The Peripatetic Philosopher ponders,

Why is religion important?

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

© August 8, 2015

REFERENCE:

We are in an age that seems to have forgotten how critical religion has been in man’s journey.  A reader’s attentive query – Why is religion important – prompts me to write a brief missive or two on that question.

Sociologist and economist Max Weber and Russian political scientist and sociologist Dimitri Furman are my guides, men known for their original and pragmatic approaches to the great religions of the world.

For the past several years, the subject of religion has progressed from a casual to a compelling interest, especially the roots and relevance of early Christianity to our times.

This is the nature of my "Jesus Story" or The Search for the Real Parents of My Soul.  It commences with Jesus and the Twelve Apostles to Paul and the New Testament, which includes the four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, as well as the apostate Gospels of Thomas, Peter and Judas.

The curious nature of these gospels is that none of the authors is actually known, although given recognizable names.  

Biblical scholars have devoted their lives to studying scraps of text and piecing them together into something resembling a montage that helps the general reader such as yours truly.  Ergo, I take no credit for expertise in theology or eschatology, disciplines far afield to my training. I do, however, confess to being something of an autodidact. 

A READER WRITES:

I fail to understand why you feel religion is so important.

For me the only importance of religion is that it illustrates the acceptance by many people of ludicrous ideologies without submitting them to examination and questioning their reality. 

The three religions that arose out of the mid-east portray a god with the characteristics of idiots like Hitler, Stalin, and Moa.  All these men believed that they had discovered an ideology that explained everything, and that their particular ideology was the only correct one. 

These men were responsible for the deaths of millions in their pursuit of their ideology.  The god portrayed in the Old Testament has the same idiotic outlook. He destroyed humanity with the flood and committed other atrocities because he was in charge and everyone better comply with his demands. 

In the New Testament he required a human sacrifice in the form of Jesus and condemned every non believer to hell which is equivalent to the behavior of any dictator. 

Also you have written how you personally witness the ideology of apartheid in South Africa.  Such behavior continues to be currently exhibited by Al Qaida, ISIS and all the other Muslim nut groups who once again are proclaiming that they have the only answer and anyone who rejects that answer must die.

Or look at the adulation the Pope receives in St. Peter’s square as if he has the answers.  It reminds me of the unquestioning adulation of Hitler at those well documented rallies. 

Today I read in the Wall Street Journal that Hindus in India want to prevent the eating of beef because cows are sacred to them.  Religions are ideologies which originated in the past to explain the unexplainable and to control the population. 

People no longer believe in the Greek and Roman gods and call them myths, but they continue to believe that the myths of Judaism, Christianity and Islam are real. 

No one knows how the universe began or why. There are speculation and scientific theories of how it all started but no answer of why.  All our invented gods are autocrats because they were invented in a time when autocrats controlled societies. 

If a citizens of the US today were required to bow and adore their leaders like the god of the Middle East requires, we would be upset.  However, religious people find it acceptable even those who live in a democratic society. 

Paul, Augustan and many other religious pontificators are read and admired, but they all suffer from the same disease as Hitler, Stalin and Mao.  They suffer from the delusion that they know the answer and that any other answer has no validity.  There is no hope for our species because our dumb behavior is redundant.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Dear Reader:

You, like all of us of European or African stock, are immigrants to this great country of the United States of America.  So it was equally true of the Pilgrims of the Puritan Christian faith who crossed the Atlantic Ocean in the Mayflower and landed the Plymouth colony in America in 1620 on what would become the State of Massachusetts.

Religion is so fundamental to the story of man that it may be useful to cover the subject in a few brief missives as to why I think this is so.  This is the first.  

For Max Weber (1864-1920) and Dimitri Furman (1943-2011), religion is the essential if not the critical linchpin to that story.

We have Max Weber's comprehensive sociology of religion, which started with the essay The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905). 

He continued it with the analysis of The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism (1915), The Religion of India (1916): The Sociology of Hinduism and Buddhism (1916) and Ancient Judaism.  It was published in 1952 thirty-two years after his death in 1920.

