WHAT IF YOU DON'T EVER WANT TO RETIRE?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Folks who never do any more than they get paid for never get paid for any more than they do.”
Albert Hubbard (1859 - 1915), American author
"We have too many people who live without working, and we have altogether too many who work without living."
Dean Charles R. Brown (1862 - 1950), American educator
"Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly or he may work gratefully; he may work as a man, or he may work as a machine. There is no work so rude, that he may not exalt it; no work so impassive, that he may not breathe a soul into it; no work so dull that he may not enliven it."
Henry Giles (1809 - 1882), American clergyman
"Work is love made visible."
Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931), poet and philosopher from Lebanon
* * * * * * * * * * *
When I was in my mid-thirties, after completing an assignment in South Africa, drained beyond what I had ever experienced before, and reasonably well off, I decided to retire. I first thought of moving to Spain and becoming a writer, but my wife vetoed that. My four children were too young to have a vote but were amenable to wherever we wished to go. We decided on Florida where my wife's parents lived in Pinellas County on the West coast of the state.
For more than two years I did little more than read, play tennis, and write, producing one book (Confident Selling 1970), which became a national best seller and was in print for twenty years. It seemed so easy as I wrote the book in six weeks, one draft, and sent it to Prentice-Hall in New York without an agent or protocol. It was accepted within two weeks. The book would go on to sell more than 100,000 copies.
It seemed too easy, but it was not the kind of writing I wanted to do. I wanted to write books on ideas of meaning to me and out of my experience. I wrote one on the Roman Catholic Church titled A Plebian View of the Church in Transition: The Silent Man in the Pew Speaks Out. It has never found a publisher. I wrote a novel called Harry: The Triple Foole the title derived from John Donne's poem. It failed to find a publisher. The Catholic book took eighteen months to write, researching and writing every day, and the novel years on and off.
My next attempt was to find an agent contacting a major New York City firm and telling them of my background and that I had retired to write. I still have the letter in response. It was from the senior partner of the agency, and he stated, "I thought I had experienced everything, and then you come along, a person highly successful, traveling the world, and you stop off it to become a writer. I've never known of a more hare brain idea. My advice is to rush to your family doctor and get help."
This advice was more a surprise than discouragement, but now with the perspective of these many decades I can see his point. I couldn't then. I also know it was a blessing these books were never published. They demonstrate a man in search of himself, uneasy with what society suggested were the staples of success but were meaningless to him, and his sense of being betrayed by his culture, society, church and profession. Nearly forty years later these themes are finding their way into his South Africa novel Green Island In A Black Sea.
After more than two years of this retirement sabbatical with my funds dwindling, and my sense of connection fraying, I didn't go back to work; I went back to school.
Presumably my motivation was to attain a Ph.D., but actually it was to find some answers to my dilemma, which was why the right hand never knew what the left hand was doing, and why duplicity, chicanery, back stabbing, gamesmanship, and endless charades were the constant diet of work at the executive level in the complex organization.
I acquired the Ph.D. after six years of continuous study -- I had to take several under graduate courses because my training was in chemistry not psychology -- and first looked into the possibility of becoming a therapist with a colleague.
But after only short exposure to this, I could see the people that needed help couldn't afford it and those that could afford it were willing to pay to talk to someone who would listen.
I next went into macro-psychology (organizational development) never to consider again micro-psychology (clinical psychology) by having the organization as my client and not the individual.
Remarkably, actually perhaps not, I found the problem was not dissimilar to that initially experienced with individuals in a clinical setting.
Senior management never asked operating personnel, who had the answers, for them. It believed since it possessed the power and the ability to execute at its pleasure it must possess the wisdom of the Oracle of Delphi.
So, for six years while pursuing my Ph.D. studies, I consulted on the side being able to make a living working only twenty weeks a year while going to school full-time year around by simply listening to operating personnel and feeding back their answers to senior management, and often receiving bonuses for the effort. Eventually, I would join a client as an OD psychologist, and work for that high tech firm for ten years again retiring for good in my fifties.
That was seventeen years ago. The irony and the reason I share this with you is that I work harder now than I ever did before, reading and writing every day of the week, and often receive no pay at all.
In fact, if I were to calculate my earnings for this 17-year-period, I would be making the equivalent of workers in the Third World, the difference being that I don't work to make a living I live to work, and will do so until I am unable or should die.
I never found retirement in the flush of my youth that enjoyable, but I have found work that I love a reason for living for the future.
We are in a culture that makes such a big deal about retirement treating work as something we have to do, or something we would rather avoid than do if we could.
My grandson, Ryan, told me the other day that he is bored. When I didn't reply, he asked me, "Are you ever bored?"
I thought for a minute and then answered. "I suppose I once was bored when I was forced to do something that I thought idiotic or wasteful."
He interrupted, "But you said you only listen to your own drummer. How do you explain that?"
I pushed him on the shoulder and said, "Let's play some more basketball."
How do you explain to a grandson without seeming arrogant that your bane of life was that you have never stayed long where that was the case?
He will have to find out for himself that boredom is only a case of not being interested in something and having the courage to pursue it come hell or high water. Most people don't, and look for Nirvana in retirement, when most of their life is over.
The great Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894) understood this. He, unfortunately, lived such a short live, but left us a treasure trove of classics (Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Kidnapped).
He once said, "If a man love the labor of any trade, apart from any question of success or fame, the Gods have called him."
_______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (Author
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
Thursday, November 08, 2007
CONTEXT & CONTENT OF A THINKER & HIS THOUGHTS!
CONTEXT & CONTENT OF A THINKER & HIS THOUGHTS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 7, 2007
“We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egoists in the noblest meaning of the word. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
__________
We are all thinkers but too often we accept the thoughts of others as our own feeling they are better qualified because they are better connected, and after all, that is their business, thinking; our business is doing with little time for such luxury.
There is danger in this for the magnitude of such dependence can be more life changing than you can imagine. The Scottish-American educator James McCosh (1811 – 1894) states it well:
“In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted.”
McCosh is addressing the context of thinking. We have drifted precariously toward second-hand minds with our mind vat filled with second-class content, largely because our experience is limited.
One of the limits of experience is language.
In my sophomore year in college, I was quite moved with my introduction to Dostoyevsky in “Notes from the Underground” (1864). I was reading him of course in translation. One day I came across an essay by Vladimir Nabokov on this book, and realized I wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky at all but the distortions of the translator.
Nabokov, the author of the popular novel “Lolita” (1959) was born in St. Petersburg and a careful scholar of his native language, Russian. Missing in translation, Nabokov claimed, was Dostoyevsky’s convulsive nervous trembling style, his syntax of frenzied piercing diction and malicious irony mixed with sorrow and despair.
This made perfect sense to me because somehow the book didn’t compute with my mind hungry for purchase in the confusion of youth. After all, I was a chemistry major with a solid foundation in mathematics and science, but no reference point in the dizzy world of literary genius.
That said Dostoyevsky touched cords previously hidden to me. I sensed the madness and the longing for clarity of the narrator in his story, but had no gauge with which to measure either. The context was wrapped in a misleading content in translation, as I was to learn latter reading his other works. He was hinting at the limits of science in labeling man’s perverse rush to sameness against the stupendous force of individuality in his nature. This work serves as an arrow to point the direction of his latter novels and would influence me in my perspective.
Deception is not limited to translation of language.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confesses in his “Journals” (2007) that he purposely left out president Andrew Jackson’s draconian treatment of Native Americans in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, “The Age of Jackson” (1945). He did so to win favor with FDR’s administration and the Democratic Party. This embarrassing chapter in American history with American Indian relations is known as the “trail of tears.” Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced from their sacred lands and resettled in the Pacific North West. Many died on the way.
Translators are not the only ones who indulge in the practice of safe bland script.
This brings me to an article I read sent to me by a friend, a successful academic and international consultant in organizational development. He was moved to share this upon learning of “The Naples Institute,” a think tank that I was recently invited to join. He found the group’s slogan, “fighting for social justice,” especially inspiring.
To put what follows in context making certain this is no bland script in disguise, I am disclosing up front that my critique of the article was greatly influenced by my state of mind when I wrote it. I say this to illustrate that what is accepted as scholarship or astute observation is often if not always influenced by this frame of reference.
For the past several days I have been in intense pain, a bone or gum pain in my jaw.
Many years ago, my da goes to his dentist complaining of such a gum and bone pain. He is forty-eight-years-old. The dentist examines his gums, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to your physician. I’d like him to take a look at this.”
So, he goes to his family doctor who takes one look at his gums and the x-rays from the dentist, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to a specialist.”
The specialist sees him, takes a biopsy of his sternum, and says, “The results will be sent to your doctor who will then contact you.”
About two weeks later, he finds himself sitting across from his friend and doctor. “Joe,” he says, “how long do I have?”
His doctor, a gentle and kind man, answers, “Ray, it’s a bad actor. We don’t know a lot about it.” Then he takes off his glasses, rubs them clean, puts them back on, and says, “A year, fourteen months at the outside.”
That was late 1957. My da lived fourteen more months with excruciating pain reduced to weighing 65 pounds with every bone in his body collapsing to putty.
He suffered from a bone disease and form of leukemia known as multiple myeloma. It is the same disease that killed Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, in the 1980s.
This past summer when I was in Russia I suffered a terrible gum and bone pain where a molar had been removed. I thought it was the toothpaste on sensitive gums. I changed toothpastes and the pain vanished.
Then this past week the pain came back with a vengeance, so great that I thought I would pass out. I have a capacity to endure pain. It might be associated with the fact of being a lifelong sufferer of migraine headaches, as was the case with my da.
Anyway, when the pain would not let up, I thought of my da, and made an emergency appointment with my dentist, wondering if this would be déjà vu.
At the same time, things were breaking for me. I was invited to be an enrichment lecturer on a culturally oriented cruise liner, asked to participate in a new think tank on leadership, and my books are selling. The world couldn’t look brighter.
My first thought was, God, this is not good timing. Then, I experienced pangs of guilt for procrastinating on my South Africa novel. I felt God was punishing me for this.
My discomfort became incapacitating last Friday. My Beautiful Betty couldn’t get me in for an emergency appointment until last Tuesday, or four days of agony and doomsday thinking.
Once at the dentist’s office, it being an emergency or unscheduled appointment, I had to sit in the waiting room for well over an hour. During that time, I read the article BB had downloaded from my professor friend, and wrote the remarks, which follow.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I have just read an article from the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS written by Tim Koechlin and titled “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways.”
Now, this article is actually a review of three books, what the reviewer calls “ambitious books.” The books are Jeffrey Sachs’s “The End of Poverty” (2005), William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” (2002), and Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” (2004).
A colleague of mine sent this article to me. Every time I send him something of my thoughts I can rest assured that he would send me something of his or from someone within his bailiwick. He has such a generous mind, and has done so much but he gives me no indication of whether I make or fail to make sense to him, so I have absolutely no sense of what value my remarks have to him.
When I read someone I don’t think of sending them an article of mine or reference some other’s work, but hit them between the eyes with what I think and feel about what they have to say. If I like it, I tell them and why. If I don’t like it, I tell them why not.
Life is so short. Why do we have to be so devious and self-deceiving? I derive no pleasure in talking about people when they are not present, but I won’t hesitate to tell them how I feel when they are. It has allowed me great freedom this inability to have self-serving tact.
Often, that is the end of it. I never hear from them again. Why doesn’t that bother me? Do I think I am God? My Baltimore Catechism in the first grade informed me that the cruelest loss in the world is never to see God again, to have Him abandon you, cut you off from His light, love and warmth, and leave you out in the cold.
Do I see myself in such terms? What could be more despicable? Is this hiding my insecurity? I think it is. I think I’ve been lying to myself and it is finally catching up with me. Who am I to write and think and act as if what I have to say has any merit? Where is my humility?
These thoughts come to mine after reading this article. It is crafted in Western lies, lies that I know so well because I am well schooled in them. What makes us think Western philosophical thought, Western perception and perspective are superior to that nomad in the desert on his camel wandering across the sand?
Why do we assume that he wants indoor plumbing, air conditioning, chlorinated drinking water, for us to save him from himself?
These books are from the perspective of the “savior” in the bland script of the West even though a native of India writes one.
The authors belch out the statistics:
1. Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in “extreme poverty,” or on less than a dollar a day;
2. Another 1.5 billion live in “moderate poverty,” or on less than two dollars a day.
Let’s give everyone $100 a day, put them in a suburban home with a three car garage and fenced in yard with all the social and economic amenities of Western society, and as a bonus give them our schizophrenic self-indulgent lifestyle and chronic anxiety for free. Have we created a better world with less war, less conflict and less social injustice? I don’t think so.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my long life, it is that you can’t see the problem clearly from the outside in, and you are never going to see the problem from the inside out because you are not “them” and they are not “you.”
Sachs in “The End of Poverty” argues that “extreme poverty” is as a rule a consequence of factors beyond the control of the poor and their government. Now, how does that sound if you are that nomad on that camel wandering across the desert?
What’s more, he sees people sullied with “extreme poverty” as experiencing an impediment to prosperity, that wonderful word of the West, “prosperity,” how it has become our god and the answer to all dilemmas. It is the Holy Grail to health, wealth and happiness.
Precisely, how does Sachs’s see this impediment?
He sees it in terms of an ungenerous climate and physical landscape, debt, overpopulation, and political and social unrest. That is the “disease” in his book, failing to realize the people he would “save” has survived tens of thousands of years in this climate. It has been the imposition of the West and its mania for prosperity that has sunk them into the despair of the Western disease. Then Sachs goes on to see “extreme poverty” a consequence of corruption, ill-advised government policies, backward cultural practices, bad choices, and bad incentives.
I find it incredible that this learned man, this superstar of academia (he was a full professor at Harvard at age 29), who is sought after by such "do gooder" celebrities as Angelina Jolie and Bono, and such bleeding heart liberals as George Soros, and ineffective leaders such as the UN’s Kofi Annan cannot see the arrogance of his zeal. My wonder is this how he directs Columbia University’s Earth Institute, or acts as an advocate of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Somehow I don’t think making the world into our image and likeness is the answer.
William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” is appropriately titled, as his quest is anything if not elusive. A professor of economics at New York University after a long career at the World Bank, he tells a slightly different story about development and poverty in his book.
Easterly doesn’t see the problem a shortage of aid but a shortage of incentives. Reading the quotations from this work I am reminded of how ineffective “incentives” have been for American enterprise. I give page, chapter and book on the subject of incentives in “Six Silent Killers” (1998), showing that incentives have too often killed initiative only to generate passive and counterdependent workers. But wait! Easterly sees there are “good” and “bad” incentives.
Bad incentives are aid, credit and debt forgiveness. They discourage saving, investment and growth, while encouraging corruption, rent seeking and counterproductive government policies. So far we are on the same page. Then he says a curious thing: education provides little payoff for the typical citizen in a poor country because once he becomes educated he moves on to greener pastures in some Western country.
Unfortunately, the author of this article goes on and on about “right incentives” without giving a single clue what Easterly proposes they are. He covers his tracks as a reviewer by saying this: “Easterly’s conclusions are essentially an elaboration of the basic principle that people respond to incentives rather than an elaboration of his particular understanding of the world. The alleviation of poverty requires growth, and growth requires that we get the incentives right.” Say again?
These great social thinkers are something else. It is a little like Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Only Easterly says, “If we have the incentives right, development will happen.” Do you ever wonder why Third World people think we have a screw loose?
Where Easterly is on safe turf is when he insists that the poor fall into vicious cycles of cumulative poverty and stagnation where there are low concentrations of capital, skill and knowledge.
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, this phenomenon is perpetuated because capital doesn’t go where there is the promise of a low rate of return on investment.
Thus the dilemma, history has proven the answer is not in socialism or communism, or for that matter totalitarianism of any hue, so capitalism is there to fill the void, or is it? Easterly says, and I think rightly, that people who live among people with few skills are less likely to make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate knowledge and skills because the expected payoff is low. So, he catches me back in his incentive net, or does he?
Remember the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith used to explain how markets encourage people to act in a given fashion, and that efficiency and satisfaction grow out of the sense of well being that is consistent with how people see themselves. Smith called this “self-interest.”
I think that nomad on the camel is operating as he perceives self-interest, selling his sparse wears in the tourist marketplace, but not wanting to abandon his lifestyle for Western ways because he is told it is better for his health and well being. What the Western mind conceives as “extreme poverty” or “moderate poverty” is itself a poverty trap because it views the problem from Western eyes and a Western mindset. When we take the desert away from the nomad, when we play havoc with his water holes through climate change, and stream pollution, when the animals that feed him disappear, and when he is seen as ignorant because he lacks Western skills, then we are, indeed, in a poverty trap, not his, but our own.
Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” attempts to rescue the Western mind from the poverty trap. He sees the answer in globalization.
Globalization is seen through the eyes of a true believer. It is good for the body and soul. It is the Holy Grail. It is good for workers in rich and poor nations; good for women as well as men; good for the poor, good for children and good for immigrants.
Corporate God is withdrawing his punishment of Adam and Eve and opening the gates of Paradise to everyone.
Globalization is therefore good for the environment; good for democracies; and provides new cultural opportunities for all. Multinational corporations are good; free trade agreements are good; sweatshops are good. Globalization represents a direction along a continuum not of two or more possibilities but of an all encompassing one.
Bhagwati cuts through everything with Occam’s razor. The simplest definition of the problem is the most reasonable one to accept. International trade and investment promote higher incomes; higher incomes create better opportunities for everyone – the poor, women, children, wageworkers, peasants and government.
He reminds the reader of Adam Smith’s most powerful insight; the selfish pursuit of profit can promote the greater good. Somehow I don’t feel this has much truck with the nomad and his camel.
To suggest Bhagwati’s scheme as madness personified would earn you the tag of being an antiglobalist, a know nothing ignoramus, a nihilist and liar, an immoral person, a devil worshiper.
