whites can't deal with 50?
Date: 4/1/2007 12:22:12 PM Eastern Daylight Time
From: THEDELTAGRPFL
To: jbrown@tampatrib.com
HOW DO WE EXPECT BLACKS TO OVERCOME 142 YEARS WHEN WHITES CAN'T DEAL WITH 50?
Joseph,
I have been remiss in reading you the last few Sundays as I've been correcting galleys and working the format of my new book A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD. The book just happens to bear on your current theme: "It's Bad Choices, Not 'The System'."
I think you and minority faculty members of higher education you reference both have a point. All life is a matter of making choices from our earliest days.
Some of us have been lucky in that we were grounded in the consequences of making bad choices, with clear evidence that should we fall there would be no safety net to catch us.
I have felt one of the luckiest coincidences of my life was that I was born poor in which I had no chance to get ahead without initiative and intuition of making choices congruent with my best interests. As a consequence, I have had a considerably easy and productive life but I will admit that I have worked hard, usually harder than anyone else in my group, and that I have not been attracted to cultural diversions supposedly endemic to my "needs." I never drank or smoked in college, never joined a social fraternity, and would not go to athletic contests if my studies demanded attention. I didn't date because I was always afraid that should I let up I might flunk out, yet I became involved in leadership campus activities. I was on the varsity fencing team for three years, joining it only to avoid physical education classes, and I did go out for baseball, but dropped out when scheduled to go to Arizona for three weeks during spring training.
My point is that I am a white guy that made choices that have given me a good life, and several successful careers as a chemist, salesman, executive, consultant, professor, author, publisher, poet, journalist (columnist), as well as a husband, father and grandfather.
In a high school class of some two hundred, there were about fifteen of us that took four years of math, four years of English, physics and chemistry, psychology and biology, as well as the other required courses.
Every one of those fifteen graduated from college, nearly all with most distinguished careers in medicine, academia, engineering, management, law, and as owners of industries.
Several of that fifteen came from families if not wealthy of comfortable circumstance that ensured that they would get a college education.
I grew up in the era of two-parent families where divorce was less than rare; it was nonexistent. All fifteen of these students were white.
My four children went to private schools, traveled the world, and got a sense of the sights and sounds beyond the American shores. Not one of them graduated from college. I have a stepdaughter who is attempting to break that record.
It didn't help my children, I suppose, that I left that affluent lifestyle and circumstance when they were young, retiring the first time in my thirties. It probably didn't help either in that I considered education a privileged and not a right, not forcing the privilege on them.
Yet three of the four are more affluent than they ever experienced as children.
This is a microcosm of the problem you described and I've used myself as laboratory to explain why the minority professors are correct in saying we have a systemic cultural and social problem that holds blacks back. You are also correct in saying blacks are not showing the gumption to make "right choices."
My life forces were formed a half-century ago when parents were honored, older siblings and friends respected, and nuns, priests, police officers and merchants were authority figures in charge. It was a controlled existence, and therefore not too dynamic.
Everything disintegrated after WWII when the working middle class exploded, leaving conventional values, beliefs and wisdom behind.
When you don't have a cultural history in place that supports and frames your life, as was the incipient case then, you can and often do go off the rails. I have relatives that in today's dollars would be making $70,000 or more who never owned a home, always rented, never had a savings account, were always borrowing from relatives to make ends meet, hated their jobs, envied everybody and smoked and drank themselves to death.
These relatives loved to entertain, loved to be the "big spenders" and loved to tell the same "want to be" and "going to be" stories over and over again, while they remained permanently stuck in place. What is worse, they connived to manipulate their aging parents or to outright steal from them. Not a pretty picture.
Speaking systemically, then, I have watched since a half-century ago the working middle class fade. I would visit my professor uncle in Detroit, and play baseball with the kids of these well heeled automotive working class families. In those days, they earned incomes as lucrative as professionals in medicine and law, and yet they lived paycheck to paycheck. Now, that well-heeled existence is all but gone.
Everything you say about black kids is as true of white kids, only exponentially different because blacks are still only about 12 percent of the population but always heavily profiled as if a larger segment. It appears Hispanics will soon surpass them in numbers, which are even having more difficult adjustments.
A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD is about the 1970s and published to show the problems haven't changed. I quote The Thin Edge Report (1975) that indicated live births for adults were up by 23 percent since 1940, but up 323 percent for teenagers to record 608,000 illegitimate children.
It is in the seven figures today and not just among black teenagers.
This points to a systemic problem.
Now, to your point about "bad choices." How do we correct that? You see it as a self-inflicted caste system, a system to which you have escaped because you are a respected journalist and your opinion on many faceted subjects is sought and taken seriously. You also see black kids who stay in school, graduate from high school, get a job, and get married as a remedial corrective. I don't disagree, but how do these kids escape the caste system to make that happen?
I don't think any of us escapes our caste system. I still see myself as a poor lower class white guy that writes books now, and has had a decent life through hard work. You can't spend your impressionistic years in an Irish conclave and think differently.
