The Peripatetic Philosopher announces:

Amazon.com Kindle Library

E-book: $9.99

Paperback Book: $24.95 

547 pages

AT LAST, THE NOVEL HAS BEEN PUBLISHED!

AUTHOR’S 50 YEAR PROMISE TO HIMSELF

DEVLIN, A Psychological Novel

BOOK’S DESCRIPTION:

The year is 1968, a year that severed the moral certainty of the past from the future shattering traditional anchors and reliable reference points.  Seamus, “Dirk” Devlin, a young Irish American chemical engineer of provincial roots, finds himself in South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new chemical conglomerate in the era of Afrikaner apartheid, a policy beyond his bucolic grasp.   

A quarter century past WWII, the United States staggers into the future, its security once nestled comfortably between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, is now challenged by a hegemony for which it has no history, but which it embraces with characteristic hubris.  

Devlin personifies this high jinx, armed with his technology, but culturally programmed for another time and a different world.  Finding himself self-estranged on the world stage, he enters a society equally out of step with the times.  The psychosexual tension that unfolds introduces him to a self that he did not know existed.  This psychological novel introduces the reader to Devlin’s world, a world that still holds the modern mind hostage.

BOOK’S AUTHOR:

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is an industrial/organization psychologist who has written a score of books in the genre of social psychology.  He has previously written “In the Shadow of the Courthouse: A Memoir of the 1940s Written as a Novel.”  DEVLIN is a 50 year promise to himself that he would write such a book one day.

The Peripatetic Philosopher announces soon to be published:

Devlin

A Psychological Novel

The year 1968 severed the moral certainty of the past from the future shattering traditional anchors and reliable reference points.  Seamus, “Dirk” Devlin, a young Irish American engineer of provincial roots, finds himself in South Africa to facilitate the formation of a new conglomerate in the era of Afrikaner apartheid, a policy beyond his bucolic grasp.  

   

The United States, staggering into the future, its security once nestled between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, was now vulnerable to the rest of the world beyond those comfortable limits.  

WWII left nations across the globe in physical devastation and economic turmoil dependent on the industrial and technological support of the U.S. to put them right.  This challenge revealed the naiveté of American intellectuals, pundits, politicians, industrial leaders and ordinary citizens, such as Devlin, on how the world worked in recovery. 

This psychological novel introduces the reader to Devlin’s world, and possibly, to the reader’s as well.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

 A Letter to a Friend

Suiting up for Life

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

© February 2, 2018

You are nearly a generation younger than I am, but as you say we are kindred spirits.  That is because we are both persons, individuals, dedicated to belief systems, which although similar are not identical, but belief systems nonetheless that are personal and soulful.   

We were both athletes but played sports as recreational outlets while focusing on developing our cognitive skills and sensitive souls to what we considered a more pressing concern, the effective utilization of our inherent ability in the service of others, not necessarily for wealth and recognition but to make a difference while on this magnificent planet. 

You in the publishing business and me embedded in the complex corporate organization have seen the drift away from people as persons to robotic electronic detachment in all avenues of enterprise, endeavor and social engagement. 

Being a writer, you say, is not for sissies, and I agree.  But what explains the boring repetitiveness of journalistic and literary discourse today?  I've come to being a writer late in life, and whereas you have won many writing accolades I've been nominated for only one (nonfiction Pulitzer).  

I agree that your success has come from courage, not commas.  Saturday Evening Post's literary critic Granville Hicks once claimed that novelist John Updike wrote like an angel but had nothing to say.  

Updike, darling of The New Yorker magazine, judiciously dotted his i's and crossed his t's, and always knew when and where to use a comma or the proper adverb to the satisfaction of that publication's editors.  

Life is not perfect, so why should our sentences be confined necessarily to the limits of arbitrary mechanical and grammatical structuring?    

Alas, politics and mass communication reflect the absurdity of dehumanizing information, data and selective facts.  Once this brew comes out of the grinder, it invariably supports the gullibility of one audience as opposed to that of another.  Consequently, words and ideas assume the convention and consistency of vanilla producing stalemate and stagnation at the expense of comprehension and action. 

