The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

DEVLIN LEARNS ABOUT LIFE/WORK

VANITIES OF VANITIES

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© November 22, 2016

REFERENCE:

This is another excerpt from DEVLIN, THE NOVEL,  which is to be a Kindle selection in early 2017.

JAMES JOYCE’S INFLUENCE

Seamus Aloysius Devlin chose St. Aloysius as his confirmation name at his mother’s request.  “Like the saint,” she said, “you are my golden boy,” adding, “and besides James Joyce chose the same confirmation name, and he’s the greatest writer in English.”  Devlin always wondered if he was a disappointment to his mother.

It wasn’t until he was twelve that he learned St. Aloysius was a Jesuit of unsullied virtue who died at the age 23 during an epidemic in Rome in 1591.  At the Crescent City Library, he confirmed that Joyce was a celebrated writer but of a far different temperament than the saint.  St. Aloysius wouldn’t allow his mother to embrace him because he feared contact with women, while Joyce embraced female verities.   

The saint was a loner terrified of women, while Joyce defied the limits of English propriety and decency.  Devlin wondered what his mother was trying to tell him, but he never asked.

Devlin was comfortable as a loner, as it was his plight to be an outsider.  He was born and grew up in the working class section of Crescent City.  Although living in a small community of 33,000, there was a section of the city where many rich families had lived for generations, an area that made him feel especially uneasy. 

He could remember the Great Depression of the 1930s, just before the war, and the times  he rode the bus with his da through blocks of mansions.  He would see fancy cars, uniformed chauffeurs, and maids in black dresses with aprons and starched white caps, and children in school uniforms playing in the yards without regard to soiling their clothes.  He had felt outside all of that, and it had never left him.  The entire scene branded in his memory, now reappeared

His life now was incomprehensible to him.  It was as if he had imagined it, or read it in a book.  After all, his family never owned an automobile, always rented.  He never got to know the part of the city where the rich kids lived, but he did have an opportunity to compete with them in the classroom and athletics, and was shocked to find they were not as smart as he was or nearly as good an athlete. 

Like St. Aloysius, he was blessed with brains, and like Joyce, he had Irish luck and pluck.  Devlin was most comfortable on the move, suffered fools poorly, fearless of adversaries, a rootless moralist, a traveling man moving fatedly if uncertainly forward.

He had been lucky to work on his own as a lab chemist since nobody wanted to work with him.  Although a junior chemist with no seniority, he was demanding to the point of impudent.  In the R&D laboratories of Tandy Brands, Inc., he was quick to complain if he found anyone’s work slipshod. 

It didn’t help him not being a real chemist as he held a BSCE in chemical engineering, which to bona fide bench chemists was neither fish nor fowl, but at best a hybrid.  It was how psychologists feel about psychiatrists.  Psychologists believe they do all the research and psychiatrists get all the credit.  To them psychiatrists are basically medical “pill” pushers with a short survey course in psychology, whereas psychologists have eight years of clinical training.

Chemical engineers are focused on processes associated with systemic and chronic problems in mechanistic systems.  Chemical engineers can observe, evaluate and correct what they see.  Chemists deal with molecular structures in a subatomic world, which is often beyond the lens of the electronic microscope.

His colleagues failed to see, and Devlin was not yet aware, that he was an engineer with the mind of a chemist and heart of a psychologist.  Book learning aside, the hybrid was to prove both his doing and undoing as he was also a sensor of the rarest of sensitivity.

Devlin jumped at the opportunity to ditch the laboratory for another hybrid, chemical sales.  It was not a career move but a way to generate income for his young family of a wife and two small children, 1 and 3, to pursue his quest for a Ph.D. in microbiology. 

He had won a fellowship to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut in molecular biology for his master’s, and once completed, with a placement in the Ph.D. program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in theoretical chemistry.  Chemical sales was a stopgap measure to complement the fellowship.  With two small children at home and demanding course work at school, jobs outside for either parent were not possible.  It was nine months before the fall term. 

Devlin, a dreamer, lived in his fantasy world of ideas.  A fan of James Watson the co-discoverer of the double helix of DNA, he saw himself building molecular models where he could enjoy science without confinement to the chemical bench.  Watson was alleged to be extroverted with a detached morality, while Devlin was introverted with an intrusive morality. 

HORNS OF DEVLIN’S DILEMMA

 No one seemed less destined for success in sales, yet he moved his family from Crescent City, Iowa to Indianapolis, Indiana where the first month with Polychem, Inc. he traveled with the area manager. 

At the end of the month, the area manager asked him what he had learned.  Devlin answered straightforwardly.  “All our calls were social calls with you telling customers about Polychem’s greatness, never once did you ask what was needed, or for an order.”

“So you think the time was wasted?” the area manager challenged with his eyes boring into Devlin.

Devlin chose silence to be his answer.

The following Monday he came to the office to find his colleagues gone except for the area and regional manager.  Both smoked cigarettes furtively while drinking coffee.  The hair on the back of Devlin’s head bristled to attention.  This was not good. 

The regional manager broke the silence. 

“We believe you’re not cut out for this kind of work.  We know you have your family here,” the senior manager said taking a long drag on his cigarette, then beaming magnanimously.  “We’ve taken that into consideration.  We’re going to give you some marginal accounts to service over the next six weeks while you look for another job.” 

The regional manager tapped his cigarette on the table with the ash falling to the cement floor of the makeshift office in a Quonset hut.  He looked down at the ash dreamily, and then continued.  “You can upgrade these accounts if you like to earn commission.”  He smiles knowingly.  Marginal accounts were marginal because they were devoid of prospects or otherwise ignored.  “And he can call on our competitors’ accounts in the area, too, can’t he boss?” the area manager chimed in. 

The two managers looked at each other holding back raucous laughs simultaneously covering their snickering mouths.  “Why of course,” the derision look never leaving either of their eyes, as the regional manager continued.  “By all means, call on them.”  What had they to lose?  It would eventually prove more than they ever suspected.

Their eyes twinkled with devilish relief, reveling in how easily they had put this matter to rest.  Fuck this upstart their nonverbal posture declared.  He brought it on himself.  At that moment, Devlin felt surprise, dismay and cloying fear.  He was being reminded once again that he was born on the wrong side of the tracks.  A visceral kind of hatred moved through his body that surprised him, but rather than deflating him it energized him with a feeling of surreal superiority.