Perhaps “radical political economics” is a fitting name for this august publication. In a curious way, I have found in reading this piece some measure of how I must sound at times. I wonder if these authors have the same sense. I hope so. We that write have good intentions but sometimes it is best to give us a pass.
Author Sachs reminds me of the pyramid climbers in corpocracy. Climbing the ladder of academia doesn’t seem a lot different from those executive climbers that I rubbed elbows with for so many years, filling all the right boxes to win membership in the club’s next tier higher.
Easterly seems lost in his own confusion, a place I’ve been so I have empathy for his predicament.
Ghagwati’s certainty is another matter. He is the most dangerous because he is no longer in a state of discovery. He has arrived. He believes he has found the answer whereas the other two authors are fairly aware they are skating on thin ice sensing that at any time they could be up to their necks in icy water. Not Ghamati, for him the pond is six inches thick with ice safe enough to drive a tank over.
My wonder is if it ever occurs to these authors that impoverishment is a relative word and not an index of societal existence; that not everyone wants to live in a city, work in a factory, have a posh home in the suburbs, or be immersed in Western culture.
Most of us like to be left alone to our own miseries and designs, which might include living miles from anyone else, or living close to nature with all its hardships and demands in an unforgiving climate. We have become weary of social engineers who would fix us, and this goes double for people outside the Western experience.
Does it ever occur to social engineers that their designs are what have impoverished people by bleeding the land of its rich resources and leaving lakes and river to dry up, and the air these impoverished people are forced to breathe filled with pollutants; that progress is the great impoverishing mechanism of all?
Then ask yourself what gave birth to the januweed, to these renegade bandits on horseback who rape and pillage and burn the humble villages of nomads on camels with impunity? Or who sponsors the corrupt politicians that allow the West to take the rich resources from the earth, and then look the other way when payment never reaches the people?
It is a travesty and tragedy when this is allowed which rips the soul from the heart. Colonialism disgusted me when I experienced it in South America and South Africa. “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways” doesn’t disgust me because I know these authors are well meaning. It saddens me nonetheless because it reminds me what a mess we have made of the Third World by trying to save it from itself. The medical term comes to mine, iatrogenic, the cure is worse than the disease.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Finally, the hygienist said my dentist could see me. I looked at my watch. I had been reading and writing for 72 minutes.
The hygienist takes two x-rays; another wait follows of fifteen minutes. I am too nervous to read my notes. I had spent the previous evening checking google and had found 61 different cancers that described such bone pain. I thought what a wonderful life I have had, how BB has made it so complete and fulfilling, and then the dentist was there.
It wasn’t my dentist, whom I learned was moving to Virginia, but a pleasant looking fortyish woman who introduced herself, and then said, “Let’s have a look at your mouth.”
I thought my heart would stop. Such an innocuous statement, one I’ve heard often and in the same words.
“As I thought,” she said, but not to me, but to the hygienist.
“You have one of your roots on molar #21 that is infected, and it has leaked a great deal of infection into the bone cavity where molar #22 had been. You have quite an abscessed tooth. Are you in a lot of pain?”
Am I in a lot of pain? I had been and was up to that point, but now I was experiencing no pain at all. I was delirious with relief. ‘I have an abscessed tooth, not leukemia,’ I wanted to jump up and hug her but I was strapped in.
“You have to have a root canal and then a new crown put on that tooth.”
What beautiful words. I found my head nodding, and yes, right away, I’ll do it right away, stuttering as I do when I am excited. She was clearly taken back by this response.
“Well,” she said, “the hygienist will take your chart up front and make arrangements, nice meeting you.” And she was gone, on to her next patient.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 7, 2007
“We may divide thinkers into those who think for themselves and those who think through others. The latter are the rule and the former the exception. The first are original thinkers in a double sense, and egoists in the noblest meaning of the word. It is from them only that the world learns wisdom. For only the light which we have kindled in ourselves can illuminate others.”
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860), German philosopher
__________
We are all thinkers but too often we accept the thoughts of others as our own feeling they are better qualified because they are better connected, and after all, that is their business, thinking; our business is doing with little time for such luxury.
There is danger in this for the magnitude of such dependence can be more life changing than you can imagine. The Scottish-American educator James McCosh (1811 – 1894) states it well:
“In the end, thought rules the world. There are times when impulses and passions are more powerful, but they soon expend themselves; while mind, acting constantly, is ever ready to drive them back and work when their energy is exhausted.”
McCosh is addressing the context of thinking. We have drifted precariously toward second-hand minds with our mind vat filled with second-class content, largely because our experience is limited.
One of the limits of experience is language.
In my sophomore year in college, I was quite moved with my introduction to Dostoyevsky in “Notes from the Underground” (1864). I was reading him of course in translation. One day I came across an essay by Vladimir Nabokov on this book, and realized I wasn’t reading Dostoyevsky at all but the distortions of the translator.
Nabokov, the author of the popular novel “Lolita” (1959) was born in St. Petersburg and a careful scholar of his native language, Russian. Missing in translation, Nabokov claimed, was Dostoyevsky’s convulsive nervous trembling style, his syntax of frenzied piercing diction and malicious irony mixed with sorrow and despair.
This made perfect sense to me because somehow the book didn’t compute with my mind hungry for purchase in the confusion of youth. After all, I was a chemistry major with a solid foundation in mathematics and science, but no reference point in the dizzy world of literary genius.
That said Dostoyevsky touched cords previously hidden to me. I sensed the madness and the longing for clarity of the narrator in his story, but had no gauge with which to measure either. The context was wrapped in a misleading content in translation, as I was to learn latter reading his other works. He was hinting at the limits of science in labeling man’s perverse rush to sameness against the stupendous force of individuality in his nature. This work serves as an arrow to point the direction of his latter novels and would influence me in my perspective.
Deception is not limited to translation of language.
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. confesses in his “Journals” (2007) that he purposely left out president Andrew Jackson’s draconian treatment of Native Americans in his Pulitzer Prize winning biography, “The Age of Jackson” (1945). He did so to win favor with FDR’s administration and the Democratic Party. This embarrassing chapter in American history with American Indian relations is known as the “trail of tears.” Tens of thousands of Native Americans were forced from their sacred lands and resettled in the Pacific North West. Many died on the way.
Translators are not the only ones who indulge in the practice of safe bland script.
This brings me to an article I read sent to me by a friend, a successful academic and international consultant in organizational development. He was moved to share this upon learning of “The Naples Institute,” a think tank that I was recently invited to join. He found the group’s slogan, “fighting for social justice,” especially inspiring.
To put what follows in context making certain this is no bland script in disguise, I am disclosing up front that my critique of the article was greatly influenced by my state of mind when I wrote it. I say this to illustrate that what is accepted as scholarship or astute observation is often if not always influenced by this frame of reference.
For the past several days I have been in intense pain, a bone or gum pain in my jaw.
Many years ago, my da goes to his dentist complaining of such a gum and bone pain. He is forty-eight-years-old. The dentist examines his gums, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to your physician. I’d like him to take a look at this.”
So, he goes to his family doctor who takes one look at his gums and the x-rays from the dentist, and says, “Ray, I’m sending you to a specialist.”
The specialist sees him, takes a biopsy of his sternum, and says, “The results will be sent to your doctor who will then contact you.”
About two weeks later, he finds himself sitting across from his friend and doctor. “Joe,” he says, “how long do I have?”
His doctor, a gentle and kind man, answers, “Ray, it’s a bad actor. We don’t know a lot about it.” Then he takes off his glasses, rubs them clean, puts them back on, and says, “A year, fourteen months at the outside.”
That was late 1957. My da lived fourteen more months with excruciating pain reduced to weighing 65 pounds with every bone in his body collapsing to putty.
He suffered from a bone disease and form of leukemia known as multiple myeloma. It is the same disease that killed Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, in the 1980s.
This past summer when I was in Russia I suffered a terrible gum and bone pain where a molar had been removed. I thought it was the toothpaste on sensitive gums. I changed toothpastes and the pain vanished.
Then this past week the pain came back with a vengeance, so great that I thought I would pass out. I have a capacity to endure pain. It might be associated with the fact of being a lifelong sufferer of migraine headaches, as was the case with my da.
Anyway, when the pain would not let up, I thought of my da, and made an emergency appointment with my dentist, wondering if this would be déjà vu.
At the same time, things were breaking for me. I was invited to be an enrichment lecturer on a culturally oriented cruise liner, asked to participate in a new think tank on leadership, and my books are selling. The world couldn’t look brighter.
My first thought was, God, this is not good timing. Then, I experienced pangs of guilt for procrastinating on my South Africa novel. I felt God was punishing me for this.
My discomfort became incapacitating last Friday. My Beautiful Betty couldn’t get me in for an emergency appointment until last Tuesday, or four days of agony and doomsday thinking.
Once at the dentist’s office, it being an emergency or unscheduled appointment, I had to sit in the waiting room for well over an hour. During that time, I read the article BB had downloaded from my professor friend, and wrote the remarks, which follow.
* * * * * * * * * * *
I have just read an article from the REVIEW OF RADICAL POLITICAL ECONOMICS written by Tim Koechlin and titled “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways.”
Now, this article is actually a review of three books, what the reviewer calls “ambitious books.” The books are Jeffrey Sachs’s “The End of Poverty” (2005), William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” (2002), and Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” (2004).
A colleague of mine sent this article to me. Every time I send him something of my thoughts I can rest assured that he would send me something of his or from someone within his bailiwick. He has such a generous mind, and has done so much but he gives me no indication of whether I make or fail to make sense to him, so I have absolutely no sense of what value my remarks have to him.
When I read someone I don’t think of sending them an article of mine or reference some other’s work, but hit them between the eyes with what I think and feel about what they have to say. If I like it, I tell them and why. If I don’t like it, I tell them why not.
Life is so short. Why do we have to be so devious and self-deceiving? I derive no pleasure in talking about people when they are not present, but I won’t hesitate to tell them how I feel when they are. It has allowed me great freedom this inability to have self-serving tact.
Often, that is the end of it. I never hear from them again. Why doesn’t that bother me? Do I think I am God? My Baltimore Catechism in the first grade informed me that the cruelest loss in the world is never to see God again, to have Him abandon you, cut you off from His light, love and warmth, and leave you out in the cold.
Do I see myself in such terms? What could be more despicable? Is this hiding my insecurity? I think it is. I think I’ve been lying to myself and it is finally catching up with me. Who am I to write and think and act as if what I have to say has any merit? Where is my humility?
These thoughts come to mine after reading this article. It is crafted in Western lies, lies that I know so well because I am well schooled in them. What makes us think Western philosophical thought, Western perception and perspective are superior to that nomad in the desert on his camel wandering across the sand?
Why do we assume that he wants indoor plumbing, air conditioning, chlorinated drinking water, for us to save him from himself?
These books are from the perspective of the “savior” in the bland script of the West even though a native of India writes one.
The authors belch out the statistics:
1. Nearly one-fifth of the world’s population lives in “extreme poverty,” or on less than a dollar a day;
2. Another 1.5 billion live in “moderate poverty,” or on less than two dollars a day.
Let’s give everyone $100 a day, put them in a suburban home with a three car garage and fenced in yard with all the social and economic amenities of Western society, and as a bonus give them our schizophrenic self-indulgent lifestyle and chronic anxiety for free. Have we created a better world with less war, less conflict and less social injustice? I don’t think so.
If there is anything I’ve learned in my long life, it is that you can’t see the problem clearly from the outside in, and you are never going to see the problem from the inside out because you are not “them” and they are not “you.”
Sachs in “The End of Poverty” argues that “extreme poverty” is as a rule a consequence of factors beyond the control of the poor and their government. Now, how does that sound if you are that nomad on that camel wandering across the desert?
What’s more, he sees people sullied with “extreme poverty” as experiencing an impediment to prosperity, that wonderful word of the West, “prosperity,” how it has become our god and the answer to all dilemmas. It is the Holy Grail to health, wealth and happiness.
Precisely, how does Sachs’s see this impediment?
He sees it in terms of an ungenerous climate and physical landscape, debt, overpopulation, and political and social unrest. That is the “disease” in his book, failing to realize the people he would “save” has survived tens of thousands of years in this climate. It has been the imposition of the West and its mania for prosperity that has sunk them into the despair of the Western disease. Then Sachs goes on to see “extreme poverty” a consequence of corruption, ill-advised government policies, backward cultural practices, bad choices, and bad incentives.
I find it incredible that this learned man, this superstar of academia (he was a full professor at Harvard at age 29), who is sought after by such "do gooder" celebrities as Angelina Jolie and Bono, and such bleeding heart liberals as George Soros, and ineffective leaders such as the UN’s Kofi Annan cannot see the arrogance of his zeal. My wonder is this how he directs Columbia University’s Earth Institute, or acts as an advocate of the UN’s Millennium Development Goals. Somehow I don’t think making the world into our image and likeness is the answer.
William Easterly’s “The Elusive Quest for Growth” is appropriately titled, as his quest is anything if not elusive. A professor of economics at New York University after a long career at the World Bank, he tells a slightly different story about development and poverty in his book.
Easterly doesn’t see the problem a shortage of aid but a shortage of incentives. Reading the quotations from this work I am reminded of how ineffective “incentives” have been for American enterprise. I give page, chapter and book on the subject of incentives in “Six Silent Killers” (1998), showing that incentives have too often killed initiative only to generate passive and counterdependent workers. But wait! Easterly sees there are “good” and “bad” incentives.
Bad incentives are aid, credit and debt forgiveness. They discourage saving, investment and growth, while encouraging corruption, rent seeking and counterproductive government policies. So far we are on the same page. Then he says a curious thing: education provides little payoff for the typical citizen in a poor country because once he becomes educated he moves on to greener pastures in some Western country.
Unfortunately, the author of this article goes on and on about “right incentives” without giving a single clue what Easterly proposes they are. He covers his tracks as a reviewer by saying this: “Easterly’s conclusions are essentially an elaboration of the basic principle that people respond to incentives rather than an elaboration of his particular understanding of the world. The alleviation of poverty requires growth, and growth requires that we get the incentives right.” Say again?
These great social thinkers are something else. It is a little like Descartes’ famous dictum, “I think therefore I am.” Only Easterly says, “If we have the incentives right, development will happen.” Do you ever wonder why Third World people think we have a screw loose?
Where Easterly is on safe turf is when he insists that the poor fall into vicious cycles of cumulative poverty and stagnation where there are low concentrations of capital, skill and knowledge.
Unfortunately, in a capitalistic society, this phenomenon is perpetuated because capital doesn’t go where there is the promise of a low rate of return on investment.
Thus the dilemma, history has proven the answer is not in socialism or communism, or for that matter totalitarianism of any hue, so capitalism is there to fill the void, or is it? Easterly says, and I think rightly, that people who live among people with few skills are less likely to make the sacrifices necessary to accumulate knowledge and skills because the expected payoff is low. So, he catches me back in his incentive net, or does he?
Remember the invisible hand of the market that Adam Smith used to explain how markets encourage people to act in a given fashion, and that efficiency and satisfaction grow out of the sense of well being that is consistent with how people see themselves. Smith called this “self-interest.”
I think that nomad on the camel is operating as he perceives self-interest, selling his sparse wears in the tourist marketplace, but not wanting to abandon his lifestyle for Western ways because he is told it is better for his health and well being. What the Western mind conceives as “extreme poverty” or “moderate poverty” is itself a poverty trap because it views the problem from Western eyes and a Western mindset. When we take the desert away from the nomad, when we play havoc with his water holes through climate change, and stream pollution, when the animals that feed him disappear, and when he is seen as ignorant because he lacks Western skills, then we are, indeed, in a poverty trap, not his, but our own.
Jagdish Bhagwati’s “In Defense of Globalization” attempts to rescue the Western mind from the poverty trap. He sees the answer in globalization.
Globalization is seen through the eyes of a true believer. It is good for the body and soul. It is the Holy Grail. It is good for workers in rich and poor nations; good for women as well as men; good for the poor, good for children and good for immigrants.
Corporate God is withdrawing his punishment of Adam and Eve and opening the gates of Paradise to everyone.
Globalization is therefore good for the environment; good for democracies; and provides new cultural opportunities for all. Multinational corporations are good; free trade agreements are good; sweatshops are good. Globalization represents a direction along a continuum not of two or more possibilities but of an all encompassing one.
Bhagwati cuts through everything with Occam’s razor. The simplest definition of the problem is the most reasonable one to accept. International trade and investment promote higher incomes; higher incomes create better opportunities for everyone – the poor, women, children, wageworkers, peasants and government.
He reminds the reader of Adam Smith’s most powerful insight; the selfish pursuit of profit can promote the greater good. Somehow I don’t feel this has much truck with the nomad and his camel.
To suggest Bhagwati’s scheme as madness personified would earn you the tag of being an antiglobalist, a know nothing ignoramus, a nihilist and liar, an immoral person, a devil worshiper.
Perhaps “radical political economics” is a fitting name for this august publication. In a curious way, I have found in reading this piece some measure of how I must sound at times. I wonder if these authors have the same sense. I hope so. We that write have good intentions but sometimes it is best to give us a pass.
Author Sachs reminds me of the pyramid climbers in corpocracy. Climbing the ladder of academia doesn’t seem a lot different from those executive climbers that I rubbed elbows with for so many years, filling all the right boxes to win membership in the club’s next tier higher.
Easterly seems lost in his own confusion, a place I’ve been so I have empathy for his predicament.
Ghagwati’s certainty is another matter. He is the most dangerous because he is no longer in a state of discovery. He has arrived. He believes he has found the answer whereas the other two authors are fairly aware they are skating on thin ice sensing that at any time they could be up to their necks in icy water. Not Ghamati, for him the pond is six inches thick with ice safe enough to drive a tank over.
My wonder is if it ever occurs to these authors that impoverishment is a relative word and not an index of societal existence; that not everyone wants to live in a city, work in a factory, have a posh home in the suburbs, or be immersed in Western culture.
Most of us like to be left alone to our own miseries and designs, which might include living miles from anyone else, or living close to nature with all its hardships and demands in an unforgiving climate. We have become weary of social engineers who would fix us, and this goes double for people outside the Western experience.