The irony is that “fact checkers” check the facts that support the checkers’ biases while claiming to be objective.  Objectivity has paradoxically become impersonal when personal validity is subjective.  Analytics have invaded philosophy and theology, sports and life styles leading to societal fragmentation rather than integration.  Consequently, the focus is on the part at the expense of the whole.

If anything, an obsession with progress has led to fractured personal identity and a bland sameness as individualism has morphed into collective dependence and passive acceptance as evolutionary development has stalled.    

Sixty years ago, longshoreman turned philosopher Eric Hoffer reminded us of the power of the herd mentality with its hysterical rush to become "true believers."  This was not a new discovery for it has existed as long as man has allowed others to do his thinking for him discouraging him from knowing himself or stepping out of the box of conventional authority. 

Earlier, when not yet a boy of nine, America found itself stumbling into a European war when national policies aggravated the Empire of Japan to bomb the US Seventh Fleet based at Pearl Harbor.  

Desperation drives societies as it does individuals to the extremes of irrational behavior.  

Japan, in a fit of anxiety feeling increasingly cut off from essential oil and steel resources by American foreign policy, was persuaded by Japanese War Lords to attack the US Seventh Fleet based on the island of Honolulu on December 7, 1941, which awakened the sleeping American industrial giant.  

For this act, the United States Air Force would subsequently drop atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945.  This created a level of destruction that astounded even those who had worked on the Manhattan Project.  

President Harry S. Truman justified his decision to embrace this precipitous action on the rationale that it would save American lives from an invasion of Japan, and would end the war in the Pacific, which it did accomplish. 

Through the cunning and persuasive mime of British Prime Minister, Sir Winston Churchill, the United States entered the war in Europe in 1942, saving Europe, while forever sacrificing its own parochial and pastoral isolation.  

At the war's end, the US would assume a global presence which it has never relinquished.  Quite remarkably, it would send young people (such as myself) from all levels of the food chain who had managed to acquire college degrees and the skills required to bring order and relief, commerce and technology to peoples about the globe. These neophytes (like myself), however, entered the world stage essentially ignorant of that world.    

Academic Nancy Isenberg recently wrote a book that offended the American psyche with its provocative title: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America.  This provocative expose places the focus on the underbelly of American society that is not readily acknowledged.  Predictably, the book has vanished from the bookshelves of many libraries and book stores as it is not how Americans like to see themselves: crude, rude and tattooed. 

As a boy growing up in a quiet community on the banks of the Mississippi River in the Midwest, I stayed close to my Irish American community where my neighbors were basically Irish Roman Catholics, as was my grocer, doctor, dentist, priests, nuns and parishioners, railroad and factory workers, mothers and fathers, and housewives, while 80 percent of the rest of the community were mainly Protestant with continental European roots.    

Because I was tall for my age, athletic and of sturdy construction whereas most of my classmates and teammates were less so, I was recruited from the sixth grade on to attend the public high school of the city. 

It was my first introduction to an alien world, a world that knew little about Catholics much less Irish Catholics, or the nature of our deeply embedded culture.  The Sisters of St. Francis had been my teachers during an era when such nuns were totally dedicated to teaching and seemingly unaware of any personal motivation. 

These nuns, however, had a bias towards some students and I thrived on that bias as it favored me without apology.  That was not so in the public high school, either in the classroom or on the athletic field.  Students and athletes had been groomed from junior high and were expected to carry the gauntlet to the next level. 

But little St. Patrick’s grammar school with only fourteen boys in my class, four of whom were recruited by the high school coaches, pushed these junior high expectant athletes to the bench, as these interlopers made the starting five in basketball and the starting eleven in football to the chagrin of many parents and school administrators.

Years later, when I got to know African Americans as students and athletes at university, I came to appreciate the validity of their constant complaint: “We don’t have to be as good as whites; we have to be twice as good in order to be given equal consideration.”  It seemed to also apply to the Irish.