“Well?” the area manager said.

“Well what?” Devlin said levelly.  “Obviously, I can’t get started without the accounts now can I?”  He waited, and their smiles dropped.  “They’re not ready, are they?”  You could cut their collective shock with a knife and break the blade.  They weren’t expecting him to be composed.  What did they expect?  For him to beg for his job, to apologize for the incompetence of the area manager, what? 

“I’ll be back in two hours to pick up these marginal accounts,” he said stressing the word, ‘marginal.’  He couldn’t believe his composure.  Where did it come from?  Then he added, “I’ll call first to make sure they’re ready.”  They smoked, their eyes masked in disbelief, as he turned and left the office, tall and straight, ignoring the secretary who had her ear to the door. 

When he was near his car, he almost collapsed.  What was he to do?  He was in a situation he’d never been in before.  Sure, they didn’t like him much in the lab but they liked his work.  He had always succeeded near the top whatever the competition: in sport, school work, even as a laborer in summer jobs at Tandy Brands while going to college.  Life was not a game to him; life was serious business.  He harbored as much contempt for the hardy fellow well meant but with counterfeit sincerity as for the scoundrel, but he had never suffered for it, until now. 

He had played competitive football, basketball, track and baseball in high school, not as a teammate, but as an individual.  He never hung out with jocks at lunchtime in high school but instead helped others with math word problems in the bleachers of the school gym.  He was in athletics but not of athletics.  He was in and of academics, which were rational and impersonal in the world of ideas.   It was only there he felt at home with a sense of belonging.

What should he tell his wife Sarah?  He decided to tell her nothing.  His one fortification was his Irish Roman Catholicism with its myths and rituals, its legends and histories, its mythical Jesus at the expense of the historical Jesus. 

THE SPECIAL ONE

Devlin now paid a visit to Indianapolis’s Sacred Heart Cathedral.  Inside the womb of the church he took in the scent of incense as he knelt in a pew thinking, strangely, of Dostoyevsky.  He wondered if the great author went to church, once spared death by the firing squad.  It certainly changed his life.  Was this a deathlike experience for him?

Dostoyevsky had a fever for the Special One, not as the Anointed Christ but as the vine to which he felt tethered.  The “God” thing was a problem for both he and Dostoyevsky.  Why did the Special One have to be God, when clearly Jesus was quite a man?

He doubted if he would see faith and science on a collision course but rather believed they were parallel universes.  Devlin’s faith was the heart of his imagination, science the mind of his reason.  Why should these two worlds collide?  Yet they did for the Special One whose faith was His science.  Jesus told it as He saw it and saw it as He told it, and for that He was crucified? 

The Special One had contempt for hierarchies, for pomp and circumstance, for grand costumes and exalted pretense.  He wore his badge of lower class like knighthood.  Devlin wondered why this had not survived in his church. 

The Special One was a rebel, an outsider, who despised the herd mentality.  He formed a community of dregs and sinners.  What would the Special One think of the church in his name? 

When Devlin was a small boy, he went to St. Boniface Church and School, there Father Sunbrueller could not raise his rhetoric above sin and the fire and brimstone of hell.  There was no place in his sermons for the Special One.  Jesus rarely talked about sin or, indeed, hell.  Devlin wondered if the Special One would accept the seven deadly sins, sins he never defined, or would he see sin as he did in terms of waste and deceit. 

“Dear Jesus,” he whispered as he thought of his life going forward with a potpourri of marginal accounts, “I am nine years younger than you were when you died.  My cross is my refusal to be predictable.  My wonder is whether my life is about over or ready to begin.”  He waited in silence for an answer.  When none came, he got up from the pew and walked into the late morning sunlight to take on the world.

 DEVLIN STUMBLES INTO SUCCESS

The marginal accounts he acquired were spread out throughout Indiana as far north as Lafayette in the northwest and Fort Wayne in the northeast, as far west as Terre Haute in west central and far east as Richmond in east central, as far southwest as Evansville and as far south east as New Albany, and of course including Indianapolis, and all other small and larger towns within those parameters. 

The accounts all used steam for heat and processing, water for air conditioning with cooling towers, often using well water heavy in dissolved solids such as iron and calcium.  There were drycleaners, bottling plants, canneries, small hospitals, small parts manufacturers, industrial bakeries, office buildings and shopping centers with medium to large air conditioning systems, small paper mills, and some thirty state facilities in which Polychem had a consulting contract to service their power plants.  These facilities included hospitals, sanitariums, men and women penal institutions, and state schools for children of special needs. 

Devlin had had a month’s training at Polychem’s corporate headquarters in Chicago about the generic technology involved in preventing scaling in boilers, corrosion in condensate lines, scaling in condensers of air conditioners, microbial growth in cooling towers and papermaking applications, and water clarification in waste treatment plants.  Devlin had no training in Polychem’s proprietary chemicals.  He was sent out with these marginal accounts to fail, and he knew it.

The first call on his own was the most nervous moment of his life.  He was talking so fast the words made no sense to him or his contact.  The gentlemen, in white bib overalls with a lined face that matched the blue lines of his jeans, listened with amusement.  “We’re a customer,” the maintenance engineer of the small chemical plant said when Devlin ran out of breath.  “We use you.  You don’t have to sell us.”

Devlin dropped his test kit to the floor, and hung his head. 

“Son, are you all right?” the man said.  “You look wiped out.  Better sit down.”  Devlin did.  “Now tell me about it.”

What’s to tell?  He wanted to cry.  “You’re my first call,” he hesitated, “ever.”

“Well, well, well, so that’s it?”  The engineer took out a pack of cigarettes offered one to Devlin, who shook his head vigorously, the customer pumped the pack against his arm until one fell out, lit it, and then sat down. 

“You’re a good looking boy with an honest face, do you know that?”  Devlin nodded.  “There’s a sincerity about you if you catch my meaning.”  Devlin nodded again.  “What I’m trying to say, son, is it’s all right to be nervous.  We’re all nervous in our first job.  This is your first job?”

“No, I was a bench chemist, and before that I was on active duty in the Navy for two years after college.”