Does it ever occur to social engineers that their designs are what have impoverished people by bleeding the land of its rich resources and leaving lakes and river to dry up, and the air these impoverished people are forced to breathe filled with pollutants; that progress is the great impoverishing mechanism of all?
Then ask yourself what gave birth to the januweed, to these renegade bandits on horseback who rape and pillage and burn the humble villages of nomads on camels with impunity? Or who sponsors the corrupt politicians that allow the West to take the rich resources from the earth, and then look the other way when payment never reaches the people?
It is a travesty and tragedy when this is allowed which rips the soul from the heart. Colonialism disgusted me when I experienced it in South America and South Africa. “Fighting Global Poverty, Three Ways” doesn’t disgust me because I know these authors are well meaning. It saddens me nonetheless because it reminds me what a mess we have made of the Third World by trying to save it from itself. The medical term comes to mine, iatrogenic, the cure is worse than the disease.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Finally, the hygienist said my dentist could see me. I looked at my watch. I had been reading and writing for 72 minutes.
The hygienist takes two x-rays; another wait follows of fifteen minutes. I am too nervous to read my notes. I had spent the previous evening checking google and had found 61 different cancers that described such bone pain. I thought what a wonderful life I have had, how BB has made it so complete and fulfilling, and then the dentist was there.
It wasn’t my dentist, whom I learned was moving to Virginia, but a pleasant looking fortyish woman who introduced herself, and then said, “Let’s have a look at your mouth.”
I thought my heart would stop. Such an innocuous statement, one I’ve heard often and in the same words.
“As I thought,” she said, but not to me, but to the hygienist.
“You have one of your roots on molar #21 that is infected, and it has leaked a great deal of infection into the bone cavity where molar #22 had been. You have quite an abscessed tooth. Are you in a lot of pain?”
Am I in a lot of pain? I had been and was up to that point, but now I was experiencing no pain at all. I was delirious with relief. ‘I have an abscessed tooth, not leukemia,’ I wanted to jump up and hug her but I was strapped in.
“You have to have a root canal and then a new crown put on that tooth.”
What beautiful words. I found my head nodding, and yes, right away, I’ll do it right away, stuttering as I do when I am excited. She was clearly taken back by this response.
“Well,” she said, “the hygienist will take your chart up front and make arrangements, nice meeting you.” And she was gone, on to her next patient.
____________
Dr. Fisher’s latest book is “A Look Back to See Ahead” (AuthorHouse 2007).
Friday, November 02, 2007
EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!
EDUCATION, THE FACTORY OF OUR LIVES!
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrists."
H. L. Wayland (1796 - 1865), American educator
"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power."
Harry A. Overstreet, The Mind Alive (1954)
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was bound to happen sooner rather than later that some researcher would study American education and conclude that it is little more than a factory, and that this factory of education is in trouble.
More than fifty years ago, the entering class with me my freshman year had 30 percent less students my sophomore year than started with me, and when it came time to graduate it had been reduced by another 30 percent, or around 40 percent actual stood the course of the four years to graduate.
Now, that was off the radar of public concern for many reasons. A college education was then something of a novelty for many of us of working class families. So, if we failed, it was no big deal.
Virtually everyone with a high school diploma from an Iowa high school was immediately eligible for acceptance into one of the land grant state institutions.
To give you a sense of the times, the US Selective Service Military Draft was on and many were pulled out of the university and drafted into the US Army to fight in the police action that never became a declared war known as "the Korean War."
Only six years before or 1945, WWII had ended and anyone that wanted a good job with only a high school education or less was set for the pickings. Indeed, in cities such as Detroit and Chicago nearby, you could get a good job without a diploma. You might find yourself working beside your mother or father, uncle or aunt, or even grandparents.
The factory became a cradle to grave economic institution especially for the "Big Three" in the automotive industry. My uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit in Detroit, and I saw this first hand as a boy, visiting him every summer, and playing baseball with kids from such families. They all had better homes than doctors in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, and few of their parents had finished high school.
It wasn't until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that all hell broke loose and education became totally a vocational experience from grammar school to high school and through college. The new math was born and the frantic of panic invaded education.
We had to compete with the Russians and we had to produce soldiers of the mind that were technically programmed to produce a finished product that could compete with and then surpass the Russians.
The purely intellectual aim of education to endeavor to make us see and imagine the world as it is without the distorting programming of a specific end product got lost in the shuffle.
Education, which at one time was the true analgesic to certain diseases the modern world engendered, such as stress and anxiety, has lost sight of the diseases so that all remedies are now superfluous.
So, it should come as little surprise that a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Bob Balfanz, has come to find U.S. high schools "dropout factories" and source of the social-cultural problem of our time.
In his study of 1,700 regular and vocational high schools nationwide, he found only 60 percent of the freshman classes graduated. In my state of Florida, it is less than 50 percent. I live in Hillsborough County, Florida where ten high schools are listed as "dropout factories."
What is not surprising but which has become typical of such studies is that there is much data on what and who but a shortage of data on why or the nature of the disease.
The study suggests the culprit being the draconian demands of testing, the concentration of students in metropolitan areas with large minority populations, poor tracking of racial, ethnic and other subgroups, and the lack of vigilance to the husbanding of such statistics.
The answers or solutions he proposes are ironic because they have the ring of the modern factory mentality:
· Make high schools report graduation rates.
· Get states to build data system to track students.
· Make states count graduation rates in a systematic and uniform way.
· Create progress reports.
We have had the program of "No Child Left Behind," and we have had our Florida schools from grammar through high school rate on an "A through F" scale, with those with "A" ratings receiving positive funding, and those with "F" ratings being punished with funding withheld, when clearly it might be best to have it the other way around, but that does not fit our factory mentality programming of motivating for positive performance through incentives.
Incentives, as I point out in my book "Work Without Managers" (1990), have driven workers from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency in the workplace, bypassing the culture of contribution. Why should it be any different in the classroom?
We still believe, and this is the factory mentality oozing out of our pores, that you can legislate passion and morality with the appropriate programming, when clearly we continue to fail on both fronts over and over and over again.
The spark of curiosity is in the soul of every child as it embraces its environment. Why is this so often killed before it takes a hold on a nascent life?
The student is not a box to fill with goodies. The student is a person with a soul and potential to approach the essence of his or her possibilities. This does not make us equal. This makes us unique. There is no satisfaction greater than finding the spark to energize our potential and then discover some small victory which has nothing to do with anyone else, but engenders the pure pleasure of feeling alive and good about ourselves. Everyone is born with this, but not everyone reaches consciousness before it expires.
We have lost the foundation of what it is to be educated in the liberal tradition. This has been understood more or less since the time of Aristotle. Education is not primarily utilitarian or sentimental; education is to be open to life in the pursuit of building a moral and responsible character. Edmund Burke stated it bluntly, "Education is the cheap defense of nations."
American high schools have become dropout factories because education has produced corporate soldiers that are programmed to march to the corporate song, and most students do not want to join that army or rat race. It is a terrible thing to see the problem of education reduced to being the student's fault or simply the failure of administrivia to track the product of its purpose with more acumen.
Why do you think students are bored in school? School has become boring. Teachers enter a war zones where survival from day to day is the most accomplished task of their purpose. Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," but what about the student respecting the teacher?
Emerson was speaking of the nineteenth century when the classroom was not a combat zone. He assumed something that cannot be assumed today. That education was a garden in which fragile seeds might be cultivated in fertile ground by accomplished horticulturists of the human heart.
What this Johns Hopkins University report tells us is that our garden is full of weeds in which only half of the planted seeds will mature into flowers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis used this metaphor with more than passing clarity when he said, "Instead of trying to suppress the weeds that can never be killed, they may be cultivated into useful and beautiful flowers. For it is impossible to conceive any impulse in a human heart which cannot be transformed into Truth or into Beauty or into Love."
Young people, all young people have the capacity to become weeds or flowers. It is a matter of attention and intention. They are far more aware than any cunning politician or educator might think. They know when they are being treated as statistics with this hidden agenda for building brownie points by having an "A" school rating, or turning the corner and having "more than 60 percent of freshmen making it to graduation."
This is not the place to go into it but as I've said repeatedly it is a problem with the problem solving. Linear logic is like the dog chasing its own tail, and this study, as well intended as it is, appears to be no different.
We know the harm we have done to our environment with synthetic fertilizers and insecticides to rid us of menacing pest. Now the bees are gone that pollinate our plants. Many fruits and vegetables are in jeopardy.
This is not an accidental metaphor. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as it is a nation's greatest resource. It is sad to report H. L. Wayland of the nineteenth century appears to have been prophetic, while Harry A. Overstreet of the twentieth century overly optimistic as quoted in this opening piece. What will the future be? It starts with each of us, as we are all students' first teachers.
______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
"Modern education too often covers the fingers with rings, and at the same time cuts the sinews at the wrists."
H. L. Wayland (1796 - 1865), American educator
"I may safely predict that the education of the future will be inventive-minded. It will believe so profoundly in the high value of the inventive or creative spirit that it will set itself to develop that spirit by all means within its power."
Harry A. Overstreet, The Mind Alive (1954)
* * * * * * * * * * *
It was bound to happen sooner rather than later that some researcher would study American education and conclude that it is little more than a factory, and that this factory of education is in trouble.
More than fifty years ago, the entering class with me my freshman year had 30 percent less students my sophomore year than started with me, and when it came time to graduate it had been reduced by another 30 percent, or around 40 percent actual stood the course of the four years to graduate.
Now, that was off the radar of public concern for many reasons. A college education was then something of a novelty for many of us of working class families. So, if we failed, it was no big deal.
Virtually everyone with a high school diploma from an Iowa high school was immediately eligible for acceptance into one of the land grant state institutions.
To give you a sense of the times, the US Selective Service Military Draft was on and many were pulled out of the university and drafted into the US Army to fight in the police action that never became a declared war known as "the Korean War."
Only six years before or 1945, WWII had ended and anyone that wanted a good job with only a high school education or less was set for the pickings. Indeed, in cities such as Detroit and Chicago nearby, you could get a good job without a diploma. You might find yourself working beside your mother or father, uncle or aunt, or even grandparents.
The factory became a cradle to grave economic institution especially for the "Big Three" in the automotive industry. My uncle was a professor at the University of Detroit in Detroit, and I saw this first hand as a boy, visiting him every summer, and playing baseball with kids from such families. They all had better homes than doctors in my hometown of Clinton, Iowa, and few of their parents had finished high school.
It wasn't until the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957 that all hell broke loose and education became totally a vocational experience from grammar school to high school and through college. The new math was born and the frantic of panic invaded education.
We had to compete with the Russians and we had to produce soldiers of the mind that were technically programmed to produce a finished product that could compete with and then surpass the Russians.
The purely intellectual aim of education to endeavor to make us see and imagine the world as it is without the distorting programming of a specific end product got lost in the shuffle.
Education, which at one time was the true analgesic to certain diseases the modern world engendered, such as stress and anxiety, has lost sight of the diseases so that all remedies are now superfluous.
So, it should come as little surprise that a Johns Hopkins University researcher, Bob Balfanz, has come to find U.S. high schools "dropout factories" and source of the social-cultural problem of our time.
In his study of 1,700 regular and vocational high schools nationwide, he found only 60 percent of the freshman classes graduated. In my state of Florida, it is less than 50 percent. I live in Hillsborough County, Florida where ten high schools are listed as "dropout factories."
What is not surprising but which has become typical of such studies is that there is much data on what and who but a shortage of data on why or the nature of the disease.
The study suggests the culprit being the draconian demands of testing, the concentration of students in metropolitan areas with large minority populations, poor tracking of racial, ethnic and other subgroups, and the lack of vigilance to the husbanding of such statistics.
The answers or solutions he proposes are ironic because they have the ring of the modern factory mentality:
· Make high schools report graduation rates.
· Get states to build data system to track students.
· Make states count graduation rates in a systematic and uniform way.
· Create progress reports.
We have had the program of "No Child Left Behind," and we have had our Florida schools from grammar through high school rate on an "A through F" scale, with those with "A" ratings receiving positive funding, and those with "F" ratings being punished with funding withheld, when clearly it might be best to have it the other way around, but that does not fit our factory mentality programming of motivating for positive performance through incentives.
Incentives, as I point out in my book "Work Without Managers" (1990), have driven workers from a culture of comfort to a culture of complacency in the workplace, bypassing the culture of contribution. Why should it be any different in the classroom?
We still believe, and this is the factory mentality oozing out of our pores, that you can legislate passion and morality with the appropriate programming, when clearly we continue to fail on both fronts over and over and over again.
The spark of curiosity is in the soul of every child as it embraces its environment. Why is this so often killed before it takes a hold on a nascent life?
The student is not a box to fill with goodies. The student is a person with a soul and potential to approach the essence of his or her possibilities. This does not make us equal. This makes us unique. There is no satisfaction greater than finding the spark to energize our potential and then discover some small victory which has nothing to do with anyone else, but engenders the pure pleasure of feeling alive and good about ourselves. Everyone is born with this, but not everyone reaches consciousness before it expires.
We have lost the foundation of what it is to be educated in the liberal tradition. This has been understood more or less since the time of Aristotle. Education is not primarily utilitarian or sentimental; education is to be open to life in the pursuit of building a moral and responsible character. Edmund Burke stated it bluntly, "Education is the cheap defense of nations."
American high schools have become dropout factories because education has produced corporate soldiers that are programmed to march to the corporate song, and most students do not want to join that army or rat race. It is a terrible thing to see the problem of education reduced to being the student's fault or simply the failure of administrivia to track the product of its purpose with more acumen.
Why do you think students are bored in school? School has become boring. Teachers enter a war zones where survival from day to day is the most accomplished task of their purpose. Emerson said, "The secret of education lies in respecting the pupil," but what about the student respecting the teacher?
Emerson was speaking of the nineteenth century when the classroom was not a combat zone. He assumed something that cannot be assumed today. That education was a garden in which fragile seeds might be cultivated in fertile ground by accomplished horticulturists of the human heart.
What this Johns Hopkins University report tells us is that our garden is full of weeds in which only half of the planted seeds will mature into flowers. English psychologist Havelock Ellis used this metaphor with more than passing clarity when he said, "Instead of trying to suppress the weeds that can never be killed, they may be cultivated into useful and beautiful flowers. For it is impossible to conceive any impulse in a human heart which cannot be transformed into Truth or into Beauty or into Love."
Young people, all young people have the capacity to become weeds or flowers. It is a matter of attention and intention. They are far more aware than any cunning politician or educator might think. They know when they are being treated as statistics with this hidden agenda for building brownie points by having an "A" school rating, or turning the corner and having "more than 60 percent of freshmen making it to graduation."
This is not the place to go into it but as I've said repeatedly it is a problem with the problem solving. Linear logic is like the dog chasing its own tail, and this study, as well intended as it is, appears to be no different.
We know the harm we have done to our environment with synthetic fertilizers and insecticides to rid us of menacing pest. Now the bees are gone that pollinate our plants. Many fruits and vegetables are in jeopardy.
This is not an accidental metaphor. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, as it is a nation's greatest resource. It is sad to report H. L. Wayland of the nineteenth century appears to have been prophetic, while Harry A. Overstreet of the twentieth century overly optimistic as quoted in this opening piece. What will the future be? It starts with each of us, as we are all students' first teachers.
______________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
Thursday, November 01, 2007
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?
FRAGEMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY – Does the body move the spirit or does the spirit move the body?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth much; but he that loseth his spirits loseth all.”
Spanish Maxim
Many of us are of such an age that we were born and matured during the middle of the last century, a century in constant war and rebellion in which more than 100 million immortal souls perished on battlefields, in concentration camps, or were the innocent victims of collateral damage.
We have seen Nazism and Communism rise and fall; totalitarian dictators come to power and wreak havoc on everything they touched, and we have seen misguided republics attempt to put their stamp on people of other persuasions, all equally damaging to our individual as well as collective soul
We have seen democracy return to Western Europe and be born again in Eastern Europe, while the rest of the planet has remained in various states of war and deprivation, where dictators come to power by the will of the people having tired of the exploitation by countries such as the United States who installed puppet regimes for economic advantage. I have seen this first hand in my working life in South America.
Then there are the sins and transgressions of lingering colonialism that still play havoc with South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East.
History has not been kind to the native and cultural peoples across the globe of this small planet.
Poland disappeared from the map of the world in the nineteenth century; was born again after WWI, only to be overrun in WWII first by the Germans and then the Russians. Descendents of the Portuguese oligarchy still dominate Brazil while the Native Brazilian Indians remain the peasant class. The jury is still out on Argentina. This is also true to various degrees throughout South and Central America. Five hundred years of colonialism leave permanent scars on the national psyche.
Even in the United States Native Americans are still treated as second-class citizens so the US is hardly one to cast the first stone.
Look at the legacy of the midget nation of Belgium and its colonial exploitation of the Belgium Congo, a nation larger in area than most in the world, but still poor although rich in natural resources with a population the majority of which does not make a dollar a day.
The world’s attention is on the Sudan and Darfar and the tragedy of that civil war in which millions of displaced, dying and starving people are casualties in a forgotten land. Someone dies in Africa every five seconds from malnutrition, AIDS or warfare. When relief is received, it seldom gets to its intended destination as corruption reaches yet another level. Too often rapacity has no specific color or conscience.
Meanwhile, religion has entered the fray on every continent of this planet taking to militant and military means to bring about what is perceived as change and social justice.
Fear and foreboding has become the diet of a global society that has lost its way. Its moral compass is faulty, and now it believes that the only way for peace is to annihilate all nonbelievers, as there is little room for differences.
The case can be made that I am speaking exclusively of fanatics of Islam, but the same charge is equally true of fanatics of all religious persuasions. Fear finds these fanatics feeling justified in attempting to annihilate those that would harm them, thinking that those of such a persuasion think differently than they do when they think and believe the same. They are both equally without a guidance system.