African American were invisible when I was a youth.  You didn’t see them downtown, in the movie theaters, at the municipal swimming pool, or at the baseball stadium.  They weren’t on the junior league baseball summer teams much less high school athletic teams.  They were everywhere and nowhere.  This is prominent in my book IN THE SHADOW OF THE COURTHOUSE, which deals with growing up during WWII from the age of eight to thirteen.  

My four years of high school were a little like the twenty years of Henry Adams.  He failed to write a word about them in The Education of Henry Adams, passing over the period from 1871 (at age 33) to 1892 (at age 54), seeing it a maturation period of no other consequence.

The only significant decision I made during my four years in high school was to realize in my sophomore year that I was putting far too much effort into athletics and not enough time into academics.  Athletics were fun but they were not preparing me for life.  

From my freshman year on, I was taking the more difficult academic courses, but was not focused on them until my sophomore year.  Significantly, the valedictorian of my class, a person I looked up to, asked me to be his roommate at the University of Iowa.  I still feel the goose bumps when I reflect on that experience as his offer legitimized me to myself as a budding scholar.  That freshman year was a great experience and if I were younger I think I might write a book about it as we consistently set the curve in our academic pursuits. 

World War Two was now history and parochial America was feeling its oats while demonstrating its ignorance of world history and other cultures about the globe.  Falsely, we Americans assumed that the recovering world wanted to be remade in the image and likeness of the United States.  Suddenly, Americans became narcissistic and self-indulgent buying into the hype that they were the “greatest generation.” 

There were reasons for being proud given that in 1941 the nation was totally unprepared for war.  Forgotten as well was the fact that the United States was protected by two vast oceans from the conflagrations of Europe and the Pacific.  This allowed the nation to hit on all cylinders in mass war production.  David Halberstam writes knowingly about this in The Next Century.       

Halberstam marvels at the collective resolve of a people that successfully put aside their differences to reach a level of synergy not witnessed before in history.  Pomp and circumstance, social stratification and protocol, feudalistic allegiances and monarchical intransigence were not a problem for Americans as they were for Europeans.  Let us not forget Europe lacked the luxury of war production without the threat of constant military attack. 

Without such cultural limitations, assembly lines operated 24/7  across the United States producing ships, planes, tanks, arms and logistical materials that rivaled the Allies and Axis powers combined. 

Heady with that achievement, the peace that followed the war was, however, short lived as there was the Korean War, and then the Vietnam War, followed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria, while tiny North Korea remains a present bellicose  menace as it continues to launch intercontinental ballistic missiles over the Sea of Japan, boasting that it can reached the United States with its missiles.

Two things happened while I was in college.  The postwar economic boom took off and conspicuous consumption became therapy for an anxious age.  The other was the natural paranoia that seems endemic to the American culture came to be exploited by Wisconsin Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy and his aids Roy Cohn and G. David Shine.

That shadowy mist hung over my college campus life, first with the execution in June 1953 of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for giving atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union followed by the histrionics that came to be called "McCarthyism."  

Returning from class to my college dormitory, I would go to the lounge and sit in front of the tiny black and white television set and watch the United States Army hearings featuring the sad face and caustic wit of Joseph Welch, the Army’s chief counsel, as he exchanged barbs with Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The senator had accused the US State Department of harboring communist Soviet spies, claiming 205 communists had infiltrated the US State Department.  It was the era of the Cold War and the senator was riding that hysteria to advantage, that is, until he accused a member of Joseph Welch’s staff of being a communist. 

Sitting in front of the small television set, a witness to history, I heard the senator make that accusation with lawyer Welch responding by uttering the immortal lines that would ultimately end Senator McCarthy’s career.  The senator would die a short time later at the age of 48. 

Joseph Welch said slowly in a nasal voice, “Until this moment, senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”  When McCarthy attempted to counter punch and regain the advantage, Welch, now clearly angry, interrupted, “Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator.  You have done enough.  Have you no sense of decency?”