The other night on "The News Hour with Jim Lehrer" on PBS a man who keeps statistics on NCAA basketball players found that in the Final 65 NCAA Teams there is a deplorable failure of players to graduate. Most of these failures are among blacks who dominate basketball. Georgetown and the University of Florida were the exception with 100 percent of their players graduating.
This is not systemic poverty but its twin, which does have the feel of a caste system.
I tutored black athletes when I was in college, some of them all-American. Football was a job to them and college was a necessary nuisance. They found it boring. Most of them didn't see themselves as student-athletes; nor did they see themselves playing in the NFL, but going back home and getting a menial job, not a professional position. I am talking college now, not high school.
The other night I was talking to my college student daughter. She was wondering if I thought the middle class was disappearing. I answered, the working middle class is. She asked, why, and this bears back on all I've said here.I told her the working middle class has been taken care of for more than fifty years, many companies paying them generously, paying 100 percent of their medical insurance, free permanent life insurance policies, free college tuition for taking classes after work, generous vacations, and holiday schedules. I told her seventeen years ago I wrote that this was the golden goose that was about to croak (Work Without Managers 1990) because entitlements had exceeded the National Debt in being over $3 trillion, while companies continued to ignore the fact living on the edge, disregarding competition looming from the East.
As for workers of this working middle class, when you are taken completely care of, when you never have to grow up, when you are suspended in terminal adolescence from birth to death, I continued, you ignore or miss the changes, because you're not trained to face them, or to be responsible for yourself, and thus your future is left up for grabs. That is an indictment of the working middle class after fifty years.
It is 142 since the Emancipation Proclamation, not fifty years, and systemically the transition from a color conscious to a colorblind society has not been complete. You were lucky and I was lucky, too, but both of us know something about dysfunctional families and dysfunctional extended families. Neither of us, I believe, is totally out of the woods on that score.
Am I suggesting patience? No, I am suggesting prudence in working your considerable intellectual influence in support of more faces on television in all its media, more faces on campus in the faculty and student population, more faces among priests and teachers, police officers and business owners, more faces as writers and poets, novelists and dramatists, more faces as actors and musicians, more faces on school boards and city councils, and more faces in the stands and theaters when blacks perform.
We have to see ourselves in others before we see ourselves in ourselves.
The middle working class worker who has lost his high five or low six figure job is now too proud to work for less, so he sits home drinking beer, badgering the family, and moaning "woe is me."
It was the same fifty years ago in my extended family, but I had a mother that would have no part of that. I see a lot of black mothers with equal strength today. One mother defended her six-year-old child who was sentenced to jail for hitting a teacher. Six-years-old! That is not even the age of reason, yet a police officer arrested and charged her. That is insane.
Joseph, we are a society out-of-control with our leaders are not leading. They are not leading because they think it is all about them and not all about what I have written here. This is a systemic problem and it is why I wrote this book.
Always be well and never lose your courage,
Jim
Monday, March 19, 2007
THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR -- WHO IS THIS?
THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR
WHO IS THIS?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007
NOTE: This is a mystery interview and the reader is to attempt to determine whom this “point of view” concerns. The author is prolific as well as polemical. His origins are from humble birth but he has acquired some affluence allowing him to be a peripatetic wanderer and wonderer. There are many that are in accord with his thinking but he continuously offends them by making them out to be the enemy; and he takes pride in his singularity of conscience while triumphing the common man.
My work is virtually impossible to classify. Is it literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology or religious apologetics? In any case, I write with the world in revolution. The age of the “common man” has indeed arrived.
We have moved through many ages and now find ourselves emphasizing the primacy of feeling and fantasy; indeed, a philosophy of personality has arrived. It is opposed in different ways to result in anarchy of subjectivism and individualism.
Consequently, a sense of reality has been lost with people fleeing the requirements of reality, taking refuge in a life of habit or rote religious conformity. Alas, we have abandoned our internal self-definition, which provides understanding as individuals before attempting to relate to a church or government or, indeed, society.
The only way a person is “real” is when in charge of the inner life of the soul as well as outer life of the body. It is a matter of making choices, which is a measure of free will.
We once used our inner world to recognize life’s differences in terms of good and evil, right and wrong and to act with decisive significance. There was no inclination to volatilize our problems into speculative synthesis and nonexistence. We accepted that a human being existed to make choices, not speculative leaps of discernment. The simplest man recognized these differences and didn’t hide behind irrelevant babble, as now do scholars.
Unfortunately, the clutter of learning often interrupts the person’s relationship to himself. As a consequence, the ability to make pure ethical choices is placed in jeopardy. He is unfree and education rather than making him freer has made him even less so for his high mindedness.
Freedom is naked and precisely concrete. It is not an abstraction. It means taking responsibility for virtually every segment of one’s entire life, for only then will the content of that life hold meaning. No matter how different the gifts and talents of the individual may be, he is equal in his freedom to manage and develop consistent with those gifts, nothing less is a travesty. Personal validity can be earned in no other way.