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-four.”

“You look as if you could still be in high school.”

Devlin laughed.  “I’m married with a son and a daughter.”

“My, my, college graduate, too?”

“Yes sir, chemical engineering.”

“Now that’s impressive, not to say having two children isn’t.  I have two myself, never been to college, but anyway,” he said stomping out his spent cigarette on the floor, “what do you have for me?”

Devlin would find over the next six weeks a collection of phrases that would pour out of the mouths of his contacts that could be reduced to about a dozen, and one of them was “what do you have for me?”  It was not a commitment, not an exploration, not a conversation stimulus, but a way to dispatch politely but persuasively. 

Devlin found himself repeating the phrase to the astonishment of the engineer.  “Well, I imagine that is why you are here, isn’t it?”

For some reason, Devlin didn’t answer but let the “isn’t it” hang out there.  He didn’t know why he did, but his hesitation drew a broad smile.  “I see you have your test kits and want to see if we’re keeping our controls on the boilers up to snuff.”

“Yes sir,” Devlin said, “I’d like to check your systems, but first tell me how this plant operates, where you apply the chemicals at what dosages, and then I’d like to know how things are working or aren’t as the case may be.  I’d like you to guide me through all your systems.”

If the purpose of a system is what it does, the role of the worker is pride and ownership of what he does.  Devlin had touched this nerve without knowing it.  He had paid the engineer a complement by honoring him by respecting his work, and then transferred the power of the exchange or the meeting from him to the engineer, becoming the engineer’s student.  Any wall that might have existed was dissolved.  They were partners as teller and listener.

After touring the plant and then tracing the lines of the boiler system, Devlin showed the engineer the schematic he had constructed.  As the engineer told him the chemicals he was using, and the dosages, he took out his manual and calculated the dosages against the cryptic algorithms.  “You are over feeding your scale prevention chemicals,” he said, “that is why you have such high readings.  I see you are slug feeding these chemicals.”  The engineer nodded.  “It would be best to use a positive displacement pump that regulates the feed at a constant rate.”

“That makes sense.  How much does such a pump cost?”

Devlin shrugged.  “I don’t know but I can find out.”

“Would you?”

“Yes,” he added, “when you inspect your boilers at shutdown, have you noticed any problems?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, we have.  We’re controlling scaling in the boiler but experiencing some severe pitting.  We’ve had to replace a number of tubes.”

Devlin took out a brochure.  “Pitting in boilers is caused by oxidation.  We have a treatment for that with the active ingredient sodium sulfite.  It combines with the oxygen to form sodium sulfate and goes out with your boiler blowdown.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Yes, and there is a test for the SO3 dosage.”  

  

It was that beginning that found Devlin rising from a Polychem liability to a senior manager to an international corporate executive in five years.  Customers were his teachers, his confidantes, and his friends.  They trusted him and he preserved that trust with passion.  It was a marriage of partners.  He knew the technology but was all thumbs when it came to mechanical skills while they were rich in such skills and made his programs work by following his instructions.  He became the golden boy in Polychem’s Industrial Division, and now was expected to continue his magic, magic no one quite understood, in South Africa.

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher introduces:

$15.99 TATE Publishing Company

E-Book: $4.99

Time Out for Sanity!

Blueprint for Dealing with an Anxious Age!

CERTAINTY AND TRUTH DISPELLED

Little did I know when I first wrote “A Look Backward to See Ahead” (2007) that the United States of Anxiety would become a societal pandemic beyond comprehension.  Since anxiety is worrying about what never happens, I thought in due course Americans would have to grow up and face the reality of a changing world in which they were not the center of interest.  But alas, that did not happen.

So when TATE Publishing Company asked me to edit, revise and expand my treatise, along with nine other of my books, in 2012, I went back to the original manuscript that I had written mainly for my own edification with no plans of publishing.  As is my inclination, I can be quite brusque and to the point with no cushioning for the reader’s comfort.  That manuscript was composed in 1980.

At the time, I could see Americans were concerned about certainty and truth.  The only problem is that there is no such thing as certainty and truth is relative, as your truth may not be my truth, and German truth may not be French truth, and so on.  The whole “Age of the Enlightenment” with such notables as Kant, Descartes, Spinoza and the like, along with the “new science” seemed confident that they had found the key to this dichotomy of certainty and truth.    

For those that are faithful readers to my missives and books, they are aware that I have a problem with this predilection.  Meanwhile, I have watched as American society became comfortable in complacency reacting to events rather than anticipating them; how it treated rhetoric as reality, rearing its children without a moral compass and therefore ill prepared to suffer the consequences of their actions; treating its workers as management dependent or counter dependent on the company for their total well-being, displaying learned helplessness while fixated in arrested development failing to reach the maturity of adults.

This has been the focus of a series of books: Work Without Management: A View from the Trenches; The Worker, Alone! Going Against the Grain; Corporate Sin: Leaderless Leadership and Dissonant Workers; Six Silent Killers: Management’s Greatest Challenge, among others. 

PRESIDENT-ELECT DONALD TRUMP – WHAT DOES IT TELL US?

When I was an athlete in my youth, we lost some games we were expected to win and suffered the humiliation of defeat.  Only a teenage boy, I understood the rules, never saw the game as being rigged, and with tears in my eyes, shook the hands of my opponents, while sulking for a spell wondering what I could have done better. 

I didn’t blame the referees if it were a basketball game, or the umpire if it were a football game, or indeed, if it were a teacher that gave me a bad grade on a test that I thought I had clearly done better.  If I failed, for some reason, call it my training, I looked to myself for the failure, never thinking that it was the referee’s fault, the umpire’s calling balls and strikes, the teacher’s subjective grading system, or even the coach’s fault for not preparing me better for the contest.  I was not alone as my teammates were of the same mind and inclination as I was.  What happened to this?

Well, of course, I don’t for sure.  I only know what I experienced and observed in the microcosm.  Many parents of my generation, children of the Great Depression of 1929, and born in the 1930s, especially those who came from the working class poor, but somehow benefitted from the post-World War Two economic bonanza where good paying jobs were plentiful, decided they didn’t want their children to go through that same trauma, which is understandable.  Many couldn’t do enough for their children as they didn’t want them to feel the trauma, the uncertainty, while selling them on the truth that they were special because they were Americans.