We have seen China in the short span of twenty years move from Godless communism to Godless capitalism combining communism with capitalism as the diet in its future quest for superpower status, believing that a high standard of living is the ultimate in spiritual fulfillment.
Have they failed to see what has happened to the lone superpower and the richest and most progressive nation of the world?
The United States has moved beyond a transcendental spirit guiding it to a handheld gadget to take its mind off the fact. Indeed, it would appear the US would rather solve the problems of the world in nation building than face its own, a common psychological ploy of a schizophrenic personality.
The world has enthusiastically embraced technology as its god seeing no limits to what science can do as it solves the mysteries of the universe. But it is not science and technology that makes us human, but regard for and connection with nature and each other that does.
We spring from the earth and go back into it as a natural phenomenon called a life span, but our immortal spirit lives on through our family and friends and through our common connection to something surreal, beyond our language and comprehension that connects us all into one race and one nationality and one common soul that goes on for eternity.
__________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© November 2007
“He that loseth wealth, loseth much; he that loseth friends, loseth much; but he that loseth his spirits loseth all.”
Spanish Maxim
Many of us are of such an age that we were born and matured during the middle of the last century, a century in constant war and rebellion in which more than 100 million immortal souls perished on battlefields, in concentration camps, or were the innocent victims of collateral damage.
We have seen Nazism and Communism rise and fall; totalitarian dictators come to power and wreak havoc on everything they touched, and we have seen misguided republics attempt to put their stamp on people of other persuasions, all equally damaging to our individual as well as collective soul
We have seen democracy return to Western Europe and be born again in Eastern Europe, while the rest of the planet has remained in various states of war and deprivation, where dictators come to power by the will of the people having tired of the exploitation by countries such as the United States who installed puppet regimes for economic advantage. I have seen this first hand in my working life in South America.
Then there are the sins and transgressions of lingering colonialism that still play havoc with South America, Africa, South East Asia, and the Middle East.
History has not been kind to the native and cultural peoples across the globe of this small planet.
Poland disappeared from the map of the world in the nineteenth century; was born again after WWI, only to be overrun in WWII first by the Germans and then the Russians. Descendents of the Portuguese oligarchy still dominate Brazil while the Native Brazilian Indians remain the peasant class. The jury is still out on Argentina. This is also true to various degrees throughout South and Central America. Five hundred years of colonialism leave permanent scars on the national psyche.
Even in the United States Native Americans are still treated as second-class citizens so the US is hardly one to cast the first stone.
Look at the legacy of the midget nation of Belgium and its colonial exploitation of the Belgium Congo, a nation larger in area than most in the world, but still poor although rich in natural resources with a population the majority of which does not make a dollar a day.
The world’s attention is on the Sudan and Darfar and the tragedy of that civil war in which millions of displaced, dying and starving people are casualties in a forgotten land. Someone dies in Africa every five seconds from malnutrition, AIDS or warfare. When relief is received, it seldom gets to its intended destination as corruption reaches yet another level. Too often rapacity has no specific color or conscience.
Meanwhile, religion has entered the fray on every continent of this planet taking to militant and military means to bring about what is perceived as change and social justice.
Fear and foreboding has become the diet of a global society that has lost its way. Its moral compass is faulty, and now it believes that the only way for peace is to annihilate all nonbelievers, as there is little room for differences.
The case can be made that I am speaking exclusively of fanatics of Islam, but the same charge is equally true of fanatics of all religious persuasions. Fear finds these fanatics feeling justified in attempting to annihilate those that would harm them, thinking that those of such a persuasion think differently than they do when they think and believe the same. They are both equally without a guidance system.
We have seen China in the short span of twenty years move from Godless communism to Godless capitalism combining communism with capitalism as the diet in its future quest for superpower status, believing that a high standard of living is the ultimate in spiritual fulfillment.
Have they failed to see what has happened to the lone superpower and the richest and most progressive nation of the world?
The United States has moved beyond a transcendental spirit guiding it to a handheld gadget to take its mind off the fact. Indeed, it would appear the US would rather solve the problems of the world in nation building than face its own, a common psychological ploy of a schizophrenic personality.
The world has enthusiastically embraced technology as its god seeing no limits to what science can do as it solves the mysteries of the universe. But it is not science and technology that makes us human, but regard for and connection with nature and each other that does.
We spring from the earth and go back into it as a natural phenomenon called a life span, but our immortal spirit lives on through our family and friends and through our common connection to something surreal, beyond our language and comprehension that connects us all into one race and one nationality and one common soul that goes on for eternity.
__________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is "Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
DR. FISHER GOES TO SEA!
DR. FISHER GOES TO SEA
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2007
"Thoughts lead on to purpose; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny."
Tryon Edwards (1809 - 1894), American theologian
* * * * * * * * * * *
As with all the other iterations of my career, I have shared my wondering, thinking and speculations in missives, articles and books on a host of topics, which might be of interest to you.
What I share with you now gives a sense of how serendipity plays in an ordinary life.
Like many others, I have ratcheted up the process, gradually, incrementally, and continuously in a persistent fashion over the past seventeen years, or since I retired from corporate life in 1990.
During that period, I have written nine books and hundreds of published articles, as well as hundreds of other unpublished articles on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) and am now busily writing a tenth, which is to be a novel of South Africa during apartheid in the late 1960s.
"You can see from this production, Jim is a passionate writer," says Gary Herrity, a Clinton (Iowa) historian, and friend of mine in defining this persistence. I would prefer to be seen as an "idea guy" and peripatetic philosopher inclined to remind others of what is taken for granted, and therefore not seen at all. (Bernie, he said this recently at a dinner held while on a book tour to Iowa in September for my latest book.)
I've always been pretty focused and disciplined almost to a fault but best remembered by my generation as an athlete. What never seemed to register is that I was always more interested in academics than athletics almost from the beginning.
Writing has been a means of expression since a little boy. I know this to be a fact because my mother held on to things, and collected them in scrapbooks of virtually everything I did. These collections reveal a linear curve of curiosity and confluence into a mindset that in the evening of my life differs little with that long ago morning.
The latest confluence is the signing of a contract to give one or more cultural enrichment lectures on Oceania Cruises in 2008. It is the same cruise line that BB and I took this summer to the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts as well as new ones such as Russia, Poland, and Estonia. It is a small ship (600 passengers) with the focus on enrichment rather than the typical entertainment ambiance of much larger cruise ships.
Consistent with the premise of this piece, I'm now going to share how that came about.
BB and I became friendly with the Park West Galleries art director of the cruise, attending all his art shows and auctions, and acquiring a couple pieces of original art. In the process, he asked what we did. BB told him she was an accountant and the business manager of a Jewish Day School, and I told him I wrote books.
"What kind of books do you write," he asked, a typical question of a writer. I told him, which spiked his interests.
"I'd sure like to read you." With that, I handed the only copy I brought of "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD." He read it, and showed it to the cruise director, who met with me. I told him about my website, and he gave me information on the manager of entertainment, whom I wrote to when I got back to the States.
About two months later, this manager contacted me by email, and asked if I would be interested in being an enrichment lecturer. I emailed him back to send me some information on what that entailed.
What I received was an opportunity to give enrichment lecturers on the history and geography of the regions to be visited. I thought that closed the door on me.
Since I am neither a geographer nor historian, I wrote back, "Sorry, but this is beyond my expertise," stating what that was. He emailed again saying I could participate as a "special interest" lecturer. Still, not satisfied with that response, I sent him the following as to the content and context of possible lecturers based on my books.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael,
Before I go into possibilities, I want you to know I am interested. That said I would like to know your policy on selling books or even taking orders should people find they would like to read more of what I have to say.
RATIONALE FOR MY APPROACH
People are always interested in writers, how they become writers, where they get their material, how they first thought to become writers, what it takes to get published, and so on, mainly because everyone is in the communication business and secretly imagines they, too, could write and see their name in print with a book.
My approach as a wonderer and thinker is to translate my thoughts and ideas into books (nine to date) and articles (more than 300) accessible to everyone. I write out of my life, education, and experience.
My lectures would be built around my books:
· A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007) -- how we are stuck in nostalgia repeating the same problems.
· Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990) -- a book that predicted that entitlement programs would sink the Fortune 500, and they have. The book dared to go where others refused to tread, and has come to have classical significance.
· Confident Selling/Confident Thinking (1992) -- the seller is the barrier to success, not the buyer. Walls of resistance are self-created. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 1992.
· The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) -- whatever the industry, professionals have become the majority of workers, but, unfortunately, they have not been programmed to recognize or deal with this successfully. So, they continue to complain rather than contribute when the only game in town belongs to them.
· The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) -- to have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. The emphasis of self-help books is on building self-esteem or becoming more assertive, when the problem is not with "others," but "you!" And the problem "with you," is that self-hatred vies with self-confidence and self-hatred usually wins. Self-help gurus and books spawn this disease, which nobody seems to notice.
Other possibilities are my novels:
· In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003) -- this is a snapshot of the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States when the nation was at war (WWII). It was a time when problems were all about what we could do, collectively, to solve them. Now, problems are all about our precious egos and how we are being exploited. There was a period after the Great Depression and during WWII when people didn't have the luxury of being hedonistic or self-indulgent. Survival was the focus. Now, that sense of struggle and survival is long gone. In the Shadow is a nostalgic picture of what it was like when we had so little but were so much.
· Green Island in a Black Sea (now being written) -- this is a novel of South Africa apartheid based upon a time when the protagonist was there forming a new company of a British affiliate, South African chemical company, and his own company's subsidiary in the late 1968, when the US seemed to becoming apart at the seams, and he with her.
POSSIBLE THEMES
It has been my experience that the ordinary can prove exhilarating and extraordinary. With that in mind, here are some possible themes that could be built into special interest lectures:
(1) TRANSFORMATION (A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s)
The idea here is that we are stuck in transition from the "American Century" to the reemergence of Europe, and the incipient emergence of capitalistic China and India in the twenty-first century. This threatens our stability and lifestyle as we have come to know ourselves. It needn't be. Unfortunately, our institutions are atavistic and our problem solving methodologies (vertical thinking) have proven limiting, resulting in our national psyche being stuck, replicating, duplicating and repeating the same tired strategies and problems experienced decades ago only with different names and faces, but with little apparent sense of how this praises our folly.
(2) PIVOTAL SYNDROME OF SELF-CONFIDENCE &SELF-HATRED (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend)
Too often the person we respect, trust and like least of all is ourselves. We explore the why of this here. Our orientation, for example, is to look for identity, authentication and approval from others who often disparage us in hopes of elevating themselves when it works always in reverse.
Pet themes are touched on including the charade of instant solutions such as "codependency no more," and "pulling your own strings" to illustrate how we have created the industry of self-help that seldom helps anyone but the generators of the material.
The importance of balance between essence (what we are born with) and personality (the many masks we wear in public) is exposed and illustrated for discussion.
(3) THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKER (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches)
Quickly, it is shown how we have moved from an agrarian to an industrial to an electronic age, and how the first Quantum leap came when so many veterans of WWII took advantage of the GI Bill to acquire a college education. Their children (Baby Boomer Generation) followed their lead in massive numbers, so that today a college education has become routine.
The educated now are essentially craftsmen compared to the classical educated high school graduate of the early twentieth century. The latter would put to shame a college graduate today. Education today has become basically "trade school training" in preparation for a job, not preparation for life and how to deal with a changing world.
The second Quantum leap in this postmodern era has been the explosion in electronic technology so that the world has been reduced to a global community. Laptops and handheld devices can bridge thousands of miles in an instant, but it remains a bridge too far to make contact with ourselves between our two ears.
Unfortunately, institutional structures and organizational behavior lag in the midst of this rupture, creating the "United States of Anxiety," which has become an exported product to the rest of the world.
Since progressive societies across the globe copy our model, they are stuck in the same mud of our anachronistic practices, cutting and controlling until the lakes dry up, the air becomes a perfect storm, and everyone retreats into an artificial world to watch reality television.
Nobody knows how to lead and nobody wants to follow.
The answers were never less in Mahogany Row and more distributed throughout the organization because knowledge is now power and it is quite democratically distributed.
The problem is that like all transitions and transformations there is a natural resistance to change; only now the consequences of delay are more immediate.
(4) THE POWER OF NOVELS TO GET OUR ATTENTION (this is a possibility covering "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" and "Green Island in a Black Sea" that is now being written)
This enrichment lecture would take the audience through the power of awareness that certain novels can generate, none of course greater than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
I am a writer in that vein as I show little forgiveness for our excesses. Instead, I attempt to show we only lose by dodging our problems, while scapegoats have a way of winning by default. You will note this in visiting my website: www.fisherofideas.com.
The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes, "Above all else, a novel is a vessel that carries inside it a dream world we wish to keep, forever alive and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape. The more we write, the richer these dreams become and the broader, more detailed, more complete seems that second world inside the vessel." I would agree.
Pamuk continues, "It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are." It is why I have returned to this form.
I hope this helps in letting you know how I might fit into your enrichment lecture program. Let me know what you think. Again, my wife and I are fans of Oceania Cruises.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael wrote back that this menu was acceptable, but that I should downplay selling my books as the focus of my lectures might sound too much like infomercials. I agree.
Is this going to make me "rich"? No. It is going to give me free cruises where I sing for my supper, and visit interesting places. At the moment, I am contracting for only one cruise.
Not a bad deal as many of you know when it comes to how expensive these cruises can be. My only reservation is that it takes time away from my writing because the cruises last two weeks and then there is the time of preparation and travel to and from.
To give you a sense of my dilemma, I appear as if I am speaking off the cuff when I have put hours and hours into my preparation. It is the way I deal with my anxiety and the possibility of bombing, something of which I am familiar. I assure you it is not a happy experience. So, stay tuned.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's books mentioned here may be asked for at your favorite bookstore, are available on his website (www.fisherofideas.com), or other electronic sources such as www.amazon.com.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 31, 2007
"Thoughts lead on to purpose; purposes go forth in action; actions form habits; habits decide character; and character fixes our destiny."
Tryon Edwards (1809 - 1894), American theologian
* * * * * * * * * * *
As with all the other iterations of my career, I have shared my wondering, thinking and speculations in missives, articles and books on a host of topics, which might be of interest to you.
What I share with you now gives a sense of how serendipity plays in an ordinary life.
Like many others, I have ratcheted up the process, gradually, incrementally, and continuously in a persistent fashion over the past seventeen years, or since I retired from corporate life in 1990.
During that period, I have written nine books and hundreds of published articles, as well as hundreds of other unpublished articles on my blog (www.fisherofideas.com) and am now busily writing a tenth, which is to be a novel of South Africa during apartheid in the late 1960s.
"You can see from this production, Jim is a passionate writer," says Gary Herrity, a Clinton (Iowa) historian, and friend of mine in defining this persistence. I would prefer to be seen as an "idea guy" and peripatetic philosopher inclined to remind others of what is taken for granted, and therefore not seen at all. (Bernie, he said this recently at a dinner held while on a book tour to Iowa in September for my latest book.)
I've always been pretty focused and disciplined almost to a fault but best remembered by my generation as an athlete. What never seemed to register is that I was always more interested in academics than athletics almost from the beginning.
Writing has been a means of expression since a little boy. I know this to be a fact because my mother held on to things, and collected them in scrapbooks of virtually everything I did. These collections reveal a linear curve of curiosity and confluence into a mindset that in the evening of my life differs little with that long ago morning.
The latest confluence is the signing of a contract to give one or more cultural enrichment lectures on Oceania Cruises in 2008. It is the same cruise line that BB and I took this summer to the Baltic Sea, visiting old haunts as well as new ones such as Russia, Poland, and Estonia. It is a small ship (600 passengers) with the focus on enrichment rather than the typical entertainment ambiance of much larger cruise ships.
Consistent with the premise of this piece, I'm now going to share how that came about.
BB and I became friendly with the Park West Galleries art director of the cruise, attending all his art shows and auctions, and acquiring a couple pieces of original art. In the process, he asked what we did. BB told him she was an accountant and the business manager of a Jewish Day School, and I told him I wrote books.
"What kind of books do you write," he asked, a typical question of a writer. I told him, which spiked his interests.
"I'd sure like to read you." With that, I handed the only copy I brought of "A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD." He read it, and showed it to the cruise director, who met with me. I told him about my website, and he gave me information on the manager of entertainment, whom I wrote to when I got back to the States.
About two months later, this manager contacted me by email, and asked if I would be interested in being an enrichment lecturer. I emailed him back to send me some information on what that entailed.
What I received was an opportunity to give enrichment lecturers on the history and geography of the regions to be visited. I thought that closed the door on me.
Since I am neither a geographer nor historian, I wrote back, "Sorry, but this is beyond my expertise," stating what that was. He emailed again saying I could participate as a "special interest" lecturer. Still, not satisfied with that response, I sent him the following as to the content and context of possible lecturers based on my books.
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael,
Before I go into possibilities, I want you to know I am interested. That said I would like to know your policy on selling books or even taking orders should people find they would like to read more of what I have to say.
RATIONALE FOR MY APPROACH
People are always interested in writers, how they become writers, where they get their material, how they first thought to become writers, what it takes to get published, and so on, mainly because everyone is in the communication business and secretly imagines they, too, could write and see their name in print with a book.
My approach as a wonderer and thinker is to translate my thoughts and ideas into books (nine to date) and articles (more than 300) accessible to everyone. I write out of my life, education, and experience.
My lectures would be built around my books:
· A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s (2007) -- how we are stuck in nostalgia repeating the same problems.
· Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (1990) -- a book that predicted that entitlement programs would sink the Fortune 500, and they have. The book dared to go where others refused to tread, and has come to have classical significance.
· Confident Selling/Confident Thinking (1992) -- the seller is the barrier to success, not the buyer. Walls of resistance are self-created. It was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction 1992.
· The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain (1995) -- whatever the industry, professionals have become the majority of workers, but, unfortunately, they have not been programmed to recognize or deal with this successfully. So, they continue to complain rather than contribute when the only game in town belongs to them.