We are faced from birth with everything increasingly external in an eternal and unceasing struggle between opposite tendencies. This is not something to mourn but to use. It starts by fighting to engage our instincts for survival. This is not a fight for a part but for the whole of us, and is commanded by our morality. Everyone knows this; knows we were made for action, not speculation. But our culture entangles us in speculation and contradiction putting up arbitrary signs that confuse and delay action. We must fight through these if not completely at least in part.
I have enthusiasm for the natural sciences, but I would not make them my principal field of interest. The virtue of reason and freedom and life, itself, has always interested me more. But my interests are not subordinated under one heading but coordinated with one another. I will admit I find the natural sciences attractive while theology in general and religion in particular appalls me. Nor will I deny this betrays weakness that would be a sign of strength were I to demonstrate, like many fish, to remain at the bottom of the sea without feeling the need to surface like a glinting sunfish. It is probably why some give me the tag of the idealist while others paint me in caricature as a comic figure.
I am known to read a great deal, and it is a correct characterization. But I have a confession to make. I am quite oblivious to the author’s intention in every book I read because I always have an eye on how it will serve my own self-understanding or particular interest.
I am also known to be repetitious of which I will have more to say later. My focus is always on “actuality.” It appears in life as ideal and in caricature. When I see it in caricature, I attack it, as it is a misrepresentation of the ideal.
In the new spirit of freedom that has embraced our land, I see everywhere around me indolence and self-satisfied mediocrity and the cautious calm produced by wealth. I hear much talk of equality, but I take arms against an abstraction at odds with its concrete reality. Everyone should have access to quality education, the highborn and the lowborn, country people and city dwellers. That is equality not as an abstraction but as reality.
I am suspicious of the crowd and “the public,” of any reference that reduces the individual to an entity with a separate will and calling that may in any way jeopardize his personal sovereignty. I see this demonstrated in the religious who claim the Savior died for the whole world but was resurrected for only practicing Christians.
Some find me vague with my internal self-definition of the individual. What it means is that the individual in the context of choice and making decisions will do himself no harm. I am blunt and emphatic about this. Internal development and integrity cannot be suborned by external authority; indeed, the individual has a perfect right to act in defiance of that authority should it be inconsistent with his personal integrity.
I am committed to the common man. I have no time for fanatics and mystics who attempt to engage him. They lack the imagination to appreciate the wonder of work. You will never find the common man creating heathen mythologies and power breaches, as he is too busy toiling for existence. He understands cruelty and corruption because he is often its victim. When change is proposed, and sacrifice demanded, it is asked always in his name, while he waits patiently in the hall for its spoils. So, when revolt comes or rebellion occurs, he is the one to die for an ill-begotten cause.
I have my problem with the crowd. It represents untruth except insofar as each person in the crowd, separately and as a single individual, relates to its idea. But the crowd invariably is reduced at some point into a mob without conscience and without restraint and therefore I have a total antipathy towards it.
I had an authoritative father. Even as a boy, my glimpse of him was as a troubled human being, a Job or a Daniel in a Lion’s den. He had trouble seeing me, as I am, a dreamer, a kind of poet, an artist of fantasy, a thinker. I must confess I didn’t understand my father fully. But in him I encountered the common man, a man for whom education was neither a crutch nor a mask, and where the pure of heart took easy residence.
There is a chance I would have been a greater writer if my father hadn’t given me a cross to bear. He called it “reality.” He was always bringing me back to earth from my flights of thought, which he saw as conjuring illusion. It would be shallow of me to think my father had a fixation on me. More accurate would be to say he was a great influence. The true upbringing that takes place in any home is always the self-education of the parents, which lives in silence.
My father gave me an appreciation of his self-education in everyday life, which I discovered was the self-discipline and basis of his authority and independence of spirit. I would make it mine. It would be inappropriate to wax psychological about this.
The truth is my father’s triumph of self-discipline over his natural and instinctual life was not the result of complexes and neuroses that constitute psychology. The health of his spirit was the fruit of an anxiety that neither weakened him nor led him astray, but instead led to the rebirth of his integrity by earnestly engaging reality. In that sense, he was the existential foundation of my thought.
I have a brother who has always been conscience-plagued, anxiety-ridden, and what I have used more often than not to describe as being “pusillanimous.” The truth is he has never been young in the spiritual sense and I have never been young in the physical sense, but spiritually always since my youth, and in a good sense. I have been granted certain courage and openness that has enabled me to take life on whereas he has always shied away from it, allowing decisions to be made for him. I see this as the difference between living up to, or not living up to one’s character.
Much as I am indebted to my father, there was a mother, too. She was the silent power behind the unending chatter that has been my life. I am talking about a sort of silence that goes beyond human speech, a silence that communicates to the soul. The simplest person or the most complex individual, should he be attuned to this silent speech, profits beyond his wildest dreams. You see, my mother is always in my mind.