As a consequence, they never had to grow up.  These were the baby boomers, children born in the 1950s and 1960s. 

I know this first hand as I constantly reminded my children that their grandfather, whom they had never met, was a brakeman on the railroad, and although their father had an executive position, and they traveled the world with him, he had had no safety net, no inheritance, and that he had no choice but to suffer the consequences of his actions, and that this was the most powerful legacy of his life. 

Obviously, they didn’t want to hear this.  Then to their consternation, their father “retired” in his thirties, and charted out a much more modest existence, one in which they had to adapt, and one in which they were not too happy to endure.  But they found their way, on their own, with little help from their father.  That is his legacy to them, which he hopes they will instill in their children, but which the jury is still out on that ledger. 

So, what does this have to do with President-elect Donald Trump?  Everything!

The United States of Anxiety has become a spoiled brat society, and the more readers protest the fact the more they reify its existence.  If this were not enough, the media stoke this angst and fuel this fire with syndicated columnists previously known for their balance, but who have gone off the rails since certainty and truth have proven to be false indicators.   

David Brooks writes, “After all, the guy (President-elect Trump) will probably resign or be impeached within a year.  The future is closer than you think.”

Leonard Pitts writes, “A black woman I know (Pitts is an African American journalist) got a text from a friend who asked what she’d be wearing to the slave auction in January . . . Maybe we are too alarmist. Or maybe we’re not alarmist enough.”

In the author’s note to “Time Out for Sanity”:

While science is looking for a universal theory, social and economic thinkers seem to be looking for an ecumenical system that answers all the questions . . .  The result is that there is seemingly a constant clash between progressive and reactionary agendas.  The obstructionists ignore the complexity of the problems being faced while progressive deny the existence of these problems and turn their attention to irrelevancies. 

The American Democratic Party got caught up in this maze with its certainty and truth rejected and now the dignity of the Presidency of the United States calls for a “Time Out for Sanity!”   

The Peripatetic Philosopher has

SOME THOUGHTS ON UTOPIA

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR. Ph.D.

© November 17, 2016

I have never been comfortable with the idea of utopia since reading “Utopia” by Thomas More.  I ran into it again when I read the works of William Morris, and found he was a great influence on America’s Elbert Hubbard.  Then I read Marx who repudiated utopianism while creating a utopian system of idealism that was thoroughly utopian (dialectical materialism). 

Wherever you look, when you get under what is said or being implied, it is the insinuation of harmony into a clash of common sense values of society and individualism with some utopian scheme.  This idealism is often in plain sight bombarding our sense with subliminal stimuli. 

I remember when quite young how I was rankled by General Electric’s constant mantra, “Progress is our most important product.”  Then to my dismay, once that got discarded by GE, I saw science in its quest for promoting its brand using the same idea with “perfection” and “value free analysis,” when both are utopian unrealities.

Then I read Einstein’s treatise on religion (“Science and God,” Forum and Century 83, 1930) and found early in his career that he encountered – in his own community – the reification of such ideas of absolutes justified by mathematics, when mathematics are an invention of man that approximates nature but is not and never can be privy to nature. 

I was programmed from birth with my Irish Roman Catholicism, which is different from Roman Catholicism as represented elsewhere in that Irish Catholicism has never left its primitive Celtic roots, which existed long before Christianity, but still envisions itself with the same Roman Catholic claim of being the ideal crucible for man to expiate his guilt, atone for his sins and seek absolution and salvation with the utopian promise of heaven being his final resting place. 

Utopianism is a closed rather than an open system of thought which can only be realized by the repression of defeat in reality. 

Utopianism is expressed in everyday life when dreams become work-in-progress social engineering project.  Social engineers believe they have the key to reform by destroying “what is” and replacing it with “what should be.”  We are in that current matrix with the dizzy headed belief in electronics, the Internet and the social media as being, collectively, the new religion but under another name. 

The problem with social engineers, and I am one, is that the methods for correcting problems invariably produce new and more catastrophic ones.  We see this in the ballooning corporate bureaucracies and the quest for greater and greater profits and larger and larger share of the marketplace while markets recede with accelerating entropy with everyone dancing on that carcass. 

The irrationality, the very madness and fragility of utopia never dawns on advocates.  If they are students of history, they fail to see that the pattern of utopia is repeated over and over again with the same dystopian results proving that humans are not the wisest of animals on the planet. 

More specifically, the primitives, whom we can only imagine because judging them from our perspective is not only in error, but insane, were able to learn from animals without the sophistication of modern man and to live with a certain economy.  We see this in our American Indians.

Utopianism, which seems always popular in periods of crises, is not only nurtured on suspect social theories, but on myths that cannot be refuted taking a page from Christianity and its heaven and hell, salvation and resurrection theology with the promise of a new day. 

The fact that utopian projects are not achievable, and often laughable or should I say totally imaginary, doesn’t discourage reformers (who are utopians) from surfacing everywhere with definitively sounding ideas and absolutes in their promises. 

Yet, I sense that there is a school of thought that believes the utopian imagination is indispensable for man to survive this wilderness called “life.”  Paradoxically, while I insist that utopianism is a closed system, utopian thinking opens the vistas to otherwise depressives who could not countenance a future without prospects. 

It matters little that history’s prescience has often been based on the futility of thinking that finds believers in that unreality putting one foot in front of another and marching obediently forward into the cloud even if swallowed up into oblivion.

I have always found more solace in Goethe’s idea of active courage than Obama’s passive hope.  Courage demands action to test boundaries whereas hope is passive acceptance of oppressive limits, dreaming that they will somehow disappear without doing anything constructive to make it so.

Again, it will appear I am waffling when I reflect on the American Revolution and the American Civil War in utopian terms.  I think both are instances of utopian belief in right champion wrong, but impulsively so (“Boston Tea Party” in the American Revolution and the South firing on Fort Sumter in the American Civil War) rather than a planned strategy to inhuman conditions. 

My words are not likely to diminish the pull of utopianism in any case however it materializes. 