· The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) -- to have a friend you must be a friend starting with yourself. The emphasis of self-help books is on building self-esteem or becoming more assertive, when the problem is not with "others," but "you!" And the problem "with you," is that self-hatred vies with self-confidence and self-hatred usually wins. Self-help gurus and books spawn this disease, which nobody seems to notice.
Other possibilities are my novels:
· In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel (2003) -- this is a snapshot of the middle of the twentieth century in the middle of the United States when the nation was at war (WWII). It was a time when problems were all about what we could do, collectively, to solve them. Now, problems are all about our precious egos and how we are being exploited. There was a period after the Great Depression and during WWII when people didn't have the luxury of being hedonistic or self-indulgent. Survival was the focus. Now, that sense of struggle and survival is long gone. In the Shadow is a nostalgic picture of what it was like when we had so little but were so much.
· Green Island in a Black Sea (now being written) -- this is a novel of South Africa apartheid based upon a time when the protagonist was there forming a new company of a British affiliate, South African chemical company, and his own company's subsidiary in the late 1968, when the US seemed to becoming apart at the seams, and he with her.
POSSIBLE THEMES
It has been my experience that the ordinary can prove exhilarating and extraordinary. With that in mind, here are some possible themes that could be built into special interest lectures:
(1) TRANSFORMATION (A Look Back to See Ahead: Our Chronic Culture Viewed from the 1970s)
The idea here is that we are stuck in transition from the "American Century" to the reemergence of Europe, and the incipient emergence of capitalistic China and India in the twenty-first century. This threatens our stability and lifestyle as we have come to know ourselves. It needn't be. Unfortunately, our institutions are atavistic and our problem solving methodologies (vertical thinking) have proven limiting, resulting in our national psyche being stuck, replicating, duplicating and repeating the same tired strategies and problems experienced decades ago only with different names and faces, but with little apparent sense of how this praises our folly.
(2) PIVOTAL SYNDROME OF SELF-CONFIDENCE &SELF-HATRED (The Taboo Against Being Your Own Best Friend)
Too often the person we respect, trust and like least of all is ourselves. We explore the why of this here. Our orientation, for example, is to look for identity, authentication and approval from others who often disparage us in hopes of elevating themselves when it works always in reverse.
Pet themes are touched on including the charade of instant solutions such as "codependency no more," and "pulling your own strings" to illustrate how we have created the industry of self-help that seldom helps anyone but the generators of the material.
The importance of balance between essence (what we are born with) and personality (the many masks we wear in public) is exposed and illustrated for discussion.
(3) THE EMERGENCE OF THE PROFESSIONAL WORKER (Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches)
Quickly, it is shown how we have moved from an agrarian to an industrial to an electronic age, and how the first Quantum leap came when so many veterans of WWII took advantage of the GI Bill to acquire a college education. Their children (Baby Boomer Generation) followed their lead in massive numbers, so that today a college education has become routine.
The educated now are essentially craftsmen compared to the classical educated high school graduate of the early twentieth century. The latter would put to shame a college graduate today. Education today has become basically "trade school training" in preparation for a job, not preparation for life and how to deal with a changing world.
The second Quantum leap in this postmodern era has been the explosion in electronic technology so that the world has been reduced to a global community. Laptops and handheld devices can bridge thousands of miles in an instant, but it remains a bridge too far to make contact with ourselves between our two ears.
Unfortunately, institutional structures and organizational behavior lag in the midst of this rupture, creating the "United States of Anxiety," which has become an exported product to the rest of the world.
Since progressive societies across the globe copy our model, they are stuck in the same mud of our anachronistic practices, cutting and controlling until the lakes dry up, the air becomes a perfect storm, and everyone retreats into an artificial world to watch reality television.
Nobody knows how to lead and nobody wants to follow.
The answers were never less in Mahogany Row and more distributed throughout the organization because knowledge is now power and it is quite democratically distributed.
The problem is that like all transitions and transformations there is a natural resistance to change; only now the consequences of delay are more immediate.
(4) THE POWER OF NOVELS TO GET OUR ATTENTION (this is a possibility covering "In the Shadow of the Courthouse" and "Green Island in a Black Sea" that is now being written)
This enrichment lecture would take the audience through the power of awareness that certain novels can generate, none of course greater than Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
I am a writer in that vein as I show little forgiveness for our excesses. Instead, I attempt to show we only lose by dodging our problems, while scapegoats have a way of winning by default. You will note this in visiting my website: www.fisherofideas.com.
The Turkish Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk writes, "Above all else, a novel is a vessel that carries inside it a dream world we wish to keep, forever alive and forever ready. Novels are held together by the little pieces of daydreams that help us, from the moment we enter them, forget the tedious world we long to escape. The more we write, the richer these dreams become and the broader, more detailed, more complete seems that second world inside the vessel." I would agree.
Pamuk continues, "It is by reading novels, stories, and myths that we come to understand the ideas that govern the world in which we live; it is fiction that gives us access to the truths kept veiled by our families, our schools, and our society; it is the art of the novel that allows us to ask who we really are." It is why I have returned to this form.
I hope this helps in letting you know how I might fit into your enrichment lecture program. Let me know what you think. Again, my wife and I are fans of Oceania Cruises.
Be always well,
Jim
* * * * * * * * * * *
Michael wrote back that this menu was acceptable, but that I should downplay selling my books as the focus of my lectures might sound too much like infomercials. I agree.
Is this going to make me "rich"? No. It is going to give me free cruises where I sing for my supper, and visit interesting places. At the moment, I am contracting for only one cruise.
Not a bad deal as many of you know when it comes to how expensive these cruises can be. My only reservation is that it takes time away from my writing because the cruises last two weeks and then there is the time of preparation and travel to and from.
To give you a sense of my dilemma, I appear as if I am speaking off the cuff when I have put hours and hours into my preparation. It is the way I deal with my anxiety and the possibility of bombing, something of which I am familiar. I assure you it is not a happy experience. So, stay tuned.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's books mentioned here may be asked for at your favorite bookstore, are available on his website (www.fisherofideas.com), or other electronic sources such as www.amazon.com.
Thursday, October 25, 2007
MAKING A DIFFERENCE QUIETLY OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT!
MAKING A DIFFERENCE QUIETLY OUTSIDE THE LIMELIGHT
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Life's cares are comforts; such by heaven design'd; he that hath none must make them, or be wretched; cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on the rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy."
Edward Young (1623 - 1765), English poet
* * * * * * * * *
It is more than thirty-five years ago that I first met Dr. Blondel Senior. I was a mature graduate student at the University of South Florida pursuing a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology, after recently retiring from an international executive career in my mid-thirties. He was a professor at USF, and from that contact, has blossomed a lifelong friendship. We have consulted together, and eventually, when I went back into industry, joined each other as organizational development (OD) psychologists at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
Behind that connection, there was and continued to be a personal dedication of which I was not aware. Dr. Senior was helping troubled young men find their way back to purpose, health and meaningful activity. His partner in this work was his wife Gloria, who is much accomplished in her own right, and if anything more quietly so than even her husband.
The synergy between them has literally moved mountains as they took an idea, developed it in its nascent form in the Orlando area, and then transplanted it to a majestic mountain retreat in Tennessee. There they started modestly and patiently nearly a score of years ago with a prescription of wisdom, love and dedication building a new community around the idea simply called the "Advent Home."
AD's singular objective then as now was to take troubled young men and reverse the ravages of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and restore their minds, bodies and character to health and well being so they could function successfully as contributing young adults to society.
Dr. Senior writes:
"ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting approximately 5 percent of American children. They are easily distracted, bored, depressed and have low concentration. Others are impulsive, hyperactive and have difficulty finishing tasks or remembering details."
He goes on to suggest, "I believe many children are actually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Parents tell me about teachers who demand that disruptive students be suspended until a physician diagnoses them with ADHD and prescribes medication to keep them still. Some physicians willing comply."
Then Dr. Senior goes on to describe the nature of a typical student that comes to Advent Home:
"Many students arrive at Advent Home taking between 2 and 14 different medications. I recognize that medication can be beneficial, nevertheless, it is often overemphasized, and the effective use of natural remedies and lifestyle changes are not viewed with the respect they deserve. So, when these boys come to Advent Home, what is our approach?"
This is where Dr. Blondel and Gloria Senior take the path less chosen. They don't climb on the rhetoric platform, as I do, and insist that most chronic disorders are cultural and endemic to lifestyle excesses. They do something about it, quietly, unobtrusively and effectively.
The Seniors insist that the body and spirit are one; that so identified behavioral change, which at first blush might appear as miraculous, becomes the normal order of the day by taking careful steps away from cultural distractions towards the essence of being.
Now, how do they do that?
Advent Home's approach is to provide a minimum distracting environment, a regulated purposeful schedule of activities, daily chores, work assignments, recreation in the fresh air and sunshine, plus a healthy diet, all programmed to reduce the symptoms of ADHD and without the need for so much medication, so that the student is now alert and ready to appreciate and master a challenging academic curriculum.
Some students entering Advent Home stayed up late watching television, and were too tired to wake up early for school the next day. Others were bombarded with damaging distractions such as harmful music, movies, computer games, hobbies and inappropriate relationships, which contributed to ADHD-like symptoms, necessitating pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Senior continues: "Anger and frequent outbursts in tired and over stimulated teens are often mislabeled as bipolar disorders. At Advent Home, we conduct group sessions where our students freely express their feelings and receive constructive feedback on numerous issues. Caring attention and affection from AH staff help cultivate a sense of 'home away from home.' As our boys feel more secure and learn to express their emotions, their anger subsides."
He is convinced that many of today's so-called ADHD symptoms are behaviors of "wasted minds and tired bodies." Dr. Senior's formula of healing agents such as work regularity, outdoor activity, sleep, and a minimum-distraction environment works. The evidence?
A recent survey of Advent Home parents by the E. A. Sutherland Education Association (EASEA) indicated high satisfaction with teachers and their methods:
· 92 percent agree students have access to a variety of learning resources.
· 88 percent believe students receive adequate help from school personnel.
· 92 percent agree that teachers are preparing students to continue education at more advanced levels.
· 96 percent believe teachers are help their children grow spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
Dr. Senior's system of Maturation Therapy ® maintains a full academic curriculum through high school with modern classrooms, a complete library, science laboratory and computer training facilities.
The faculty and counselors are nearly two-to-one to the students with counselors living on campus. The student population is kept low -- somewhere in the high teens -- to ensure maximum connection and confluence.
The school is fully accredited and the teachers all certified, many with or in the process of earning advanced degrees. Students have gone on to excel at major American universities in professional pursuits including medicine, nursing, education and engineering.
Although Dr. Senior is the founder and director of the school along with his wife, Gloria, he once was a well-known international seminar leader and trainer in such areas as stress and time management. In a recent Advent Home Update, he availed the reader of a practical guide to time management. I would like to close with it as it summarizes what American psychologist William James called our "pragmatic philosophy." Here I am quoting as it appears in the latest Advent Home Update:
All of us have 24 hours each day, but too often it just isn't enough! We could all benefit from learning how to use the time we have more wisely. Here are seven suggestions on how to improve your personal effectiveness:
1. Make a list. Write down what you have to do. During the day, add or subtract from your list. Don't rely on memory, but use a notebook, planner or pocket calendar.
2. Set priorities. Priority "A" items must be done first. The "C" items can wait until the A's are completed. Avoid a "B" list, which means you can't make up your mind. Be decisive about each item.
3. Manger interruptions. You will be interrupted. Calls, visitors, crises, and other distractions will pressure you to change your priorities. Accept interruptions, but keep them short, give a good response, delegate, or add to your list.
4. Stay focused. If you get distracted, return to your plan as soon as possible. Learn to say no courteously. If you fee out of control, STOP. Rework your priority list and resume control.
5. Wisely conserve your energy. Know your limitations. Don't promise the impossible. Work smart. Avoid burnout, which results from unnecessary stress, anger, fear, poor diet, insufficient sleep, lack of exercise, and neglect of spirituality.
6. Cultivate a positive attitude. Your attitude drives you. Stay motivated by staying positive and in control. To take charge of your life; let go and let God!
7. Practice the four D's: When handling paper: dump it, delegate it, do it, delay it!
_______________
For your information: Advent Home Youth Services, Inc., 900 County Road 950, Calhoun, TN 37309-5150; website: www.adventhome.org; e-mail address; info@adventhome.org.
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Life's cares are comforts; such by heaven design'd; he that hath none must make them, or be wretched; cares are employments; and without employ the soul is on the rack; the rack of rest, to souls most adverse; action all their joy."
Edward Young (1623 - 1765), English poet
* * * * * * * * *
It is more than thirty-five years ago that I first met Dr. Blondel Senior. I was a mature graduate student at the University of South Florida pursuing a Ph.D. in organization-industrial psychology, after recently retiring from an international executive career in my mid-thirties. He was a professor at USF, and from that contact, has blossomed a lifelong friendship. We have consulted together, and eventually, when I went back into industry, joined each other as organizational development (OD) psychologists at Honeywell Avionics in Clearwater, Florida.
Behind that connection, there was and continued to be a personal dedication of which I was not aware. Dr. Senior was helping troubled young men find their way back to purpose, health and meaningful activity. His partner in this work was his wife Gloria, who is much accomplished in her own right, and if anything more quietly so than even her husband.
The synergy between them has literally moved mountains as they took an idea, developed it in its nascent form in the Orlando area, and then transplanted it to a majestic mountain retreat in Tennessee. There they started modestly and patiently nearly a score of years ago with a prescription of wisdom, love and dedication building a new community around the idea simply called the "Advent Home."
AD's singular objective then as now was to take troubled young men and reverse the ravages of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and restore their minds, bodies and character to health and well being so they could function successfully as contributing young adults to society.
Dr. Senior writes:
"ADHD is a neurological disorder affecting approximately 5 percent of American children. They are easily distracted, bored, depressed and have low concentration. Others are impulsive, hyperactive and have difficulty finishing tasks or remembering details."
He goes on to suggest, "I believe many children are actually misdiagnosed as having ADHD. Parents tell me about teachers who demand that disruptive students be suspended until a physician diagnoses them with ADHD and prescribes medication to keep them still. Some physicians willing comply."
Then Dr. Senior goes on to describe the nature of a typical student that comes to Advent Home:
"Many students arrive at Advent Home taking between 2 and 14 different medications. I recognize that medication can be beneficial, nevertheless, it is often overemphasized, and the effective use of natural remedies and lifestyle changes are not viewed with the respect they deserve. So, when these boys come to Advent Home, what is our approach?"
This is where Dr. Blondel and Gloria Senior take the path less chosen. They don't climb on the rhetoric platform, as I do, and insist that most chronic disorders are cultural and endemic to lifestyle excesses. They do something about it, quietly, unobtrusively and effectively.
The Seniors insist that the body and spirit are one; that so identified behavioral change, which at first blush might appear as miraculous, becomes the normal order of the day by taking careful steps away from cultural distractions towards the essence of being.
Now, how do they do that?
Advent Home's approach is to provide a minimum distracting environment, a regulated purposeful schedule of activities, daily chores, work assignments, recreation in the fresh air and sunshine, plus a healthy diet, all programmed to reduce the symptoms of ADHD and without the need for so much medication, so that the student is now alert and ready to appreciate and master a challenging academic curriculum.
Some students entering Advent Home stayed up late watching television, and were too tired to wake up early for school the next day. Others were bombarded with damaging distractions such as harmful music, movies, computer games, hobbies and inappropriate relationships, which contributed to ADHD-like symptoms, necessitating pharmaceutical therapeutic interventions.
Dr. Senior continues: "Anger and frequent outbursts in tired and over stimulated teens are often mislabeled as bipolar disorders. At Advent Home, we conduct group sessions where our students freely express their feelings and receive constructive feedback on numerous issues. Caring attention and affection from AH staff help cultivate a sense of 'home away from home.' As our boys feel more secure and learn to express their emotions, their anger subsides."
He is convinced that many of today's so-called ADHD symptoms are behaviors of "wasted minds and tired bodies." Dr. Senior's formula of healing agents such as work regularity, outdoor activity, sleep, and a minimum-distraction environment works. The evidence?
A recent survey of Advent Home parents by the E. A. Sutherland Education Association (EASEA) indicated high satisfaction with teachers and their methods:
· 92 percent agree students have access to a variety of learning resources.
· 88 percent believe students receive adequate help from school personnel.
· 92 percent agree that teachers are preparing students to continue education at more advanced levels.
· 96 percent believe teachers are help their children grow spiritually as well as physically and emotionally.
Dr. Senior's system of Maturation Therapy ® maintains a full academic curriculum through high school with modern classrooms, a complete library, science laboratory and computer training facilities.
The faculty and counselors are nearly two-to-one to the students with counselors living on campus. The student population is kept low -- somewhere in the high teens -- to ensure maximum connection and confluence.
The school is fully accredited and the teachers all certified, many with or in the process of earning advanced degrees. Students have gone on to excel at major American universities in professional pursuits including medicine, nursing, education and engineering.
Although Dr. Senior is the founder and director of the school along with his wife, Gloria, he once was a well-known international seminar leader and trainer in such areas as stress and time management. In a recent Advent Home Update, he availed the reader of a practical guide to time management. I would like to close with it as it summarizes what American psychologist William James called our "pragmatic philosophy." Here I am quoting as it appears in the latest Advent Home Update:
All of us have 24 hours each day, but too often it just isn't enough! We could all benefit from learning how to use the time we have more wisely. Here are seven suggestions on how to improve your personal effectiveness:
1. Make a list. Write down what you have to do. During the day, add or subtract from your list. Don't rely on memory, but use a notebook, planner or pocket calendar.
2. Set priorities. Priority "A" items must be done first. The "C" items can wait until the A's are completed. Avoid a "B" list, which means you can't make up your mind. Be decisive about each item.
3. Manger interruptions. You will be interrupted. Calls, visitors, crises, and other distractions will pressure you to change your priorities. Accept interruptions, but keep them short, give a good response, delegate, or add to your list.