Whereas my father’s melancholy was palpable, my mother’s was concealed behind her high spirits and irony. This was an art she managed to pass on to me, but not my brother. My mother was a great reader but could not write, leaving that too me. She was a kind little woman with an unpretentious cheerful turn of mind. She made me the apple of her eye.
Consequently, I was a frightfully spoiled and naughty child who hung on her apron strings. Where some who came to our home talked in a high-minded fashion, she was silent, possessed of uncomplicated warmth and paid them no mind. Yet, as a bit of irony, I find many of my mother’s words have found their way into my writing.
These words I can best describe as coming out of her silence because they spoke to a language not expressed directly in the Word. By that I mean she is a believer, a hearer of the Word, who has never forgotten the Word. So, she is not distracted by the descriptions of the Word, as she is a person of faith.
She was silent; she is silence. Neither does she talk about religion in the community or at home. I hope this does not imply that she is a simpleminded person because she is not. While everyone is talking in a high-minded fashion, she sits in silence. I often wondered when I was young what this silence meant. She would tend to her house, as though with her entire soul, even down to the most insignificant detail.
She is joyful and full of merriment. She is the joy of the house more than we as children are. Yet when you are looking at her sitting there smiling you cannot but say, she is silence. So often I wanted to ask her what was behind all this, but never found the courage. I find now at this late date that she bequeathed this power to me so that I could capture the silence between the words.
It is in silence that a taste for ironic playfulness, for humor and concealment, for the interesting and the spicy, for the point counterpoint sense and senselessness is found in song. I have it and she gave it to me as a gift.
My father gave me an understanding and appreciation of my common roots, and the pride of that identity with common man. He made me see that many men claim an outward sympathy for them but it is a ruse. They actually see themselves as apart from common man as if on another level. Such fundamental elements of my youth have become primary to my philosophical foundation.
I am an observer, but as such I am among them, but as a consequence not one of them. Is this in the service of deception? I think not. It is necessary to see things as they are.
From my earliest youth, it would be safe to say I have been incommensurable with the opinions of my time. I was an individual looking for the single Archimedean point from which to move the world. My father died and this earnest drive was put into action in his memory.
External relationships and surroundings were abandoned. I was driven totally by the fulfillment of inner needs. Like a person after a shipwreck, the world looked different to me in the absence of my father. I turned to what is highest after this emptiness. It was my absolute dawn; not only in its fullness, but also in the responsibility that I now felt was mine. Shadow and light, joy and perdition, anxiety and courage became amorphous so that at first I didn’t know precisely what I needed to do.
There I was, sitting at the last station of his way, the place where it all began. I sat there entirely alone, thinking of my father and what was past lost in the present. I saw him as a poor boy and felt homesickness because of his descriptions. He was gone and I was a young man lost in what the future held.
What if I now were to fall ill and join him? What a strange thought. His last wish for me was to fulfill my destiny. Could this be the whole of my earthly destiny? From him I learned what fatherly love is, and thus received a notion of divine fatherly love, the only unshakable thing in life, and the true Archimedean point.
Yet, my mind was full of confusion. I remained for three days separate from community, alone with him in my thoughts. I then hurried home anxious for the journey, longing for the embrace of a young girl, and to start my work.
I had come to equilibrium. To one person it is found in joy, to another it is discovered in tears and permission to rest, yet the divine is reflected in the tear-dimmed eyes of a restless person for action, as a rainbow is more beautiful than the clear blue sky.
It was apparent from the first that I would go against the grain. It is the manner of how I would fight for truth. I would not be blinded by hidden social fears where manner is the message, but by reason. I would exalt the common man whom I understood so well. I understood, too, my campaign would be an attack on “the establishment.” How else could it be?
I had studied hard and understood the content and form of culture with a natural loyalty to the triumvirate that determined taste, faith and knowledge. Consequently, even when I was attacking the establishment I would think well of it. It was because I understood the tenor of my times as few others did. The spirit of my age ran the gamut from wit to sentimentality, and despite a dim sadness, it was salted with irony, and irony was my weapon.
I was fighting the cloak of coyness transformed into reciprocal wariness that pulled everyone down to the same level. The tenor of the times was animated with futile conversation that dulled the edge of possible originality. Skepticism was harbored against anything original, particularly when it originated from the lower classes. The world was reduced to polished pretense. Alas, the times lacked pathos and passion, giving me reason to construct my books as bombs to explode this smugness.
This brings me back to my point of repetition.
Repetition is the relationship between perfectibility and metamorphosis. You cannot write well until you write continuously, repetitively. You cannot overcome stage fright until you transform your jittery nerves into composure and ease onstage. You cannot become a polished thinker until you penetrate your ignorance with acumen. You cannot overcome your clumsiness and self-consciousness until you repeatedly place yourself in embarrassing situations. Nor can you hear the beauty of your mind unless you exercise it.
The whole piece is self-examination in playful analysis. Repetitiveness leads to reliability, and reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all this playfulness.
We have it on good authority that high brows think and behave differently than low brows think and behave. This is hypocrisy. Common man is comfortable with his playfulness and does not have to identify it as if something else. He understands without words what the high brows need to commit to volumes.