We have just witnessed a utopian election of the President of the United States.  The radical desire – the utopian imagination to create jobs and restore harmony, prosperity, international prominence, and security -- has put a rank amateur in the White House, a man who is neither a Democrat nor Republican, neither a passionate liberal nor conservative, but rather a pragmatist that knows the art of the deal. 

The pull of utopian results is so powerful with a passive people for in its unrealistic promises the irrational mood, which is, of course, denied, decimates any semblance of the rational.  Look at the Dow Jones Industrial Averages!  Stock prices are going through the roof to all-time highs purely on speculation with absolutely nothing to do with the health of the American economy or international security. 

Although coming from working class poor, I have been a registered Republican since I was eighteen-years-old, believing in limited government, self-direction, self-realization, self-acceptance and individualism with the belief we come in alone and go out alone, and should suffer the  consequences of our actions because we get a report card every day of our life. 

I am not a utopian.  Utopians are dreamers believing in collective deliverance from what concerns them refusing to admit that in waking life utopianism only fosters nightmares. 

Utopian thinkers – and there have been many – are obsessed with such words as “order” and “harmony” and “equity” and “tranquility,” seeing revolution as the means to such an end, which only nurtures chaos, conflict, disparity and discord.

More pragmatically, poignantly and personally, I find the best barometer to life in the micro not the macro sense, having written this (in THE WORKER, ALONE! Going Against the Grain, 2016):

Order comes from within.  To establish order takes more than good intentions, more than a change of attitude.  Order requires a radical change in mentality, a structural change in how you view the world.  Such radicalism requires the individual going against the grain.

That said people take comfort in the utopian thinking of the collective.  There they have a sense of belonging to something that gives them the confidence that they are not alone, and they don’t have to do this – whatever “this” is – on their own; that they will have the comfort of other true believers. 

But, alas, change does not occur in the collective as we have seen in the recent election.  Tens of thousands of self-important utopian idealists didn’t find the time to vote, and now they are surprised and angry and want to take it out on the television entertainer who has become their president.  What could be more absurd!  Yet, this is the current absurdity of those fallacious believers in a fixed, ultimate, unchanging human nature that thinks like they do.  They can shout to the rafters, walk out of their classrooms, post hate messages on their iPhones, block the streets of commerce in protest, or riot and destroy other people’s property in reactionary stupidity, but they cannot undo what is done. 

Utopianism involves the hubris of people in power constantly putting off until tomorrow problems that are crippling everyone today.  I will close providing one such monumental budding situation.

Progress, which is the main thrust of utopianism, has promoted creative destruction without limits denying the portending calamity on the horizon.  The dogma of progress is radically changing our planet, evidenced is in the population explosion which is increasing beyond the capacity of the environment to cope with much less sustain the life of humans.  Here in Florida, it is estimated that 15 million more souls will reside in the state by 2070.  Given that assessment, utopianism in the form of revolution or civil war is likely to follow, and it will not be about jobs, or oil, or even food, but about water.   

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher observes:

Consequences of 65 Years of Self-Indulgence:

A Spoiled Brat Society

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, JR.

© November 12, 2016

Without the poorly educated but dedicated Americans that came out of the hinterland from the farms and factories, from the small towns and villages and volunteered to fight the Germans and Japanese in World War Two, America, indeed, the Western World would not have survived. 

I had a cousin who dropped out of high school and joined the US Navy in 1939 at the age of 17, and found himself a machinist on a repair ship tied to the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor Bay when the Empire of Japan naval and air forces attacked the American naval base there on the morning of December 7, 1941.  



My cousin survived with a broken back and was never able to pursue his duties again.  But his younger brother, a senior in high school, dropped out of school and joined the US Navy and became the captain of an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) bringing fighting men to the beaches of North Africa, participating in the D-Day Invasion of Europe, as well as the invasion of Italy and Sicily, and surviving, proud of his service but ever modest of his accomplishments.  


He read everything I wrote from articles in trade journals to published books, regretting that he had never had much of an education.  I collected his letters written when he was fighting in Europe in WWII, and published them in a book for his family shortly before he died.

Another cousin was a US Navy Commander and skipper of a mine sweeper in the North Atlantic looking for German submarines during WWII.  His sister was a WAVE (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service).  


They were part of nearly a million service men and women who sacrificed everything so that we could be safe, secure and free.

THE 1950s WHEN EVERYTHING CHANGED

World War Two ended in 1945, and with it the nostalgia of the Great Depression that produced this Greatest Generation, who had the belief in honest work, sacrifice and dedication to something bigger than themselves.  


This generation also accepted philosophically disappointment, the unpredictable, failure, discrimination, inability to keep up with the prevailing norm, and cultural and religious biases, wasting little mind to what they could not change preferring to deal with what they could and get on with their lives.  


They believed in being the molders of their own destiny engaging in the Promethean struggle to achieve their own social freedom wresting from nature the means to serve their own goals and not looking for someone else to do that for them.

They believed in what philosopher Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom,” that is, not looking for the government to protect and ensure their safety, security and freedom but to assume that responsibility themselves.  


We have drifted to what Berlin calls “positive freedom,” or entitlement where the government is our God, our protector, our conscience and our benefactor, and we are the obliging and obeying servants to that God and that government.


Sixty five years after Pearl Harbor nearly as many Americans survive on the dole or entitlements provided by the government as those working for a living in the US economy in 2016.

This all happened after 1945 when social engineers, sociologists and psychologists got into the act interpreting Sigmund Freud’s dictums on anxiety, trauma, and psychosexual hysteria treating these psychosomatic symptoms as communicable diseases as if as contagious as chicken pox. 

Educators got into the act and decided that no child should have a sense of failure; that every child should see him or herself as a winner.  Therefore, in classroom work or recreational activities everyone got achievement awards so no one felt left out.  


Education became a farce and a dumbing down process that commenced with social promotion from one grade to the next however unqualified the student was to do the work at the next level.  From the 1950s on, millions of students graduated from high school who could not diagram a sentence, read at the sixth grade level, do their multiplication tables, or read a map.  


From elementary school to middle school to high school to university psychological pabulum was fed to all students indiscriminately to protect their delicate psyches.

Then in 1958, the USSR or Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and suddenly the United States found itself behind – or thought it was – in science and mathematics with a radical reformation in the teaching of science and mathematics in the American classroom. 