4. Stay focused. If you get distracted, return to your plan as soon as possible. Learn to say no courteously. If you fee out of control, STOP. Rework your priority list and resume control.
5. Wisely conserve your energy. Know your limitations. Don't promise the impossible. Work smart. Avoid burnout, which results from unnecessary stress, anger, fear, poor diet, insufficient sleep, lack of exercise, and neglect of spirituality.
6. Cultivate a positive attitude. Your attitude drives you. Stay motivated by staying positive and in control. To take charge of your life; let go and let God!
7. Practice the four D's: When handling paper: dump it, delegate it, do it, delay it!
_______________
For your information: Advent Home Youth Services, Inc., 900 County Road 950, Calhoun, TN 37309-5150; website: www.adventhome.org; e-mail address; info@adventhome.org.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
ATTENTION! CLUES TO THE FUTURE IN THIS QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
ATTENTION: CLUES TO THE FUTURE IN THIS QUADRENNIAL MADNESS
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 23, 2007
"The future is going to belong to young people and your people have to take command of their voice."
Robert Redford, American film actor
* * * * * * * * *
Often I have felt like the lone fellow standing in the middle of the corporate stadium shouting it is about to implode, only to hear my echo.
All the indicators are there that institutional corpocracy is faltering badly if not folding.
I've observed corporate society -- in the private and public sector -- from outside as an unobtrusive observer and consultant.
For forty years as an organization-industrial psychologist I have seen the human folly of it all with attempts to deal with it increasingly only in faint-hearted ways.
There are no longer believers on the corporate campus, only performers, and when believers don't have their hearts in it, their heads lag behind. This is true from the privileged few who run things to the pampered many who are indulged by them in an attempt either to placate or control.
I see management is no longer necessary; that it is a vestige organ on the corporate body of a societal past; that leadership is not working because cultural programming has reduced and isolated leadership to a few key individuals, when this model no longer tracks with efficacy or reality.
With closer observation of corporate society, we see the wildness, the panic, the incredible blundering that has become the pathology of normalcy.
This pathology is quite transparent in government, but equally apparent in corporate America, which has become one continuous strip mall. Everyone that works in a corporate setting knows this to be true, but no one does anything about it.
People are afraid. They have jobs to protect and careers to sustain. So, it is easier to go with the flow until the source dries up. But that, of course, is not their problem!
That is my perspective from outside looking in.
Writers within the system, whose beat is to get up close and personal, see the growing impact of the nerd complex, what Michael Kinsley of Time (October 29, 2007) calls "libertarians rising." He writes, as everyone seems to be writing, about the quadrennial madness of people who want to be president while their respective choirs are on holiday.
Candidates are entertaining each other on the stump talking about everything but ideas. There are no Lincoln-Douglas debaters here; nor any consideration of such ideas as Kinsley's about the transformation going on under their eyes of the changing social-political climate of the 24 to 35-year-olds. Instead, it is an AARP convention on the road to no place or utopia.
These talking heads groan on about nothing of consequence lest it come back to bite them. They have concluded voters care more about how a candidate makes them feel about themselves or how he or she looks on TV. It is a beauty contest that has little to do with addressing real issues to real people and making connection, when newly eligible voters are lost somewhere in cyberspace.
Kinsley sees the same behavioral shift that I do only from the inside out rather than outside in. Bosses and formal structures, policies & procedures won't cut it with the rising libertarians springing up from nerdsville. They are full of ideas, energy and a desire to make a difference but won't surrender to claptrap or marching orders. It is a new day.
Meanwhile, approximately a $ billion will be spent during this primary season with all these candidates making presidential when they don't seem to understand that being presidential no longer matters. Being relevant does. Then again, they need all this money for television advertisement because this voting block of the future isn't watching.
These candidates don't seem to get it. This generation that has arrived doesn't believe it needs them; doesn't believe in them; doesn't trust them -- any of them in either party. To members of the computer revolution this is a meaningless sideshow that if they watch it at all, it is for comic relief.
As Kinsley says, "The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners convinced they don't need society -- nor should anyone else."
Is anyone listening?
This is not an aberration. Kinsley sees this generation becoming an increasingly powerful force in politics. It has already shredded the corporation and is doing pretty much as it pleases.
Corporations making hey while the sun is shinning are not acting very corporate at all -- take Apple, Inc. for example -- as they turn this creative force loose to do its thing within reasonable parameters without an army in the night of managers to play critical or nurturing parent to them.
We don't fully understand where these libertarians are going, or how they will restructure work and social life in this new millennium but we can already see that many of the alarm signals covered in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD have surfaced as they dance naked in the mind field.
___________
Dr. Fisher's newest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 23, 2007
"The future is going to belong to young people and your people have to take command of their voice."
Robert Redford, American film actor
* * * * * * * * *
Often I have felt like the lone fellow standing in the middle of the corporate stadium shouting it is about to implode, only to hear my echo.
All the indicators are there that institutional corpocracy is faltering badly if not folding.
I've observed corporate society -- in the private and public sector -- from outside as an unobtrusive observer and consultant.
For forty years as an organization-industrial psychologist I have seen the human folly of it all with attempts to deal with it increasingly only in faint-hearted ways.
There are no longer believers on the corporate campus, only performers, and when believers don't have their hearts in it, their heads lag behind. This is true from the privileged few who run things to the pampered many who are indulged by them in an attempt either to placate or control.
I see management is no longer necessary; that it is a vestige organ on the corporate body of a societal past; that leadership is not working because cultural programming has reduced and isolated leadership to a few key individuals, when this model no longer tracks with efficacy or reality.
With closer observation of corporate society, we see the wildness, the panic, the incredible blundering that has become the pathology of normalcy.
This pathology is quite transparent in government, but equally apparent in corporate America, which has become one continuous strip mall. Everyone that works in a corporate setting knows this to be true, but no one does anything about it.
People are afraid. They have jobs to protect and careers to sustain. So, it is easier to go with the flow until the source dries up. But that, of course, is not their problem!
That is my perspective from outside looking in.
Writers within the system, whose beat is to get up close and personal, see the growing impact of the nerd complex, what Michael Kinsley of Time (October 29, 2007) calls "libertarians rising." He writes, as everyone seems to be writing, about the quadrennial madness of people who want to be president while their respective choirs are on holiday.
Candidates are entertaining each other on the stump talking about everything but ideas. There are no Lincoln-Douglas debaters here; nor any consideration of such ideas as Kinsley's about the transformation going on under their eyes of the changing social-political climate of the 24 to 35-year-olds. Instead, it is an AARP convention on the road to no place or utopia.
These talking heads groan on about nothing of consequence lest it come back to bite them. They have concluded voters care more about how a candidate makes them feel about themselves or how he or she looks on TV. It is a beauty contest that has little to do with addressing real issues to real people and making connection, when newly eligible voters are lost somewhere in cyberspace.
Kinsley sees the same behavioral shift that I do only from the inside out rather than outside in. Bosses and formal structures, policies & procedures won't cut it with the rising libertarians springing up from nerdsville. They are full of ideas, energy and a desire to make a difference but won't surrender to claptrap or marching orders. It is a new day.
Meanwhile, approximately a $ billion will be spent during this primary season with all these candidates making presidential when they don't seem to understand that being presidential no longer matters. Being relevant does. Then again, they need all this money for television advertisement because this voting block of the future isn't watching.
These candidates don't seem to get it. This generation that has arrived doesn't believe it needs them; doesn't believe in them; doesn't trust them -- any of them in either party. To members of the computer revolution this is a meaningless sideshow that if they watch it at all, it is for comic relief.
As Kinsley says, "The computer revolution has bred a generation of smart loners convinced they don't need society -- nor should anyone else."
Is anyone listening?
This is not an aberration. Kinsley sees this generation becoming an increasingly powerful force in politics. It has already shredded the corporation and is doing pretty much as it pleases.
Corporations making hey while the sun is shinning are not acting very corporate at all -- take Apple, Inc. for example -- as they turn this creative force loose to do its thing within reasonable parameters without an army in the night of managers to play critical or nurturing parent to them.
We don't fully understand where these libertarians are going, or how they will restructure work and social life in this new millennium but we can already see that many of the alarm signals covered in A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD have surfaced as they dance naked in the mind field.
___________
Dr. Fisher's newest book is "A Look Back to See Ahead" (AuthorHouse 2007).
Monday, October 22, 2007
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY -- "Wake up, little Susie, wake up!"
FYI:
I'm working on my novel. As respites from it, I'm writing "fragments of a philosophy" similar to those that appeared in "A Look Back to See Ahead." Who knows, such reflections might find their way into the novel. Stay tuned.
JRF
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY
"WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, WAKE UP!"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT!"-- Slogan of General Electric in the 1960s
Ever notice how we are obsessed with endings? It is an interesting obsession because we clearly don't believe in endings, or beginnings or middles for that matter. But to camouflage this obsession we insist on making known the purpose of a thing, when clearly most things are purposeless, while locked in purposefulness. We wrap our lives in projects.
The project?
Oh, that can be anything that looks, seems, smells, tastes, and feels good like what is already accepted as "in" or "desirable" or consistent with whatever everyone else is doing or is. Education can't simply be a desire to enlarge our horizons to better enjoy our time on earth. It must have a purpose: to make a living, to do good, to make a name for ourselves, to leave the world a better place for our being here when being here never gets much attention. We are so busy doing and becoming that we don't have enough time to be. Being is not part of the equation.
This is true in work and what is deemed productive effort, or the dynamics of an economy. It is equally true of what is called pleasure or affluence or, alas, purpose. Words become a substitute for action, and forward inertia a substitute for movement. We must escape into some artificial high to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We create diseases by lifestyle choices, and then cure the diseases by artificial or synthetic palliatives. The more things change the more they remain the same.
We fail to see the paradox in promoting health insurance for everyone while neglecting to promote healthful lifestyles. More sensible lifestyles would negate the need for a national health insurance program. It is such little things that mean a lot that we as a peculiar clueless animal repeatedly miss.
There is no originality when the focus is moving away rather than towards a thing. It is the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force. There is something of the "big bang" and "black holes" to this, which I will address in a future missive.
Whatever the activity, it is raw and naked and yes, obscenely so, when it comes to art. We let our subconscious show in art to reveal our confusion while wrapping it in the allure of an extension of what is construed as beautiful, sophisticated, and the touchstone of culture.
Come to think of it music and painting and other expressions of creativity are all about progress, aren't they?
They mask the most prominent condition of our times, the disorder of attention deficit. We can't stand still. We constantly have to be on the move, talking to someone, listening or texting someone. We are slaves to our electronic toys. Show people some new gadget, or show them the old gadget in a new way and they are hooked.
We've left the fresh air and smell of mature and the need to work from sun up to sunset to make chump change, for urban sprawl. We still want the feel of the real without the smell or aggravation. Now we have street art in metropolitan America where ceramic pigs and cows in colorful polka-dot acrylic splendor grace the boulevard of the high-end shops. Not to be outdone, plastinated real dead animals are on display in art galleries and homes of affluent sportsmen.
What this reveals is our sickness, the shadows of our collective mind, the anxieties of our times juxtaposed in point-counterpoint to expose the sarcophagus of "the project." Wake up little, Susie, wake up!
Nobody creates anymore. Look to popular music. It is primarily noise, a lot of gyrations, bastardizing the language, and staying well within the limits of gonad consciousness. Painters don't paint anymore. Daubing canvases with streaks of colors place us back in the ancient caves of primitives who were afraid to come out for fear of being the lunch of some wild animal.
The fear now is not of wild animals but of intimacy. We don't want to know ourselves. When others find out who we are, and they don't like it, they do one of two things: they attempt to change us, or they abandon us. We do the same things to ourselves and with our projects.
When they don't work out or work as they are supposed to within the time constraints that we artificially impose, we panic. We become stressed out.
Mild forms of stress - overworking a problem at work or at home compounds the impact - induce physical reaction to make us stop. We have a pain behind the eyes or in a knee or in some other part of our anatomy that forces us to do so. Extreme forms of stress release the same atavistic mechanism known as "fight or flight" - that burst of energy, which will give us the strength to confront the problem and our adversary or cause us to retreat into ourselves, and say, "no big deal," and suffer the mounting stress for the denial.
We are no longer in the wild, but our urban jungle induces the same reaction. The combined pressure of a heavy workload with distressing details and no clear closure, the death of a parent, the divorce from a mate, the plunge into chaos from a natural disaster, can trigger a permanent adrenalin rush. Blood pressure goes up, weight goes down, and appetite is suppressed. The brain speeds up. Sleep becomes evasive, sex impossible. The body reacts as if the mind has encountered something to be feared. There is sweating, anxiety, rising to panic, followed by memory loss, and obsessive circular thinking as if on a treadmill spinning away and going nowhere in a cage.
We are not operating in a sacred world of high purpose. We are operating in a market economy. Progress is our most important product. Here we are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.
One of a continuing series from Dr. Fisher, whose most recent book is A Look Back to See Ahead (2007).
I'm working on my novel. As respites from it, I'm writing "fragments of a philosophy" similar to those that appeared in "A Look Back to See Ahead." Who knows, such reflections might find their way into the novel. Stay tuned.
JRF
FRAGMENTS OF A PHILOSOPHY
"WAKE UP, LITTLE SUSIE, WAKE UP!"
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© 2007
"PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT!"-- Slogan of General Electric in the 1960s
Ever notice how we are obsessed with endings? It is an interesting obsession because we clearly don't believe in endings, or beginnings or middles for that matter. But to camouflage this obsession we insist on making known the purpose of a thing, when clearly most things are purposeless, while locked in purposefulness. We wrap our lives in projects.
The project?
Oh, that can be anything that looks, seems, smells, tastes, and feels good like what is already accepted as "in" or "desirable" or consistent with whatever everyone else is doing or is. Education can't simply be a desire to enlarge our horizons to better enjoy our time on earth. It must have a purpose: to make a living, to do good, to make a name for ourselves, to leave the world a better place for our being here when being here never gets much attention. We are so busy doing and becoming that we don't have enough time to be. Being is not part of the equation.
This is true in work and what is deemed productive effort, or the dynamics of an economy. It is equally true of what is called pleasure or affluence or, alas, purpose. Words become a substitute for action, and forward inertia a substitute for movement. We must escape into some artificial high to find ourselves by losing ourselves. We create diseases by lifestyle choices, and then cure the diseases by artificial or synthetic palliatives. The more things change the more they remain the same.
We fail to see the paradox in promoting health insurance for everyone while neglecting to promote healthful lifestyles. More sensible lifestyles would negate the need for a national health insurance program. It is such little things that mean a lot that we as a peculiar clueless animal repeatedly miss.
There is no originality when the focus is moving away rather than towards a thing. It is the difference between centrifugal and centripetal force. There is something of the "big bang" and "black holes" to this, which I will address in a future missive.
Whatever the activity, it is raw and naked and yes, obscenely so, when it comes to art. We let our subconscious show in art to reveal our confusion while wrapping it in the allure of an extension of what is construed as beautiful, sophisticated, and the touchstone of culture.
Come to think of it music and painting and other expressions of creativity are all about progress, aren't they?
They mask the most prominent condition of our times, the disorder of attention deficit. We can't stand still. We constantly have to be on the move, talking to someone, listening or texting someone. We are slaves to our electronic toys. Show people some new gadget, or show them the old gadget in a new way and they are hooked.
We've left the fresh air and smell of mature and the need to work from sun up to sunset to make chump change, for urban sprawl. We still want the feel of the real without the smell or aggravation. Now we have street art in metropolitan America where ceramic pigs and cows in colorful polka-dot acrylic splendor grace the boulevard of the high-end shops. Not to be outdone, plastinated real dead animals are on display in art galleries and homes of affluent sportsmen.
What this reveals is our sickness, the shadows of our collective mind, the anxieties of our times juxtaposed in point-counterpoint to expose the sarcophagus of "the project." Wake up little, Susie, wake up!
Nobody creates anymore. Look to popular music. It is primarily noise, a lot of gyrations, bastardizing the language, and staying well within the limits of gonad consciousness. Painters don't paint anymore. Daubing canvases with streaks of colors place us back in the ancient caves of primitives who were afraid to come out for fear of being the lunch of some wild animal.
The fear now is not of wild animals but of intimacy. We don't want to know ourselves. When others find out who we are, and they don't like it, they do one of two things: they attempt to change us, or they abandon us. We do the same things to ourselves and with our projects.
When they don't work out or work as they are supposed to within the time constraints that we artificially impose, we panic. We become stressed out.
Mild forms of stress - overworking a problem at work or at home compounds the impact - induce physical reaction to make us stop. We have a pain behind the eyes or in a knee or in some other part of our anatomy that forces us to do so. Extreme forms of stress release the same atavistic mechanism known as "fight or flight" - that burst of energy, which will give us the strength to confront the problem and our adversary or cause us to retreat into ourselves, and say, "no big deal," and suffer the mounting stress for the denial.
We are no longer in the wild, but our urban jungle induces the same reaction. The combined pressure of a heavy workload with distressing details and no clear closure, the death of a parent, the divorce from a mate, the plunge into chaos from a natural disaster, can trigger a permanent adrenalin rush. Blood pressure goes up, weight goes down, and appetite is suppressed. The brain speeds up. Sleep becomes evasive, sex impossible. The body reacts as if the mind has encountered something to be feared. There is sweating, anxiety, rising to panic, followed by memory loss, and obsessive circular thinking as if on a treadmill spinning away and going nowhere in a cage.
We are not operating in a sacred world of high purpose. We are operating in a market economy. Progress is our most important product. Here we are aiming at some high truth, when in fact we are mired in the mud of commerce.
One of a continuing series from Dr. Fisher, whose most recent book is A Look Back to See Ahead (2007).
Saturday, October 20, 2007
IS THERE A LITTLE "FAUST" IN YOU?
IS THERE A LITTLE "FAUST" IN YOU?
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragic History of Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592)
"Faustian: of, relating to, resembling, or suggesting Faust; made or done for present gain without regard for future cost or consequences."