When he displays unrest, it is genuine and there is purpose behind it. His unrest signifies the first fieriness of essential genius. It reveals something elemental, inexhaustible, like the wind or the sounds of nature. When he feels joy, it is revealed in his playfulness and happy innocence, a triumphant awareness of his indescribable good fortune. Likewise, when angry, it rises from his bowels not his head. It is nature released in storm.
It is so easy to misread him. He displays the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances with the coquettish cackle of calm amidst agitation.
All that is needed to bring out this genius is the possibility of metamorphosis through repetitive opportunity. Then a fresh and lively originality will surface. Passion will have broken out into many facets within a smoldering framework, a sort of torment that is prevented from bursting into flame. The common man is the future.
When I was young and fiery, I rode daringly on ideas, vaulted over stars and down into the abyss. Some admired me and the envious carped. Time has validated me. Some things have been consigned to the past, but the ideal in recollection has cast a brilliant light. It is now a quiet fire with an imperishable glow.
This glow rests in the eternity of the essential genius of the idea. It has no wishful longing after the flames has disappeared. The metamorphosis is too rich for that. Like an idealizing light, pure and reassuring recollection will continue to illuminate.
To make myself clear, the metamorphosis that reveals the idea is in the notion of reliability. Reliability is dependent on the repetitious role of our endeavor. The clumsy act becomes polished over time. Therefore, repetition is the role that makes a simple act imperishable in the glow of genius and recollection.
I will end my introduction to THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR by admitting this is a revolutionary age. Doubt is parent to the man and we live with such parents.
Devoid of passion or pathos in an age of revolution we are ill prepared to find passion or pathos even though essential. It must be cultivated. The elasticity of the inner being is the measure of this cultivation. An unsophisticated woman who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated. A common man who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.
On the other hand, a superficial and fragmentary set of manners as measure of the man, display inner emptiness. Doubt is covered with swagger instead of humility, reducing action to form and affectation.
We live in such an age where reflection is substituted for action. The strength of speculation signals waste and sterility. Spectacular deception has lured us away from all else. People are preoccupied with the past and discouraged in the present content to allow the future to imitate itself.
I am a child of my times and have had to fight without authority, and without the power or influence of that authority. Reluctantly, I have had to assume the role of prophet who wishes only to lead his lost generation back to its time-honored ways. My fight is for the individual against “the public,” as history has shown is the beginning and end of all.
WHO DO YOU THINK THIS IS?
Well, I’ll leave you in no longer in suspense. It is SOREN KIERKEGAARD who was born in Denmark in 1813 and died at the age of forty-two in 1855. He is the father of existential philosophy that permeates virtually every segment of our Western society today from education to engineering, architecture to the arts, social and behavior sciences to the physical sciences, literature to language, politics to governance, economics to ecology, and beyond.
He chose to be eccentric and although well educated and affluent, walked among the people on the street taking pride in his modest roots and their concerns. He was a prolific and polemical writer of books and articles and often was savaged in the press as an oddball, misfit and outsider.
Tall, straight, blond and handsome, he could be seen in his fine clothes in the most drab and rundown sections of the city, conversing with the unemployed, taking notes of their harrowing lives, and always checking the pulse of his city. There isn’t a writer or thinker of our times that doesn’t owe a debt to him and his pioneer work. Yet he was buried nearly in shame first having his funeral refused by state church. Few attended his funeral, while his grave was devoid of a headstone until twenty years later (1875).
None of his books sold well in his lifetime, but he continued to write up to the very end, collapsing on the street and dying shortly thereafter. Fortunately, his books have since become a source for scholars and students over the past one hundred and fifty two years. Most young people may not know his name but it is likely they live consistent with his existential philosophy for he had them in mind.
It is another reason why I have written A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
PRORDER INFORMATION: $20 (S&H included); checks to: Dr. James R. Fisher, Jr., 6714 Jennifer Drive, Tampa, FL 33617-2504.
WHO IS THIS?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© March 2007
NOTE: This is a mystery interview and the reader is to attempt to determine whom this “point of view” concerns. The author is prolific as well as polemical. His origins are from humble birth but he has acquired some affluence allowing him to be a peripatetic wanderer and wonderer. There are many that are in accord with his thinking but he continuously offends them by making them out to be the enemy; and he takes pride in his singularity of conscience while triumphing the common man.
My work is virtually impossible to classify. Is it literature, philosophy, psychology, sociology or religious apologetics? In any case, I write with the world in revolution. The age of the “common man” has indeed arrived.
We have moved through many ages and now find ourselves emphasizing the primacy of feeling and fantasy; indeed, a philosophy of personality has arrived. It is opposed in different ways to result in anarchy of subjectivism and individualism.
Consequently, a sense of reality has been lost with people fleeing the requirements of reality, taking refuge in a life of habit or rote religious conformity. Alas, we have abandoned our internal self-definition, which provides understanding as individuals before attempting to relate to a church or government or, indeed, society.