The “Red Scare” would not abate once McCarthy, Cohn and Shine were off stage as the House UN American Activities Committee (HUAAC) would continue the mad frenzy holding seemingly endless hearings parading professional writers, directors, actors, and studio czars of Hollywood before the committee while covertly subjugating them to being black balled from working in that industry.  It was The Age of the United States of Anxiety, an emotional status that has yet to be relinquished.

NEXT

A LETTER TO A FRIEND –  Finding Life Was Ready for Me but I Wasn’t Ready for Life!

  

      

   

The Peripatetic Philosopher gives a peek inside:

The Ascent of the Working Woman

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

© January 11, 2018

Amazon’s Kindle Library: $21.95 (paperback); $9.99 (e-book)

NO LONGER A “GLASS CEILING,” NOW SIMPLY A MYTHIC WALL

IT IS ALL BURIED IN THE STATISTICS

THE UNITED STATES OF ANXIETY

Some twenty-two years ago, viewing women through the feminine prism in an attempt to get inside the gender bias, a chapter of The Taboo against Being Your Own Best Friend (1996) was dedicated to male/female statistics:

In 1996, white boys got higher scores in mathematics and science, while girls got higher scores in reading, writing and reading comprehension;

Boys in eighth grade were 50 percent more likely to be held back a grade than girls; boys in high school constituted 68 percent of the special education population;

67 percent of female high school graduates went on to college, whereas 58 percent of male high school graduates did so.

Regarding graduate school in 1970:

Women received 40 percent of all master’s degrees and were 59 percent of all master’s degree students in 1996, earning 53 percent of all master’s degrees;

Women earned only 6 percent of all professional degrees (medicine, dentistry, law), but by 1991 that figure had risen to 39 percent;

Only 14 percent of all doctoral degrees went to women whereas in 1996 that figure had risen to 39 percent;

The medical degree earned during this period by women jumped from 8 percent to 39 percent, and by 1993 42 percent of first-year medical students were women;

Only 5 percent of women earned law degrees, but that figure in 1993 was 40 percent;  

Women received only 1 percent of dental degrees compared to 32 percent by 1991;

In 1996, women earned the majority of the doctoral degrees awarded in pharmacy and veterinary medicine.

The summary concludes:

There is, however, a growing gender imbalance in higher education among minority students.  Among black students who earned a bachelor’s degree in 1990, fully 62 percent were female; among Hispanic students, 55 percent were female, and among white students, the imbalance was 53 percent to 47 percent favoring women.

FAST FORWARD TO THE 21^ST CENTURY

The feminine resurgence is not only economic but cultural as well.  To an amazing degree it mirrors the 11^th, 12^th and 13^th centuries (which will be covered in a future missive on “The Ascent of the Working Woman”) when the driver was not masculine but feminine dominance in manner, dress, speech, and decorum despite the prominence of the Crusades to the Holy Land during this period.

Today, we see much less evidence of the “glass ceiling,” but now it is the mystical wall that seemingly blocks feminine progress if not achievement.  Statistics bear this out without the necessity of editorial comment.

As of 2015, the gender gap in favor of boys for mathematical aptitude across ethnic groups continues to persist.  It is reflected in the Scholastic Aptitude (SAT) test where boys average higher math SAT scores than girls: 1.65 to 1.00, which has held for more than forty years.  Girls, on other hand, during the same period, have continued to outperform boys on SAT tests for reading comprehension.

In 1994, 63 percent of female high school graduates and 61 percent of male high school graduates were enrolled in college.  By 2012, the share of young women enrolled in college increased to 71 percent while 61 percent remained unchanged for the college enrollment of men.

On the other hand, a most recent report confirms that black women are the most educated group in the United States while being a long way from economic equity or social parity.  Between 2009 - 2010, black women earned 68 percent of all associate degrees (two-year), as well as 66 percent of bachelor’s degrees (four year), and 71 percent of master’s degrees and 65 percent of all doctorates.