This knee jerk response to outside activities would become an American syndrome in virtually every walk of life, as reaction rather than anticipation would become the game Americans played from the most sublime of activities such as the arts -- music, literature and culture -- to the most ridiculous in national politics in the Office of the President of the United States. 

The United States Congress as well as industry and commerce would follow the refrain, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” resulting in missing the changes, unable to face them, leaving the future up for grabs until the world exploded into crisis after crisis with rhetoric no longer sufficing for reality, as survival was now in play. 

We bemoan the loss of good industrial jobs in the rust built in such states as Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere as if this all occurred in a vacuum.  It did not.  It was created by ineptitude and passivity.

In the 1950s, the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters Union, with many other unions following, decided to go for “positive freedom” putting their destiny in the hands of union bosses and obliging employers giving up their negative freedom, which was control of their jobs and the conduct of their work.  For this, workers became renters rather than owners of what they did. 

These workers did this without protest because their union leadership got them more and more money, and more and more entitlements until a typical UAW family in Detroit, Michigan might have a mother and father, brother and sister all working for General Motors, Ford or Chrysler with high school educations or less, while being better off than someone who had spent eight to ten years at university becoming a Doctor of Medicine.  



How do I know this?  In the 1950s, I visited my uncle every summer who was Head of the Department of Commerce and Economics at the University of Detroit, and I played summer baseball with kids of such families who had the best homes in the suburbs as well as the best equipment to play sports.

THE 1960s CAME AND EVERYTHING CHANGED AGAIN,

OR DID IT?

The Western World was devastated by the destruction of WWII, as well as much of the Far East.  The Soviet Union put up the Berlin Wall separating Western from Eastern Germany and the Cold War between Russia and the United States and Western Europe was underway. 

Senator Joseph McCarthy in the late 1950s had become something of a celebrity with the House Un American Activities Committee (HUAC) playing on the massive paranoia of Americans who believed “Reds” (Russian Communists) were everywhere.  



Meanwhile, Soviet Russia constructed an “Iron Curtain” between itself and the West with a promise that the Soviet Union would last one hundred years, which was modest to that of the Nazi’s claim of existing for one thousand years.  Germany’s Nazism last twelve years (1933-1945); the Soviet Union lasted seventy two years (1917-1989). 

World War Two was meant to be a "War of Liberation," but the West interpreted this to mean the world was prime for one ideology and one culture, and that was Western democracy and Western science.  Events have proven that was in error.

The 1960s gravitated to an essentially secular society with Christianity’s Catholicism and Protestantism taking a backseat to science and mathematics.  The mantra reverberated across the country that "everyone must be a college graduate.”  It was only a whisper in the 1960s, but would be repeated for the next fifty years to become the hermeneutics of an indisputable dogma of a civil religion.  



We tend to forget that mathematics is something that man has invented and not the forces of nature to which mathematics are dedicated to explaining.  It has been a challenge of man from the beginning to recognize the difference between self-understanding and deployment and accurate observation of the external world, as well as the world of others than himself. 

If anyone was paying attention, and clearly those in positions of authority and power weren’t, the 1960s saw the rise of Japan as an emerging economic force and serious competitor to the United States.


This groundswell of opposition continued to thrive in the 1970s and 1980s reaching a sustainable momentum throughout Europe and Pacific Rim countries. While this was happening, the United States would see its exports of finished products be reduced from a high of nearly 60 percent a quarter century after WWII to what they are today around 30 percent.



In 1980, NBC television launched an hour long program with the challenge: "Japan Can, Why Can't We?"  The Japanese surge was reduced to one word, "quality," and since Americans love simplicity, everything became a mad dash for quality in a tragic comedic effort to emulate Japan.  Little notice was taken of the fact that Japan was a group think or collective society and the United States was individualistic.  

Valiant as the effort, the trade deficit continued to escalate.  Good paying jobs continued to disappear with a severe erosion in the ranks of union workers in the United States along with the demise of American manufacturing.  



The United States has always prided itself in its innovative capacity to invent something new, and to produce new products swiftly and economically.  What the US didn't anticipate was that Europe, Japan and Pacific Rim countries could take this new technology and produce products equally as good if not better and more cheaply than the United States. 

In my work from the 1960s to the 1980s across Europe, I witnessed the inappropriateness of gas guzzling coffin sized American vehicles unable to negotiate narrow European streets.  The US automotive industry stubbornly continued to produce these machines, while Japan, South Korean and Taiwan took control of the American market at home and abroad nearly driving the "Big Three" automakers into receivership.  This has been repeated in many other US industries. 

As I have written in many of my tomes, the United States has gone from dependable, independent and self-actualizing workers up to and through WWII to workers suspended in terminal adolescence and arrested development, dependent on management and/or counter dependent on the organization that employs them for their total well being.  


They have become renters on the job rather than owners of what they do.

A blatant illustration of this dependence was apparent when US Steel and the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA) decided in the 1960s to motivate workers and lift them out of their lethargy by giving veteran workers a 13-week furlough every five years to do as they liked while continuing to receive full wages and entitlements.  



Instead of taking advantage of this opportunity and going back to school to improve their skills, or to take an extended vacation, they did only what they knew.  They got a second job.  When the furlough period was over, many attempted to keep both jobs going as they had adjusted their standard of living to the new income.  Far from returning to work happy and appreciative as workers, they came back angry finding it impossible to be effective in performing the two jobs at once.

This illustrates how quickly counter dependence can develop from independence with responsible maturity giving way to immature adolescence in work as in life.  



In only a single generation after WWII (1945-1970), the American workforce went from independence to this dependent mode.  Moreover, American workers never expected the windfall to end, so they DID NOT SAVE FOR A RAINY DAY!

WAS THE PRESIDENT REAGAN YEARS A REALITY OR A MIRAGE?

Politicians today talk about the “boom years” of President Ronald Reagan, years when the Berlin Wall was about to come down, and the Soviet Union was about to dissolve; years when US Defense spending went through the roof; and years when the cauldron of the Middle East was festering to the point of explosion, leading to the First and Second Iraq War; and years when the US Congress and the American business community were unceremoniously and unwittingly seeding the discord that would lead to the rise of Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda and the Twin Tower terrorist attack with the subsequent emergence of ISSI and the present stalemate in Syria. 