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
* * * * * * * * *
These are the immortal lines when the devil introduces Faustus to Helen of Troy.
As with most morality plays, there is a basis in fact. Dr. Johannes Faust was a real person. He was a professional astrologer and magician who spent his time wandering from town to town in Germany during the sixteenth century. He provided horoscopes and astrological advice to bishops and princes as well as to commoners. He was famous enough to come to the attention of Martin Luther who denounced him as making a pact with the devil.
Faust's actual acquaintance with the devil is not known, but he did become a legend after his death, when an account of his life was published in Germany. It incorporated many fanciful tales borrowed from other sources. In fact down through the ages, fascination is yet to diminish. It has become the Faustian myth.
What has kept this alive is there appears a drive in man to attain an edge on his fellowman. It breaks out in mysterious ways. So, it should come as no surprise that artists would place their stamp on the myth profiling extraordinary souls.
What of ordinary souls such as you and I? Does Faust touch our lives?
Before you answer, consider the fact that many of us seek knowledge and wealth and power and influence, or some other kind of dominance, at the expense of our own personal material-spiritual balance. We become essentially one-dimensional as Herbert Marcuse suggests in his book "One Dimensional Man" (1986). We fail to see something is given up never to be regained for a temporary advantage.
There has been dissembling in science where objective truth is supposedly the anchor of the investigation. But the good and bad angel is very much in the midst of humans. I was reminded of this again when James Watson, the scientific icon and "co-discoverer" of DNA said recently that blacks are inherently inferior to whites and therefore the prospects for Africa are not good.
Watson in the chemical field was a model builder. His partner Francis Crick was a theoretical chemist. They were totally off base until the boss of Rosalind Franklin showed them her famous "photograph 51," which confirmed DNA was a double helix.
Watson savaged Franklin in his book "The Double Helix" (1968) without acknowledging her contribution. She died from excessive exposure to radiation in her research in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1962) was awarded to Watson and Crick. Franklin was thirty-eight (see "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" by Brenda Maddox 2002) when she died.
Watson was very Faustian as a young man. He brazenly invited himself from the States to participate on the British team in Great Britain, which would eventually find him a scientific iconic figure. The dark side of his mind slipped out only this week with an opinion that has no basis in science. Once it was published in the press he was immediately suspended from chancellor responsibilities at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (source: The Tampa Tribune, October 19, 2007).
It might even be suggested that the maddening race to understand the universe, or make progress our most important product is symptomatic of this Faustian myth. For such people in quest of such a “prize” nothing must stand in the way. This includes brutalizing those less motivated or driven. Indeed, such people think they are different, exceptional, unique, as if they, alone, can hold the bad angel at bay and have only the blessings of the good angel.
What is prejudice but shorthand for claiming superiority? What is the obsession with living in an affluent gated community or graduating from an exclusive university other than to create an edge? What is the obsession with knowledge, celebrity, beauty, sex, or physical prowess than Faustian?
Now, this doesn't have to be the motivation but our cultural programming surely encourages such preoccupation. We live in a sick Faustian society as indexed by disproportionate wealth where people are allowed to die every five seconds because of a simple lack of food and water. Someone says, "You're talking about Africa. This is the United States. This is not Africa."
Well, we talk about a competitive edge and competitive advantage as if they are the lexicon for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when in truth for every gain someone else loses. The irony is that to create this edge we often stifle creativity, encourage conformity and replicate mediocrity, grinding our obsession deeper into the abyss while promoting lifestyle diseases as companion to such excess.
Many fortunes have been built on Faustian excess, as we learn if we read biographies. Read the biography of Henry Ford. His good angel found him giving workers the $5 a day wage, a pension plan, and the eight-hour working day so that he had a ready market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford, while his bad angel had him surreptitiously supporting Hitler and having an equal hatred of the Jews.
How do you know that Faust controls your nature? There is no simple answer, only ambivalent gradients of obsessive compulsiveness. Some simple questions might help: are you in control of your destiny or is your destiny in control of you? Do you have balance in your life or are you sacrificing balance now for finding it later? Are you too self-absorb to have time for family and friends? Can you never relax?
Another good indicator is when beauty or intellectual or physical prowess is flaunted and not used with modesty and humility; when self-aggrandizement becomes an end; when society becomes unequivocally narcissistic. Then the pathology of normalcy is firmly in place. I suggest it is and that we live in a sick society.
Unfortunately, the last chapter on Faust has not been written, as it lives in the heart of every ambitious person who sells his soul to attain "the prize," whatever it is. Then, it becomes pathological and eats away at the spiritual-material balance of goodness displaying itself instead in Faustian diabolical form.
The killing fields across the globe are not always those of physical murder. More often than not the killing fields are emotional and psychological abuse. The body is allowed to live but the spirit is murdered as we escape into work, career, drugs or dissipation.
It is my thesis that we promote Faustian behavior without ever mentioning the name. It is the reason suicide is the greatest killer of our young people. Not only is suicide rampant in the United States, but across the Western world, and is starting to be noted in China and India as well.
That said it might be interesting to review a few well-known Faustian myths that artists have provided us starting with the most well known from the gifted Christopher Marlowe, who never made it to the age of thirty. He was fatally wounded in a brawl at Deptford, England May 30, 1593.
Marlowe's own life was quite Faustian. His original intention was to take Holy Orders and become a priest, but he abandoned that to write plays and to become embroiled in political intrigue.
In 1589 he was involved in a scuffle with William Bradley in Norton Folgate, who died, but Marlowe’s plea of self-defense was accepted. A genius as a playwright, he was also known to have strong unorthodox religious and political opinions and would not back down from a fight. It was as if he felt immortal. In 1593, he was arrested on a charge of atheism, but met his own death before being brought to trial.
Intrigue has followed his death for more than four hundred years. The whole episode of his death is perplexing as some say he was a spy, and others say he escaped to the continent and wrote the plays for which Shakespeare is given credit.
Rodney Bolt writes in "History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe" (2005) that he staged his own death to dodge the atheism charge, fled to Europe, and wrote the great Shakespearean plays. The evidence? The language and syntax of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" (1586 - 1587), "The Jew of Malta" (1589), and "Edward the Second" (1591).
The Faustian mind loves the idea of conspiracy. Critics insist, however, that Marlowe's plays up to 1590 are tragedies, but unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, show no real tragic sense and little skill in dramatic contrivance.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 - 1593)
Marlowe's "The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus" (1592) is "master of all knowledge." The story as told by Marlowe finds Faustus born of base stock in Rhodes, Germany. In his maturity, while living with relatives in Wittenberg, he studies theology and is called "doctor." However, Faustus is so swollen with conceit that, like Joyce's Daedalus, strives too far, becoming glutted with learning and conspires with the devil to know everything knowable, and finally falls accursed.
The path of his downfall found him the complete master of medicine, where he had huge success. But after obtaining good health for men no challenge remained in medicine except immortality. Law was no challenge as he sensed that it was nothing but an elaborate moneymaking scheme. Only divinity remained, but it was a blind alley. Since the reward of sin was death, and since no one could escape sin, all men must die.
The Good Angel and Evil Angel tried to persuade Faustus, but he was in no mood to listen to the Good Angel. He sought to be the wealthiest man on earth with all the power that comes from such wealth. He would reform education and perform many other fabulous deeds.
His first act of magic is to summon Mephostopilis, but he is so ugly he orders him to assume the shape of a Franciscan friar. Faustus questions Mephostopilis about the nature of his master, Lucifer and Lucifer's domain, hell. Mephostopilis tells him that the fallen spirits, having been deprived of the glories of heaven, find the whole world hell.
Faustus then says he will surrender his soul to Lucifer if the fallen angel will give him twenty-four years of voluptuous ease. Lucifer agrees. Faustus thinks he has beaten the devil at his own game because he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
During the final days of his life, Faustus asked Mephostopilis to bring him Helen of Troy as a lover. In the end, he pleads to be spared impending misery, but instead is carried off by a company of devils.
JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE (1749 - 1832)
The genius of Goethe rendered a version of this great story in a clarity that still resonates with each generation throughout the world. To Goethe, the hero is simply "Faust" (1790) but the philosophical problem is the same: the human damnation through the desire for knowledge.
Echoing the sentiments of the eighteenth century "Age of Reason," which asserted that man's rationality was the supreme truth in life, Goethe created some of the most quoted passages in literature.
Then, too, Faust's cry for one moment in life of uninterrupted pleasure is echoed throughout the ages in the emotions of men of all times. Goethe cleverly creates a play of "Faust" that doesn't exist in a certain locale or time, but exists forever and everywhere.
While three archangels are singing the praises of God's lofty works, Mephistopheles appears and says that conditions on earth are bad. The Lord agrees that man has his weaknesses, but He slyly points out that His servant Faust cannot be swayed from the path of righteousness.
Mephistopheles makes a wager with the Lord that Faust can be tempted from his faithful service. The Lord knew Faust could be led downward if he were to lose his soul, while Mephistopheles knew Faust was not satisfied with all the knowledge he had acquired.
Faust confesses to his servant, Wagner, that he has two souls: one clings to earthly things, the other to super sensual things. Feeling limited in his daily existence, and wanting to be taken to another level, Faust intimates to Wagner that he would do anything to take him there.
Mephistopheles in the form of a dog follows Faust to his home. Seeing Faust contemplating the meaning of life, the dog steps forward in its true form, but Faust remains unmoved by the devil's entreaties.
The devil returns the next day and finds Faust more receptive to getting more out of life. But again Mephistopheles fails to tempt Faust with cheap debauchery.
Next the devil uses the maiden Gretchen to tempt Faust. A complicated love affair follows in which Gretchen surrenders to Faust, than is shamed by her brother, who Faust kills, only for Gretchen to kill her love child with Faust and damn herself.
Mephistopheles then brings Faust to the emperor, who asks Faust to show him the most beautiful male and female who have ever existed. Faust produces the images of Paris and Helen of Troy. Then to the devil's surprise, Faust faints. He is so overwhelmed with desire at the sight of Helen. This desire for ideal love mystifies the devil.
Mephistopheles with the help of Wagner creates a formless spirit of learning, Homunculus, who can see what is going on in Faust's mind. With that, they venture off to Greece. There a living Helen is brought to Faust with the devil now convinced he has finally found Faust's weakness. But Faust soon realizes that the enjoyment of transitory beauty is no more enduring than his other experiences.
With this new knowledge of himself, Faust returns to his native land with a pledge to use his powers in the service of men. His mystical power now banished, he stands before nature alone. His first act is to turn a large swamp into useful production. People are inspired by this act and follow by widening their creative efforts in useful ways.
Now blind and old, Faust sees his life among men as free and active and useful. At that moment, when he realizes what he has created, he cries out for this moment, so fair to him, to linger on.
Faust had emerged from being a self-centered egoist into a man who saw his actions as part of a creative society. He realized, finally, life could be worth living, but in that moment of perception he lost his wager to Mephistopheles. The devil now claims Faust's soul, but in reality he too has lost the wager. The Almighty was right. Although Faust has made a mistake in his life, he has always remained aware of goodness and truth.
Seeing his own defeat, Mephistopheles attempts to prevent the ascension of Faust's soul to God. Angels appear to help Faust, however, and he is carried into Heaven where all is active creation, exactly the kind of afterlife Faust would have chosen.
OSCAR WILDE (1856 - 1900)
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) remains a popular book over a hundred years after its first publication. Dorian Gray is very much a Faustian young man, as was the author himself, who lived an amoral life and died a young man of genius at the age of forty-four while burning the candle at both ends.
The story opens with Basil Hallward, an artist, putting the finishing touches on the portrait of his handsome young friend, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton, a caller, indolently watches the painter at work. The artist explains to Lord Henry that Dorian was his ideal of youth, and that he must promise not to influence the boy, as the artist knew Lord Henry was the personification of evil.
While the two men are talking, Dorian comes to the studio. Lord Henry immediately attempts to influence Dorian, telling him that while he will become old, wrinkled and ugly, his portrait will remain the same, frozen in beauty. This saddens Dorian and wishes that the portrait would grow old while he remains forever young. Lord Henry sees that he gets his wish becoming his Mephistopheles.
Dorian then romances a young actress, Sibyl Vane. When she is hopelessly in love with him, he coldly rejects her. She commits suicide as Dorian has killed her love. He learns of her suicide too late to ask her forgiveness, and decides, immediately, to live a life of sensation and pleasure.
One day he notices that the appearance of his portrait has changed but he has not. He hangs the portrait in an old schoolroom upstairs, locks the door, and puts the key where only he can find it.
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, he takes the artist to the portrait to show what it has become. It was now quite ugly. Hallward reacts with horror seeing his work is now a portrait of evil. Enraged by this, Dorian stabs him to death.
Then there is a comic-tragic encounter between, James, the brother of Sybl and Dorian. James seeks out Dorian whom he holds responsible for his sister's death eighteen years before. But instead he finds a man who appears no more than twenty. Mystified but yet suspicious, he stalks Dorian only to be killed under strange circumstances on Dorian's country estate. The police are investigating this death as well as the disappearance of the artist Basil Hallward.
Dorian decides to destroy the picture, which stood as an awful record of his guilt. He goes to the schoolroom and finds the portrait now has the appearance of cunning and triumph. He slashes it to pieces with the same knife he murdered the artist.
The servants hear a horrible cry. When they reach the schoolroom, they see a beautiful portrait on the wall, and the dead body of Dorian, withered and wrinkled in evening dress, with a knife in his chest. Only by his jewelry did they recognize Dorian Gray, who, in his desperate attempt to kill his conscience, had killed himself.
THOMAS MANN (1875 - 1945)
Thomas Man composed "Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend" (1947) nearly four hundred years after Marlowe. On one level, it is a biographical story of a strange and fascinating genius; on another it is of a man tormented by his demons.
It may also be regarded as an excursion into a field, which present day fiction has neglected, which is that of the destruction of the human soul in the demon-haunted world of the imagination, which modern science has all but destroyed.
And it may be studied as the problem of the artist in contemporary society, of the conflict between a love of beauty and his moral responsibility to the kind of world in which he lives. It is so easy for the artist and men of conscience to get caught up in contemporary grandeur and thus lose perspective.
Beyond and beneath these levels of meaning, Mann's novel is a political and philosophical allegory deeply charged with purpose.
Mann would have us believe Leverkuhn, who gave his soul to the devil for twenty years of creative genius, symbolizes the German breakthrough to world power, and the rise of the tortured nationalism of the Nazi state.
As the narrator digresses to comment on the progress of World War II, the reader perceives that the rise and collapse of the Nazi dream runs side by side with Leverkuhn's tragic story, like musical point-counterpoint creating a mood of increasing shame and community guilt in the realization of inescapable doom.
The story ends with Leverkuhn spending the last ten years of his life quite mad, while being tenderly cared for by his aged mother at his birthplace in Thuringian. His old friend, Serenus Zeitblom was one of the few at his funeral.
It seemed to Serenus, then, and grew as he was writing this story of Adrian's life that his friend had somehow reflected the destiny of the German nation, a land arrogant, isolated, dehumanized, and at last reeling to that level of destruction, which was the price of power, as he penned his final pages in April 1945 (Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces on May 7, 1945).
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS
With the nuclear bomb, man having been on the moon, and spacecraft now part of contemporary life, not to mention digital handheld contrivances, and computers with stupendous memories and flexibility, bringing us all electronically together as a single human face, it is not surprising that men and women of tremendous genius would give pause.
Early in the twentieth century many great minds were reaching fruition, but were aware at the same time, that more than ever before they needed perspective while working for this scientific revolution. Humor is the vehicle for a sense of proportion and a set of balance. And so these scientists came together to put on a Faustian play with them as players in the farce. This occurred at the Copenhagen Institute.
The early twentieth century was scientifically led by such names as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feyman, Max Delbruck, and George Gamow, to name a few. They passed through the Copenhagen Institute.
The founder and presiding spirit of the institute was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Goethe's Faust was always a great love and fascination to this physicist. He dreamed of adapting it to the world of physics and physicists to illustrate how the mind and soul struggled in their work. The Faust rendition of the play was written in this context and first performed as a group enterprise in 1932.
"Faust" proved an excellent vehicle for illustrating the carping differences in this competitive scientific world. Here they could lampoon such theories (and theorists) as relativity, quantum mechanics, field theory, wave equations, string theory, and so on. Behind these innocent dramatics was the uncertainty these brilliant men and women harbored with regards to their souls. They knew with each discovery the world changed, and in the changing the consequences could not be fully understood. As Einstein said more than once, "we are having a conversation with God."
As pure and purposeful as their science, the human factor in the equation remained ever ambivalent.
Tragedy was destined to follow after that 1932 Faust performance in Copenhagen. Paul Ehrenfest, a charismatic teacher but tortured soul, was given the role of Faust. He was comfortable in the world of classical physics while feeling alien to the weird new world of quantum mechanics. Not only was this new world mystifying, he had the horrible feeling he couldn't keep up with his colleagues.
Niels Bohr, on the other hand, made the adjustment with ease and grace, while Ehrenfest was unable to make the leap. Ehrenfest wrote letters to Einstein and Bohr that he was thinking of committing suicide. The letters were never mailed. Two years later he killed himself in a park in Amsterdam.
The Faust script was never published. But like all these versions of the original play, the soul has found a lasting place in the annals of the Copenhagen group as recorded in Gino Segre's new book, "Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics" (2007).
It is no accident that kindness is considered the greatest virtue and humility the greatest expression of the soul. Faust in its various iterations leaves us with that lesson.
_____________
Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 2007
"Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragic History of Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1592)
"Faustian: of, relating to, resembling, or suggesting Faust; made or done for present gain without regard for future cost or consequences."
Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1993)
* * * * * * * * *
These are the immortal lines when the devil introduces Faustus to Helen of Troy.