Between 1976 and 2012, college students who were black increased from 10 to 15 percent, while the percentage of white students among U.S. college students fell from 84 to 60 percent.  By both race and gender, a higher percentage of black women (9.7 percent) are enrolled in college than any other group, topping Asian women (8.7 percent), white women (7.1 percent) and white men (6.1 percent).

Most dramatic, where men once went to college far more than women – 58 percent to 42 percent – the ratio has now been nearly reversed.  Today, women comprise more than 56 percent of all college students on college campuses nationwide.  Some 2.2 million fewer men than women are enrolled in college today.  The new minority in American society is men.

MEN/WOMEN ARE MARRIED TO THE MACHINE

THE POSTMODERN DEGREE FACTORY

As of 2010, the most popular master’s degree for both men and women is the Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA).  Why this degree has such eminence is open to conjecture.  Obviously, there is some legitimacy for an MBA in the complexity of the corporate business world, but could this be hiding something, such as providing an anodyne for career anxiety?

From 1970 to 1980, I was an adjunct professor for several public and private universities (University of South Florida, Florida Institute of Technology, St. Petersburg College, St. Leo University, Nova University, Biscayne University, and Golden Gate University) in which all these institutions presented the MBA degree to meet the demand.  The motivation of the students was never clear other than to have an added bargaining chip for promotion.  To put it another way, it was rare to find a student truly interested in management theory and thought to appreciate the efficacies, deficiencies and embedded problems of corporate culture.      

Women were invariably the best MBA students for insight and pragmatic analysis of complex situations seldom becoming lost in the detail.  No surprise, as of 2016, women have earned the majority of doctoral degrees in every year since 2009 including in business curriculums. 

Women started out modestly, first earning the majority of the associate degrees in 1978, a majority of the master’s degrees in 1981, and a majority of the bachelor’s degrees in 1982.

As inflation is a common aspect of modern economic society, the bachelor’s degree has proven the equivalent of a high school diploma in 1950.  In 2015, apparently realizing this, fully 26 percent of college graduates were back in school pursuing master and doctorate degrees, mainly because of the pay gap between a BA and an MA degree. 

Since all students, male and female, are likely married to the machine, the factory mentality and mindset has become endemic to the age.  Good sense and rational appraisal of how cost effective an advance degree may be is seldom likely to be considered.  The mantra is: the bachelor’s degree is meaningless if not worthless; therefore I must have an advanced degree.

Against this rationale, the tuition for a master’s degree at a public institution can be in excess of $30,000 a year, while at a private institution it can soar above $40,000 per year.  Compare this with the average debt of $35,000 per college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in 2015.

Then just how valuable is a master or doctorate degree?  Graduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics command salaries from $68,000 to $117,000 whereas degrees of other disciplines (as will be soon shown) can be quite modest in comparison.  Student loans can and often do plague the college graduate for years into their working life.  But new and surprising opportunities are evolving due in part to critical shortages in some professions.

New to the list is the physician assistant.  This master’s degree can earn $87,000 as median pay at the entry level as of 2016.  In the United States, largely because of the physician shortage, physician assistants are nationally certified and state licensed to practice medicine under the supervision of a physician.

Graduate degrees in various areas of education, healthcare and accounting can be far more modest in terms of possible income with an annual salary of $48,700.  What is ironic is that professionals in such disciplines are most likely to be satisfied with their work despite the low paycheck.