This passivity was born and nurtured by those in leadership positions since WWII.

President Barak Obama's presidency reflects his generation and its passivity, cautionary to the nth degree in his approach to the problem solving with an irrevocable belief in the nobility of man to prevail in the end.  



If President Obama ever read “The Prince” by Machiavelli, it is doubtful that any of it resonated as man is equally ignoble as noble when it comes to power.  As Lord Acton has said, “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” 

Politicians reminded American voters in the 2016 Presidential Election that the United States National Debt had soared from $10 trillion to $20 trillion during Obama's eight year administration, yet presidents as far back as John F. Kennedy in 1961 through Democratic and Republican Administrations have seen entitlements soar without abatement as politicians on the right as well as the left have been more interested in reelection than governance as the appeal has been to the lowest common denominator of the American people. 

Pirating from the words of the Lebanese American poet Kahlil Gibran in an address to the people of Lebanon, President Kennedy borrowed his words that have been repeated ad nauseam without registering their import: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”

THE SPOILED BRATS COME OUT OF THE WOODWORK

Otto Preminger, the famous Hollywood film director, once said, “Hollywood actors have the maturity of children and the intelligence of morons.  The best they can do is memorize lines written by someone else.”  


Yet, in the wake of the 2016 Presidential Election, this celebrity culture is a force which has evolved since the 1950s.  We see this in war movies made by such Teflon movie stars as John Wayne who made a career starring in movies as a war hero while avoiding military service in WWII. 

Teflon man became the prototype of American individualism as envisioned by such writers as Garry Wills in his “John Wayne’s America.”  


This America has segued to the politics of celebrity, a culture that is now 65 years old and still soaring.  Many of these Teflon characters have threatened to go to Canada now that President-elect Donald James Trump has won the presidency.  I await their departure, but I am not holding my breath to see that it happens.

The election of Trump indicates the epitome of the “Spoiled Brat Society” that America has become.  There are forty million more Americans in the United States now than when Barak Obama was first elected, yet 20 million less Americans went to the polls on November 8, 2016 than went to the polls four years earlier when President Obama won reelection to a second term.  Moreover, one million less African Americans went to the polls in 2016 than went to the polls in 2012. 

Many Americans of the eligible age to vote have never voted.  I have a son in that category.  While students riot at UCLA; Portland, Oregon; Chicago, Illinois; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New York City, and elsewhere, I doubt if 20 percent of the rioters actually have voted.  Spoiled brats want their cake and eat it, too, but they don’t want the responsibility of earning the means to enjoy that cake. 

We have had waves of Black Power, Black dissidents, and now Black Lives Matters, all of which have legitimacy as there are many justifications for anger and outrage against the establishment for the practices of metropolitan governments and the behavior of police and the Criminal Justice System.  But destroying small business establishments and destroying public property is the behavior of out-of-control spoiled brats and not the behavior of mature responsible citizens.

When you have been on this planet for only 18 to 22 or 24 years, what do you know about life?  What do you know about police?  Novelist and former Los Angeles police sergeant Joseph Wambaugh once said, “A community gets the police it deserves.”  

I wrote my Ph.D. dissertation on that fact from consultancy of police and community organizations along the Atlantic east coast.  I found it emphatically true: corrupt community leadership spawns unethical police departments; communities of integrity create effective and engaged police departments.   

There is no more important profession than that of the police, who put their lives on the line every day.  When they are successful they receive not a word, but when they foul up they earn headlines in the media and are painted with a broad brush as racists and bigots and not caring.  Walk one day in their shoes and then tell me it is not one of the most difficult jobs in society. 

President-elect Trump was elected fairly and legitimately winning the Electoral College vote while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote beating Trump by 400,000 votes in an election that included 120.5 million Americans.  Trump earned a majority of the Electorate College vote of 290 (he needed 270) to Clinton’s 228.  


That is the system.  If you don’t like the system, vote and elect people to the system who can change it to more closely reflect your views.

The call is for responsible Americans, not spoiled brats.  Responsible individuals expect to pay for their college education, and not have it provided by the government; they expect to compete in the workplace for jobs and careers and not have them guaranteed by the government; and they have the good sense to save 5 to 10 percent of what they earn for the future, and not expect the government to take care of them from cradle to grave.

The behavior we see across the country at the moment in the wake of Donald James Trump's winning the election is the behavior of indentured slaves to their appetites; people who don’t know how to take disappointment, failure or the embarrassment of their contretemps in stride.  

Several universities have postponed semester examinations because the anxieties of students are such that it is not possible for them to cope with the surprise of Donald James Trump’s winning of the presidency.  These young people are supposed to be the wave of the future.  If they don’t develop a backbone, they will represent its demise.

*     *     *

     

  

Peripatetic philosopher shares a chapter from:

Devlin

 

A Novel

JAMES RAYMOND FISHER, Jr.

© November 11, 2016

NOTE: Several readers across the globe have registered an interest in the previous segment shared from this novel.  This is a second one.

JRF

 

TWENTY TWO

 THE GARDENER JOSIAH

Josiah Bruto preferred to be called “Joe,” but Devlin liked the ring of Josiah and refused to use the nickname.  Josiah’s given name was actually “Jifunza,” which means, “teach oneself.”  Nearly as tall as Devlin, he had the magnificent physique of his people, the Swahilis, who once roamed South Africa with fierce authority, but were now limited to a homeland, called, “Swaziland.”  It is surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique, largely mountainous and slightly smaller than the size of New Jersey in the United States.  In 1963, the territory was constituted a protectorate within the northeast borders of South Africa and scheduled to become an independent nation in September of the current year.

*     *     *

There are people you meet who you already know so there is little necessity for polite sparring.  Josiah was such a person.  Yet, it took Devlin’s third attempt at conversation before the gardener decided he was sincere.

On that occasion, he said, “You are interested to know where I come from.  I come from Mbabane, a quiet village nestled in the Diangeni Hills in the northwest corner of my country near the South African border.  It is our capital and has been since the Boer War of 1901 when the British took control of the country.  We are mainly farmers and craftsman with a profusion of wild flowers covering our hills and valleys.”