As with most morality plays, there is a basis in fact. Dr. Johannes Faust was a real person. He was a professional astrologer and magician who spent his time wandering from town to town in Germany during the sixteenth century. He provided horoscopes and astrological advice to bishops and princes as well as to commoners. He was famous enough to come to the attention of Martin Luther who denounced him as making a pact with the devil.
Faust's actual acquaintance with the devil is not known, but he did become a legend after his death, when an account of his life was published in Germany. It incorporated many fanciful tales borrowed from other sources. In fact down through the ages, fascination is yet to diminish. It has become the Faustian myth.
What has kept this alive is there appears a drive in man to attain an edge on his fellowman. It breaks out in mysterious ways. So, it should come as no surprise that artists would place their stamp on the myth profiling extraordinary souls.
What of ordinary souls such as you and I? Does Faust touch our lives?
Before you answer, consider the fact that many of us seek knowledge and wealth and power and influence, or some other kind of dominance, at the expense of our own personal material-spiritual balance. We become essentially one-dimensional as Herbert Marcuse suggests in his book "One Dimensional Man" (1986). We fail to see something is given up never to be regained for a temporary advantage.
There has been dissembling in science where objective truth is supposedly the anchor of the investigation. But the good and bad angel is very much in the midst of humans. I was reminded of this again when James Watson, the scientific icon and "co-discoverer" of DNA said recently that blacks are inherently inferior to whites and therefore the prospects for Africa are not good.
Watson in the chemical field was a model builder. His partner Francis Crick was a theoretical chemist. They were totally off base until the boss of Rosalind Franklin showed them her famous "photograph 51," which confirmed DNA was a double helix.
Watson savaged Franklin in his book "The Double Helix" (1968) without acknowledging her contribution. She died from excessive exposure to radiation in her research in 1958, four years before the Nobel Prize for Chemistry (1962) was awarded to Watson and Crick. Franklin was thirty-eight (see "Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA" by Brenda Maddox 2002) when she died.
Watson was very Faustian as a young man. He brazenly invited himself from the States to participate on the British team in Great Britain, which would eventually find him a scientific iconic figure. The dark side of his mind slipped out only this week with an opinion that has no basis in science. Once it was published in the press he was immediately suspended from chancellor responsibilities at the renowned Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (source: The Tampa Tribune, October 19, 2007).
It might even be suggested that the maddening race to understand the universe, or make progress our most important product is symptomatic of this Faustian myth. For such people in quest of such a “prize” nothing must stand in the way. This includes brutalizing those less motivated or driven. Indeed, such people think they are different, exceptional, unique, as if they, alone, can hold the bad angel at bay and have only the blessings of the good angel.
What is prejudice but shorthand for claiming superiority? What is the obsession with living in an affluent gated community or graduating from an exclusive university other than to create an edge? What is the obsession with knowledge, celebrity, beauty, sex, or physical prowess than Faustian?
Now, this doesn't have to be the motivation but our cultural programming surely encourages such preoccupation. We live in a sick Faustian society as indexed by disproportionate wealth where people are allowed to die every five seconds because of a simple lack of food and water. Someone says, "You're talking about Africa. This is the United States. This is not Africa."
Well, we talk about a competitive edge and competitive advantage as if they are the lexicon for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, when in truth for every gain someone else loses. The irony is that to create this edge we often stifle creativity, encourage conformity and replicate mediocrity, grinding our obsession deeper into the abyss while promoting lifestyle diseases as companion to such excess.
Many fortunes have been built on Faustian excess, as we learn if we read biographies. Read the biography of Henry Ford. His good angel found him giving workers the $5 a day wage, a pension plan, and the eight-hour working day so that he had a ready market for his Model-A and Model-T Ford, while his bad angel had him surreptitiously supporting Hitler and having an equal hatred of the Jews.
How do you know that Faust controls your nature? There is no simple answer, only ambivalent gradients of obsessive compulsiveness. Some simple questions might help: are you in control of your destiny or is your destiny in control of you? Do you have balance in your life or are you sacrificing balance now for finding it later? Are you too self-absorb to have time for family and friends? Can you never relax?
Another good indicator is when beauty or intellectual or physical prowess is flaunted and not used with modesty and humility; when self-aggrandizement becomes an end; when society becomes unequivocally narcissistic. Then the pathology of normalcy is firmly in place. I suggest it is and that we live in a sick society.
Unfortunately, the last chapter on Faust has not been written, as it lives in the heart of every ambitious person who sells his soul to attain "the prize," whatever it is. Then, it becomes pathological and eats away at the spiritual-material balance of goodness displaying itself instead in Faustian diabolical form.
The killing fields across the globe are not always those of physical murder. More often than not the killing fields are emotional and psychological abuse. The body is allowed to live but the spirit is murdered as we escape into work, career, drugs or dissipation.
It is my thesis that we promote Faustian behavior without ever mentioning the name. It is the reason suicide is the greatest killer of our young people. Not only is suicide rampant in the United States, but across the Western world, and is starting to be noted in China and India as well.
That said it might be interesting to review a few well-known Faustian myths that artists have provided us starting with the most well known from the gifted Christopher Marlowe, who never made it to the age of thirty. He was fatally wounded in a brawl at Deptford, England May 30, 1593.
Marlowe's own life was quite Faustian. His original intention was to take Holy Orders and become a priest, but he abandoned that to write plays and to become embroiled in political intrigue.
In 1589 he was involved in a scuffle with William Bradley in Norton Folgate, who died, but Marlowe’s plea of self-defense was accepted. A genius as a playwright, he was also known to have strong unorthodox religious and political opinions and would not back down from a fight. It was as if he felt immortal. In 1593, he was arrested on a charge of atheism, but met his own death before being brought to trial.
Intrigue has followed his death for more than four hundred years. The whole episode of his death is perplexing as some say he was a spy, and others say he escaped to the continent and wrote the plays for which Shakespeare is given credit.
Rodney Bolt writes in "History Play: The Lives and Afterlife of Christopher Marlowe" (2005) that he staged his own death to dodge the atheism charge, fled to Europe, and wrote the great Shakespearean plays. The evidence? The language and syntax of Marlowe's "Tamburlaine" (1586 - 1587), "The Jew of Malta" (1589), and "Edward the Second" (1591).
The Faustian mind loves the idea of conspiracy. Critics insist, however, that Marlowe's plays up to 1590 are tragedies, but unlike Shakespeare's tragedies, show no real tragic sense and little skill in dramatic contrivance.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE (1564 - 1593)
Marlowe's "The Tragedy of Dr. Faustus" (1592) is "master of all knowledge." The story as told by Marlowe finds Faustus born of base stock in Rhodes, Germany. In his maturity, while living with relatives in Wittenberg, he studies theology and is called "doctor." However, Faustus is so swollen with conceit that, like Joyce's Daedalus, strives too far, becoming glutted with learning and conspires with the devil to know everything knowable, and finally falls accursed.
The path of his downfall found him the complete master of medicine, where he had huge success. But after obtaining good health for men no challenge remained in medicine except immortality. Law was no challenge as he sensed that it was nothing but an elaborate moneymaking scheme. Only divinity remained, but it was a blind alley. Since the reward of sin was death, and since no one could escape sin, all men must die.
The Good Angel and Evil Angel tried to persuade Faustus, but he was in no mood to listen to the Good Angel. He sought to be the wealthiest man on earth with all the power that comes from such wealth. He would reform education and perform many other fabulous deeds.
His first act of magic is to summon Mephostopilis, but he is so ugly he orders him to assume the shape of a Franciscan friar. Faustus questions Mephostopilis about the nature of his master, Lucifer and Lucifer's domain, hell. Mephostopilis tells him that the fallen spirits, having been deprived of the glories of heaven, find the whole world hell.
Faustus then says he will surrender his soul to Lucifer if the fallen angel will give him twenty-four years of voluptuous ease. Lucifer agrees. Faustus thinks he has beaten the devil at his own game because he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.
During the final days of his life, Faustus asked Mephostopilis to bring him Helen of Troy as a lover. In the end, he pleads to be spared impending misery, but instead is carried off by a company of devils.
JOHANN WOLFGANG von GOETHE (1749 - 1832)
The genius of Goethe rendered a version of this great story in a clarity that still resonates with each generation throughout the world. To Goethe, the hero is simply "Faust" (1790) but the philosophical problem is the same: the human damnation through the desire for knowledge.
Echoing the sentiments of the eighteenth century "Age of Reason," which asserted that man's rationality was the supreme truth in life, Goethe created some of the most quoted passages in literature.
Then, too, Faust's cry for one moment in life of uninterrupted pleasure is echoed throughout the ages in the emotions of men of all times. Goethe cleverly creates a play of "Faust" that doesn't exist in a certain locale or time, but exists forever and everywhere.
While three archangels are singing the praises of God's lofty works, Mephistopheles appears and says that conditions on earth are bad. The Lord agrees that man has his weaknesses, but He slyly points out that His servant Faust cannot be swayed from the path of righteousness.
Mephistopheles makes a wager with the Lord that Faust can be tempted from his faithful service. The Lord knew Faust could be led downward if he were to lose his soul, while Mephistopheles knew Faust was not satisfied with all the knowledge he had acquired.
Faust confesses to his servant, Wagner, that he has two souls: one clings to earthly things, the other to super sensual things. Feeling limited in his daily existence, and wanting to be taken to another level, Faust intimates to Wagner that he would do anything to take him there.
Mephistopheles in the form of a dog follows Faust to his home. Seeing Faust contemplating the meaning of life, the dog steps forward in its true form, but Faust remains unmoved by the devil's entreaties.
The devil returns the next day and finds Faust more receptive to getting more out of life. But again Mephistopheles fails to tempt Faust with cheap debauchery.
Next the devil uses the maiden Gretchen to tempt Faust. A complicated love affair follows in which Gretchen surrenders to Faust, than is shamed by her brother, who Faust kills, only for Gretchen to kill her love child with Faust and damn herself.
Mephistopheles then brings Faust to the emperor, who asks Faust to show him the most beautiful male and female who have ever existed. Faust produces the images of Paris and Helen of Troy. Then to the devil's surprise, Faust faints. He is so overwhelmed with desire at the sight of Helen. This desire for ideal love mystifies the devil.
Mephistopheles with the help of Wagner creates a formless spirit of learning, Homunculus, who can see what is going on in Faust's mind. With that, they venture off to Greece. There a living Helen is brought to Faust with the devil now convinced he has finally found Faust's weakness. But Faust soon realizes that the enjoyment of transitory beauty is no more enduring than his other experiences.
With this new knowledge of himself, Faust returns to his native land with a pledge to use his powers in the service of men. His mystical power now banished, he stands before nature alone. His first act is to turn a large swamp into useful production. People are inspired by this act and follow by widening their creative efforts in useful ways.
Now blind and old, Faust sees his life among men as free and active and useful. At that moment, when he realizes what he has created, he cries out for this moment, so fair to him, to linger on.
Faust had emerged from being a self-centered egoist into a man who saw his actions as part of a creative society. He realized, finally, life could be worth living, but in that moment of perception he lost his wager to Mephistopheles. The devil now claims Faust's soul, but in reality he too has lost the wager. The Almighty was right. Although Faust has made a mistake in his life, he has always remained aware of goodness and truth.
Seeing his own defeat, Mephistopheles attempts to prevent the ascension of Faust's soul to God. Angels appear to help Faust, however, and he is carried into Heaven where all is active creation, exactly the kind of afterlife Faust would have chosen.
OSCAR WILDE (1856 - 1900)
"The Picture of Dorian Gray" (1891) remains a popular book over a hundred years after its first publication. Dorian Gray is very much a Faustian young man, as was the author himself, who lived an amoral life and died a young man of genius at the age of forty-four while burning the candle at both ends.
The story opens with Basil Hallward, an artist, putting the finishing touches on the portrait of his handsome young friend, Dorian Gray. Lord Henry Wotton, a caller, indolently watches the painter at work. The artist explains to Lord Henry that Dorian was his ideal of youth, and that he must promise not to influence the boy, as the artist knew Lord Henry was the personification of evil.
While the two men are talking, Dorian comes to the studio. Lord Henry immediately attempts to influence Dorian, telling him that while he will become old, wrinkled and ugly, his portrait will remain the same, frozen in beauty. This saddens Dorian and wishes that the portrait would grow old while he remains forever young. Lord Henry sees that he gets his wish becoming his Mephistopheles.
Dorian then romances a young actress, Sibyl Vane. When she is hopelessly in love with him, he coldly rejects her. She commits suicide as Dorian has killed her love. He learns of her suicide too late to ask her forgiveness, and decides, immediately, to live a life of sensation and pleasure.
One day he notices that the appearance of his portrait has changed but he has not. He hangs the portrait in an old schoolroom upstairs, locks the door, and puts the key where only he can find it.
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, he takes the artist to the portrait to show what it has become. It was now quite ugly. Hallward reacts with horror seeing his work is now a portrait of evil. Enraged by this, Dorian stabs him to death.
Then there is a comic-tragic encounter between, James, the brother of Sybl and Dorian. James seeks out Dorian whom he holds responsible for his sister's death eighteen years before. But instead he finds a man who appears no more than twenty. Mystified but yet suspicious, he stalks Dorian only to be killed under strange circumstances on Dorian's country estate. The police are investigating this death as well as the disappearance of the artist Basil Hallward.
Dorian decides to destroy the picture, which stood as an awful record of his guilt. He goes to the schoolroom and finds the portrait now has the appearance of cunning and triumph. He slashes it to pieces with the same knife he murdered the artist.
The servants hear a horrible cry. When they reach the schoolroom, they see a beautiful portrait on the wall, and the dead body of Dorian, withered and wrinkled in evening dress, with a knife in his chest. Only by his jewelry did they recognize Dorian Gray, who, in his desperate attempt to kill his conscience, had killed himself.
THOMAS MANN (1875 - 1945)
Thomas Man composed "Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend" (1947) nearly four hundred years after Marlowe. On one level, it is a biographical story of a strange and fascinating genius; on another it is of a man tormented by his demons.
It may also be regarded as an excursion into a field, which present day fiction has neglected, which is that of the destruction of the human soul in the demon-haunted world of the imagination, which modern science has all but destroyed.
And it may be studied as the problem of the artist in contemporary society, of the conflict between a love of beauty and his moral responsibility to the kind of world in which he lives. It is so easy for the artist and men of conscience to get caught up in contemporary grandeur and thus lose perspective.
Beyond and beneath these levels of meaning, Mann's novel is a political and philosophical allegory deeply charged with purpose.
Mann would have us believe Leverkuhn, who gave his soul to the devil for twenty years of creative genius, symbolizes the German breakthrough to world power, and the rise of the tortured nationalism of the Nazi state.
As the narrator digresses to comment on the progress of World War II, the reader perceives that the rise and collapse of the Nazi dream runs side by side with Leverkuhn's tragic story, like musical point-counterpoint creating a mood of increasing shame and community guilt in the realization of inescapable doom.
The story ends with Leverkuhn spending the last ten years of his life quite mad, while being tenderly cared for by his aged mother at his birthplace in Thuringian. His old friend, Serenus Zeitblom was one of the few at his funeral.
It seemed to Serenus, then, and grew as he was writing this story of Adrian's life that his friend had somehow reflected the destiny of the German nation, a land arrogant, isolated, dehumanized, and at last reeling to that level of destruction, which was the price of power, as he penned his final pages in April 1945 (Germany surrendered unconditionally to the Allied Forces on May 7, 1945).
FAUST IN COPENHAGEN: A STRUGGLE FOR THE SOUL OF PHYSICS
With the nuclear bomb, man having been on the moon, and spacecraft now part of contemporary life, not to mention digital handheld contrivances, and computers with stupendous memories and flexibility, bringing us all electronically together as a single human face, it is not surprising that men and women of tremendous genius would give pause.
Early in the twentieth century many great minds were reaching fruition, but were aware at the same time, that more than ever before they needed perspective while working for this scientific revolution. Humor is the vehicle for a sense of proportion and a set of balance. And so these scientists came together to put on a Faustian play with them as players in the farce. This occurred at the Copenhagen Institute.
The early twentieth century was scientifically led by such names as Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Lise Meitner, Max Planck, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul Dirac, Werner Heisenberg, Richard Feyman, Max Delbruck, and George Gamow, to name a few. They passed through the Copenhagen Institute.
The founder and presiding spirit of the institute was the Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Goethe's Faust was always a great love and fascination to this physicist. He dreamed of adapting it to the world of physics and physicists to illustrate how the mind and soul struggled in their work. The Faust rendition of the play was written in this context and first performed as a group enterprise in 1932.
"Faust" proved an excellent vehicle for illustrating the carping differences in this competitive scientific world. Here they could lampoon such theories (and theorists) as relativity, quantum mechanics, field theory, wave equations, string theory, and so on. Behind these innocent dramatics was the uncertainty these brilliant men and women harbored with regards to their souls. They knew with each discovery the world changed, and in the changing the consequences could not be fully understood. As Einstein said more than once, "we are having a conversation with God."
As pure and purposeful as their science, the human factor in the equation remained ever ambivalent.
Tragedy was destined to follow after that 1932 Faust performance in Copenhagen. Paul Ehrenfest, a charismatic teacher but tortured soul, was given the role of Faust. He was comfortable in the world of classical physics while feeling alien to the weird new world of quantum mechanics. Not only was this new world mystifying, he had the horrible feeling he couldn't keep up with his colleagues.
Niels Bohr, on the other hand, made the adjustment with ease and grace, while Ehrenfest was unable to make the leap. Ehrenfest wrote letters to Einstein and Bohr that he was thinking of committing suicide. The letters were never mailed. Two years later he killed himself in a park in Amsterdam.
The Faust script was never published. But like all these versions of the original play, the soul has found a lasting place in the annals of the Copenhagen group as recorded in Gino Segre's new book, "Faust in Copenhagen: A Struggle for the Soul of Physics" (2007).
It is no accident that kindness is considered the greatest virtue and humility the greatest expression of the soul. Faust in its various iterations leaves us with that lesson.
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Dr. Fisher's latest book is A LOOK BACK TO SEE AHEAD (AuthorHouse 2
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