BEST GRADUATE DEGREES FOR JOBS

Master’s in Biostatistics: medium salary, $105,000

Master’s in Statistics: $113,700

Ph.D., Computer Science: medium salary, $147,400

Ph.D., Economics: medium salary, $125,800

Master’s in Applied Mathematics: medium salary, $124,900

Master’s in Computer Science: medium salary, $125,700

Ph.D., Pharmacy: medium salary, $126,000

Ph.D., Mathematics: $106,600

Ph.D., Physics: $137,800

Master’s Degree, Software Engineering: medium salary, $118,900

Ph.D., Physical Chemistry: medium salary, $134,800

Master’s, Information Systems: medium salary, $116,100

Master’s, Physician Assistant Studies: medium salary, $103,600

MBA, Management Information Systems: medium salary, $117,800

Ph.D., Political Science: medium salary, $116,700

WORST GRADUATE DEGREES FOR JOBS

Master’s, Fine Arts (MFA): medium salary, $46,600

Master’s, Early Childhood Education: $48,700

Master’s, Divinity: $48,700

Master’s, Elementary Education: $54,700

Master’s, Reading & Literacy: $58,200

Master’s, Theology, $57,800

Master’s, Special Education: $59,200

Master’s, Graphic Design, $72,700

Master’s of Library and Information Science: $61,200

Master of Arts in Teaching: $60,100

Master’s, Curriculum and Instruction: $60,600

Master’s, Teaching English as a Second Language: $55,000

Master’s, Pastoral Ministry: $60,800

Master of Architecture: $81,100

Master’s, English Literature: $69,500

THEN THERE IS THE PERSISTENT MYTHICAL WALL

Some sixty years ago when I was young, economic security, prestige, community respect and unquestioned authority was the prerogative of the family physician.  He didn’t worry about law suits, or being disparaged by his clientele or worry about them second guessing him.  He was trusted as if a god to know and do what was best for everyone in his care without consideration of race, ethnicity or economic circumstances. 

That mystique, although severely tarnished, has survived to this day.  It finds many women, as shown here, both black and white, making huge sacrifices to become physicians.  The only problem is that being white instead of black tacks an extra $60,000 a year on the physician’s paycheck if he is a man. 

Medical doctors who are male earn 8 percent more than their female colleagues, which translates into $20,000 or more for the male physician doing the same work as the equally qualified female physician.  The wage gap is so wide that women physicians teaching in medical schools as full professors make about the same as associate male professors. 

This mythical wall was created more than one hundred years ago when there were few if any female doctors.  The medical profession led by the American Medical Association created its brand as assiduously as NFL owners created theirs.  The AMA now defends that brand, believing itself indispensable if not the infallible authority on medical practice. 

Indeed, the AMA promotes the correct dialogue with female doctors, and claims to advocate equally the interests of female medical practitioners, but the gap between male and female doctors, and now the surging presence of black female physicians has continued to widen rather than shrink over the last several decades. 

For white female physicians this is not as pronounced a discrepancy as it is for black women physicians, but it does illustrate the fact that these highly qualified women of both races are pushing against a wall that although mythical remains a psychological and economic barrier that still holds these women in ascension from realizing their full potential and promise.  It is as if the mystique that dominated my youth sixty years ago hangs on in its irrelevancy to this day. 

The glass ceiling is gone, but this mythic barrier persists and it does so because medical patients today have apparently the same mindset as patience fifty to one hundred years ago, and that is, believing that the white male doctor is omniscient when he is a disappearing phenomenon.  The Ascent of the Working Woman is in control of our creative tomorrow, establishing her essence without fanfare but with due diligence as this book attempts to illustrate.

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares his new book:

The Ascent of the Working Woman

JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© December 26, 2017

THE ASCENT OF THE WORKING WOMAN is not new.  Indeed, it is as old as time, as women have always been the measure of the health and well-being of society, not men.  Women have led without power using their guile to influence men when men were often otherwise occupied to the point of walking off the cliff and into the abyss. 

Women have been forced by social protocol to be mainly obliging listeners and supportive partners to men, who traditionally have held the power.  This has forced women to traditionally assume a passive role to men to realize a significant economic and social advantage.

When women have acquired power, however, and this is increasingly the case, they have been less inclined to “strut their stuff” in mocking imitation of male self-aggrandizement.  Instead, they have been more disposed to husband their resources in the clearly difficult climb to financial equity giving rather than taking credit along the way.   

That said the working woman is as capable of rational thinking and timely decision-making as is the working man, while making no apologies for complementing her thinking with insight from instinct and intuition.  The paradoxical reality of the times is that she finds herself married to the same machine that now dominates the working man. 

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