He often talked about the “wild flowers,” his face lighting up with the memory of delicate plants as if they were friends.  “Wild flowers,” he said, “are the most fragile creature’s alive but yet the most persevering.”  Devlin wondered if that described Josiah. 

“I was educated in a convent school in Swaziland.  You were educated at an American university, no?”  Devlin nodded.  He found it confusing that Devlin could know so much about things and so little about nature.  Devlin smiled at the boldness of his observation, which was however true.  To mollify his employer, the gardener added, “You shall be my teacher of philosophy and I yours of nature.” 

*     *     *

Josiah came to Rosen Haven Place in 1963 at the age of twenty-two serving the needs of the garden but indifferent to whom might be the occupant.  One of the previous occupants was the former mayor of Johannesburg, a woman, who had entertained Prime Minister Winston Churchill there during World War Two.

Watching Josiah work, it was apparent that the nomadic life suited him, living in a modest house off the garden, and to the back of the main house.  Devlin was curious to see this house and get more of a sense of his new friend.  After a month of casual conversations, one day he asked if he could see his place. 

Josiah dropped his trough into the dirt, his expression that between betrayal and deception.  “You wish to see my home?”

“Yes, if that is all right with you?”

“How long have you been in this country?”

“Several months now, why?”

“Several months,” he repeated.  “Plants grow by nature’s clock.  There is a nature to time’s clock as well.”

“Meaning?”

“Nature adds or subtracts what sustains life.  Sometimes winter flowers choose to grow in the spring, and spring flowers sometimes bloom in the fall.”

“Josiah, you’re talking in riddles.  I have no idea what you’re about.  Have I offended you by asking to see your home?”

He studied the American.  “I try to live by Nature’s clock in all its variations.”

“I think I get it.  You see me forcing nature by making such a request, right?”

“Where is your home in the United States?”

“You could say ‘everywhere,’ but I was born in northeastern Iowa, have lived in Chicago, Indianapolis and Louisville, which is in Kentucky, as well as in Europe and South America, for a spell on a US Navy ship in the Mediterranean, now in South Africa.”

“Kentucky is in the south?”

“Well, yes, more or less, at least it considers itself in the South, a border state is what they call it, but I see your point.”

“Yes, well, when people ask you where you come from in the white community, always tell them ‘Kentucky.’  It will be better.”

Devlin had read books by Alan Paton before coming to South Africa, also a “Very Strange Society” by Allen Drury, and so had a rough idea of apartheid.  He had also received propaganda from the “South African Embassy’s Consul of Information” getting the government’s side of the story. 

He was by nature curious, and by temperament direct.  It never occurred to him that it was necessary for his gardener to oblige him whatever the request.  He stood on individualism not on a class or cast system.  After all, he was the son of a brakeman.  That was how clueless Josiah was of this American.

*     *     *

So, the first time Devlin was in Josiah’s house the air was hot and humid like in a lion’s den.  Josiah didn’t seem to notice, but was differential to a fault.  It was clear he was most relieved when they prepared to leave.  As time passed, and they became friends, Devlin saw Josiah drop his guard without letting it down completely. 

The American could not bridge the gap to show the gardener how much they had in common, how much they were both outsiders.  The only difference was that Josiah’s cage was not of his making, while Devlin’s cage was of his.

*     *     *

The gardener’s house was a white stucco building of the same construction as the main house.  Inside, Josiah’s home was modest but extremely tidy.  It was a one-room combination kitchen and bedroom with a separate bathroom.  He had a small bed, which seemed too short for his long body.  It had a red homemade quilt over it, and was stacked high with pillows.  By the bed was a reading lamp and comfortable chair with a footstool.  The kitchen table was mahogany with two firm chairs, while the adjoining kitchen sink was polished to a shine with dishes stacked neatly on an open shelf above the kitchen table.  There was no stove but a small electric heating plate, and a similar sized space heater.

Against the side window that looked into the garden was a makeshift bookcase separated by red bricks and standing from the floor nearly to the ceiling.  The books were all paperbacks; most in English, but several in what Devlin did not recognize but would later learn was Swahili.

“Josiah,” he said, “I’m sincere.  I want to get to know you and your work.  I’m from a farm state but know nothing about agriculture and even less about flowers or exotic plants that I see everywhere here.”

“How could you be from a farm state and know nothing about farming?”

“Well, I grew up in a river town, which is on the Mississippi River, and it was also a factory town with most people working in factories or for the railroad.  My da worked on the railroad.”

“Your da?”

“Yes, my father.  I called him my da.” 

His eyes grew dreamy, then he turned away, “No other white man talks to me as you do.”

“Well, I’m not a white man.  I’m an American.  You’re from Swaziland and I’m from Iowa.  I suppose you are a lot like others from your hometown.” He nodded.  “I’m a Midwesterner, grew up in the Midwest, went to school in the Midwest, and have never left my roots.  Have you ever left yours?”  He nodded.

“We Midwesterners tend to be outspoken, earthy, straightforward and don’t suffer fools too well no matter what a big deal they think they are.”

“You are fortunate.  It is hard for me to perceive what you are saying.”  Then he grew pensive.  “But I read books about your country, and people of color don’t seem to have the same good fortune, is that not true?”

“Yes, it is.  There is much turmoil in America at the moment.” 

As we talked about the United States, it was evident that the South African press spared no detail to paint America with a broad brush of racial hypocrisy and social unrest.  However true that might be, it failed to capture the America Devlin knew and loved.  He decided to listen to his new friend without comment.

Josiah didn’t miss this.  He repressed his impossible glee, “You listen to me.”

“Yes?”

“I talk.  You listen.”  Then he grew worried.  “You don’t perceive the danger in this?”

“No.  Should I?”

“You could be deported.  It is a crime to be too familiar with the Bantu, do you not know that?”

“Yes, of course, I’ve been told that, but this is my home, on my property with a seven-foot stucco wall around the place, who is going to talk?”

“The walls have ears.”

“You’re not serious?  I’m sure there are no electronic bugs in the walls.”

“I’m talking about people.”

Devlin then knew exactly what he meant, the other servants, the housekeeper, the house manager, and his driver, whom he used only occasionally.  His own people!  They were the ears in the walls.  Neither the American nor the gardener knew how ominous this would prove to be.

*     *     *