The only way a person is “real” is when in charge of the inner life of the soul as well as outer life of the body. It is a matter of making choices, which is a measure of free will.
We once used our inner world to recognize life’s differences in terms of good and evil, right and wrong and to act with decisive significance. There was no inclination to volatilize our problems into speculative synthesis and nonexistence. We accepted that a human being existed to make choices, not speculative leaps of discernment. The simplest man recognized these differences and didn’t hide behind irrelevant babble, as now do scholars.
Unfortunately, the clutter of learning often interrupts the person’s relationship to himself. As a consequence, the ability to make pure ethical choices is placed in jeopardy. He is unfree and education rather than making him freer has made him even less so for his high mindedness.
Freedom is naked and precisely concrete. It is not an abstraction. It means taking responsibility for virtually every segment of one’s entire life, for only then will the content of that life hold meaning. No matter how different the gifts and talents of the individual may be, he is equal in his freedom to manage and develop consistent with those gifts, nothing less is a travesty. Personal validity can be earned in no other way.
We are faced from birth with everything increasingly external in an eternal and unceasing struggle between opposite tendencies. This is not something to mourn but to use. It starts by fighting to engage our instincts for survival. This is not a fight for a part but for the whole of us, and is commanded by our morality. Everyone knows this; knows we were made for action, not speculation. But our culture entangles us in speculation and contradiction putting up arbitrary signs that confuse and delay action. We must fight through these if not completely at least in part.
I have enthusiasm for the natural sciences, but I would not make them my principal field of interest. The virtue of reason and freedom and life, itself, has always interested me more. But my interests are not subordinated under one heading but coordinated with one another. I will admit I find the natural sciences attractive while theology in general and religion in particular appalls me. Nor will I deny this betrays weakness that would be a sign of strength were I to demonstrate, like many fish, to remain at the bottom of the sea without feeling the need to surface like a glinting sunfish. It is probably why some give me the tag of the idealist while others paint me in caricature as a comic figure.
I am known to read a great deal, and it is a correct characterization. But I have a confession to make. I am quite oblivious to the author’s intention in every book I read because I always have an eye on how it will serve my own self-understanding or particular interest.
I am also known to be repetitious of which I will have more to say later. My focus is always on “actuality.” It appears in life as ideal and in caricature. When I see it in caricature, I attack it, as it is a misrepresentation of the ideal.
In the new spirit of freedom that has embraced our land, I see everywhere around me indolence and self-satisfied mediocrity and the cautious calm produced by wealth. I hear much talk of equality, but I take arms against an abstraction at odds with its concrete reality. Everyone should have access to quality education, the highborn and the lowborn, country people and city dwellers. That is equality not as an abstraction but as reality.
I am suspicious of the crowd and “the public,” of any reference that reduces the individual to an entity with a separate will and calling that may in any way jeopardize his personal sovereignty. I see this demonstrated in the religious who claim the Savior died for the whole world but was resurrected for only practicing Christians.
Some find me vague with my internal self-definition of the individual. What it means is that the individual in the context of choice and making decisions will do himself no harm. I am blunt and emphatic about this. Internal development and integrity cannot be suborned by external authority; indeed, the individual has a perfect right to act in defiance of that authority should it be inconsistent with his personal integrity.
I am committed to the common man. I have no time for fanatics and mystics who attempt to engage him. They lack the imagination to appreciate the wonder of work. You will never find the common man creating heathen mythologies and power breaches, as he is too busy toiling for existence. He understands cruelty and corruption because he is often its victim. When change is proposed, and sacrifice demanded, it is asked always in his name, while he waits patiently in the hall for its spoils. So, when revolt comes or rebellion occurs, he is the one to die for an ill-begotten cause.
I have my problem with the crowd. It represents untruth except insofar as each person in the crowd, separately and as a single individual, relates to its idea. But the crowd invariably is reduced at some point into a mob without conscience and without restraint and therefore I have a total antipathy towards it.
I had an authoritative father. Even as a boy, my glimpse of him was as a troubled human being, a Job or a Daniel in a Lion’s den. He had trouble seeing me, as I am, a dreamer, a kind of poet, an artist of fantasy, a thinker. I must confess I didn’t understand my father fully. But in him I encountered the common man, a man for whom education was neither a crutch nor a mask, and where the pure of heart took easy residence.
There is a chance I would have been a greater writer if my father hadn’t given me a cross to bear. He called it “reality.” He was always bringing me back to earth from my flights of thought, which he saw as conjuring illusion. It would be shallow of me to think my father had a fixation on me. More accurate would be to say he was a great influence. The true upbringing that takes place in any home is always the self-education of the parents, which lives in silence.
My father gave me an appreciation of his self-education in everyday life, which I discovered was the self-discipline and basis of his authority and independence of spirit. I would make it mine. It would be inappropriate to wax psychological about this.
The truth is my father’s triumph of self-discipline over his natural and instinctual life was not the result of complexes and neuroses that constitute psychology. The health of his spirit was the fruit of an anxiety that neither weakened him nor led him astray, but instead led to the rebirth of his integrity by earnestly engaging reality. In that sense, he was the existential foundation of my thought.
I have a brother who has always been conscience-plagued, anxiety-ridden, and what I have used more often than not to describe as being “pusillanimous.” The truth is he has never been young in the spiritual sense and I have never been young in the physical sense, but spiritually always since my youth, and in a good sense. I have been granted certain courage and openness that has enabled me to take life on whereas he has always shied away from it, allowing decisions to be made for him. I see this as the difference between living up to, or not living up to one’s character.
Much as I am indebted to my father, there was a mother, too. She was the silent power behind the unending chatter that has been my life. I am talking about a sort of silence that goes beyond human speech, a silence that communicates to the soul. The simplest person or the most complex individual, should he be attuned to this silent speech, profits beyond his wildest dreams. You see, my mother is always in my mind.
Whereas my father’s melancholy was palpable, my mother’s was concealed behind her high spirits and irony. This was an art she managed to pass on to me, but not my brother. My mother was a great reader but could not write, leaving that too me. She was a kind little woman with an unpretentious cheerful turn of mind. She made me the apple of her eye.
Consequently, I was a frightfully spoiled and naughty child who hung on her apron strings. Where some who came to our home talked in a high-minded fashion, she was silent, possessed of uncomplicated warmth and paid them no mind. Yet, as a bit of irony, I find many of my mother’s words have found their way into my writing.
These words I can best describe as coming out of her silence because they spoke to a language not expressed directly in the Word. By that I mean she is a believer, a hearer of the Word, who has never forgotten the Word. So, she is not distracted by the descriptions of the Word, as she is a person of faith.
She was silent; she is silence. Neither does she talk about religion in the community or at home. I hope this does not imply that she is a simpleminded person because she is not. While everyone is talking in a high-minded fashion, she sits in silence. I often wondered when I was young what this silence meant. She would tend to her house, as though with her entire soul, even down to the most insignificant detail.
She is joyful and full of merriment. She is the joy of the house more than we as children are. Yet when you are looking at her sitting there smiling you cannot but say, she is silence. So often I wanted to ask her what was behind all this, but never found the courage. I find now at this late date that she bequeathed this power to me so that I could capture the silence between the words.
It is in silence that a taste for ironic playfulness, for humor and concealment, for the interesting and the spicy, for the point counterpoint sense and senselessness is found in song. I have it and she gave it to me as a gift.
My father gave me an understanding and appreciation of my common roots, and the pride of that identity with common man. He made me see that many men claim an outward sympathy for them but it is a ruse. They actually see themselves as apart from common man as if on another level. Such fundamental elements of my youth have become primary to my philosophical foundation.
I am an observer, but as such I am among them, but as a consequence not one of them. Is this in the service of deception? I think not. It is necessary to see things as they are.
From my earliest youth, it would be safe to say I have been incommensurable with the opinions of my time. I was an individual looking for the single Archimedean point from which to move the world. My father died and this earnest drive was put into action in his memory.
External relationships and surroundings were abandoned. I was driven totally by the fulfillment of inner needs. Like a person after a shipwreck, the world looked different to me in the absence of my father. I turned to what is highest after this emptiness. It was my absolute dawn; not only in its fullness, but also in the responsibility that I now felt was mine. Shadow and light, joy and perdition, anxiety and courage became amorphous so that at first I didn’t know precisely what I needed to do.
There I was, sitting at the last station of his way, the place where it all began. I sat there entirely alone, thinking of my father and what was past lost in the present. I saw him as a poor boy and felt homesickness because of his descriptions. He was gone and I was a young man lost in what the future held.
What if I now were to fall ill and join him? What a strange thought. His last wish for me was to fulfill my destiny. Could this be the whole of my earthly destiny? From him I learned what fatherly love is, and thus received a notion of divine fatherly love, the only unshakable thing in life, and the true Archimedean point.
Yet, my mind was full of confusion. I remained for three days separate from community, alone with him in my thoughts. I then hurried home anxious for the journey, longing for the embrace of a young girl, and to start my work.
I had come to equilibrium. To one person it is found in joy, to another it is discovered in tears and permission to rest, yet the divine is reflected in the tear-dimmed eyes of a restless person for action, as a rainbow is more beautiful than the clear blue sky.
It was apparent from the first that I would go against the grain. It is the manner of how I would fight for truth. I would not be blinded by hidden social fears where manner is the message, but by reason. I would exalt the common man whom I understood so well. I understood, too, my campaign would be an attack on “the establishment.” How else could it be?
I had studied hard and understood the content and form of culture with a natural loyalty to the triumvirate that determined taste, faith and knowledge. Consequently, even when I was attacking the establishment I would think well of it. It was because I understood the tenor of my times as few others did. The spirit of my age ran the gamut from wit to sentimentality, and despite a dim sadness, it was salted with irony, and irony was my weapon.
I was fighting the cloak of coyness transformed into reciprocal wariness that pulled everyone down to the same level. The tenor of the times was animated with futile conversation that dulled the edge of possible originality. Skepticism was harbored against anything original, particularly when it originated from the lower classes. The world was reduced to polished pretense. Alas, the times lacked pathos and passion, giving me reason to construct my books as bombs to explode this smugness.
This brings me back to my point of repetition.
Repetition is the relationship between perfectibility and metamorphosis. You cannot write well until you write continuously, repetitively. You cannot overcome stage fright until you transform your jittery nerves into composure and ease onstage. You cannot become a polished thinker until you penetrate your ignorance with acumen. You cannot overcome your clumsiness and self-consciousness until you repeatedly place yourself in embarrassing situations. Nor can you hear the beauty of your mind unless you exercise it.
The whole piece is self-examination in playful analysis. Repetitiveness leads to reliability, and reliability is the existential touchstone that makes it possible to defend all this playfulness.
We have it on good authority that high brows think and behave differently than low brows think and behave. This is hypocrisy. Common man is comfortable with his playfulness and does not have to identify it as if something else. He understands without words what the high brows need to commit to volumes.
When he displays unrest, it is genuine and there is purpose behind it. His unrest signifies the first fieriness of essential genius. It reveals something elemental, inexhaustible, like the wind or the sounds of nature. When he feels joy, it is revealed in his playfulness and happy innocence, a triumphant awareness of his indescribable good fortune. Likewise, when angry, it rises from his bowels not his head. It is nature released in storm.
It is so easy to misread him. He displays the ability to be simultaneously deceptive and truthful, playing with thematic nuances with the coquettish cackle of calm amidst agitation.
All that is needed to bring out this genius is the possibility of metamorphosis through repetitive opportunity. Then a fresh and lively originality will surface. Passion will have broken out into many facets within a smoldering framework, a sort of torment that is prevented from bursting into flame. The common man is the future.
When I was young and fiery, I rode daringly on ideas, vaulted over stars and down into the abyss. Some admired me and the envious carped. Time has validated me. Some things have been consigned to the past, but the ideal in recollection has cast a brilliant light. It is now a quiet fire with an imperishable glow.
This glow rests in the eternity of the essential genius of the idea. It has no wishful longing after the flames has disappeared. The metamorphosis is too rich for that. Like an idealizing light, pure and reassuring recollection will continue to illuminate.
To make myself clear, the metamorphosis that reveals the idea is in the notion of reliability. Reliability is dependent on the repetitious role of our endeavor. The clumsy act becomes polished over time. Therefore, repetition is the role that makes a simple act imperishable in the glow of genius and recollection.
I will end my introduction to THE POINT OF VIEW FOR MY WORK AS AN AUTHOR by admitting this is a revolutionary age. Doubt is parent to the man and we live with such parents.
Devoid of passion or pathos in an age of revolution we are ill prepared to find passion or pathos even though essential. It must be cultivated. The elasticity of the inner being is the measure of this cultivation. An unsophisticated woman who is essentially in love is essentially cultivated. A common man who has an essential and passionate commitment to an important decision is essentially cultivated.
On the other hand, a superficial and fragmentary set of manners as measure of the man, display inner emptiness. Doubt is covered with swagger instead of humility, reducing action to form and affectation.
We live in such an age where reflection is substituted for action. The strength of speculation signals waste and sterility. Spectacular deception has lured us away from all else. People are preoccupied with the past and discouraged in the present content to allow the future to imitate itself.
I am a child of my times and have had to fight without authority, and without the power or influence of that authority. Reluctantly, I have had to assume the role of prophet who wishes only to lead his lost generation back to its time-honored ways. My fight is for the individual against “the public,” as history has shown is the beginning and end of all.
WHO DO YOU THINK THIS IS?
Well, I’ll leave you in no longer in suspense. It is SOREN KIERKEGAARD who was born in Denmark in 1813 and died at the age of forty-two in 1855. He is the father of existential philosophy that permeates virtually every segment of our Western society today from education to engineering, architecture to the arts, social and behavior sciences to the physical sciences, literature to language, politics to governance, economics to ecology, and beyond.
He chose to be eccentric and although well educated and affluent, walked among the people on the street taking pride in his modest roots and their concerns. He was a prolific and polemical writer of books and articles and often was savaged in the press as an oddball, misfit and outsider.
Tall, straight, blond and handsome, he could be seen in his fine clothes in the most drab and rundown sections of the city, conversing with the unemployed, taking notes of their harrowing lives, and always checking the pulse of his city. There isn’t a writer or thinker of our times that doesn’t owe a debt to him and his pioneer work. Yet he was buried nearly in shame first having his funeral refused by state church. Few attended his funeral, while his grave was devoid of a headstone until twenty years later (1875).
None of his books sold well in his lifetime, but he continued to write up to the very end, collapsing on the street and dying shortly thereafter. Fortunately, his books have since become a source for scholars and students over the past one hundred and fifty two years. Most young people may not know his name but it is likely they live consistent with his existential philosophy for he had them in mind.
It is another reason why I have written A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD.
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