Weber’s sudden death prevented him from following Ancient Judaism with studies of Early Christianity and Islam.

The three main themes in these essays were the effect of religious ideas on economic activities, the relation between social stratification and religious ideas and the distinguishable characteristics of these ideas on Western Civilization.

Weber saw religion as one of the core forces in the society of man.  His goal was to find reasons for the different developmental paths of the cultures of the Occident and the Orient without judging or valuing them.

Like some of the contemporary thinkers who followed the social Darwinist paradigm, Weber wanted to explain the distinctive elements of Western Civilization primarily from an economic point of view.

In this analysis, Weber maintained that Calvinist (and more widely, Protestant) religious ideas had had a major impact on the social innovation and development of the capitalistic economic system of the West, but noted that these religious ideas were not the only factors in that development.

Other notable factors mentioned by Weber included the rationalism of scientific pursuit, merging observation with mathematics, science of scholarship with jurisprudence, rational systematization and bureaucratization of government administration with economic enterprise. 

His paradigm on bureaucracy shows how early Christianity was assimilated into the Roman culture and its bureaucratic structure by Emperor Constantine.  This gave Roman Catholicism a bureaucratic impetus early in the fourth century (305 C.E.) that assured its stability, continuity and sustainability over next twenty centuries despite many false steps.

In the end, the study of the sociology of religion, according to Weber, focused on one distinguishing part of the Western culture, the decline of beliefs in magic, or what he referred to as "disenchantment of the world" and the rapid rise of science in man’s consciousness. 

*     *     *

Russian Dmitri Yefimovich Furman studied the sociology of religion more from a political than an economic perspective.  His analysis complements rather than refutes that of Max Weber. 

He was called in The New Left Review, "Russia’s leading comparative scholar on the political systems of the post-Soviet states.”  His PhD thesis was on "Religion and Social Conflicts in USA" (1981).

In recent years, he has been editor or author of a series of studies of the former Soviet border states including the Ukraine (1997), Belarus (1998), Chechnya (1999), Azerbaijan (2001), and the Baltic States (2002).  He wrote a monograph on Kazakhstan (2004)., and dozens of separate essays and articles.  

Isolated as he was in Soviet Russia of exchange with scholars abroad, Furman once remarked that Russian thinkers of his generation had no choice but to be autodidacts, which meant they were always liable to reinvent the bicycle. 

Furman was noted by temperament as a pragmatic researcher with little interest in intellectual genealogies or engagement with parallel bodies of work.

His thesis Religion and Social Conflicts in the USA (1981) turned into a book and focused on the role of Protestantism in American history and society. It offered a detailed empirical sociology of American churches, denominations and sects in the 20th century.

This remarkable study became the hallmark of his comparative work with the emphasis on the influence of religion on the political life of society rather than the prominence of economics on religion favored by Max Weber.

Why, Furman asks, at the outset, had France known four revolutions since the 18th century, and some 15 constitutions, and the United States just one of each?

Bourgeois society in America, he argued, had from the beginning combined exceptional dynamism with extreme stability, a combination that could not be understood apart from the peculiar salience of Protestantism in its formation.

America, he claimed, included both the unfettering of a drive for knowledge and a biblical respect for the immutability of the constitution. 

Though officially church and state were separated, the reigning ideology of the nation mingled religious rituals and symbols with secular forms and themes in a promiscuous potpourri whose very lack of clear divisions or borders was permissive of continual economic and social change.

UCLA professor Perry Anderson profiles Dimitri Furman in a long essay titled “One Exceptional Figure Stood Out” in The London Review (July 30, 2015) in which he reveals the clarity and originality of Furman's scholarship.  

My next missive will be to share Furman’s analysis of religion along with appropriate references to that of Weber's as well.  In that offering, I will attempt to show why his ideas appear so compelling.  Unfortunately, it is hard to acquire information on him.  His book is currently unavailable on Amazon.com.

The Peripatetic Philosopher admits:

Why My Fascination With Millennials

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

© August 6, 2015

HEADLINE:

 “Sales at Bonefish Sink!" (Tampa Bay Times, August 6, 2015)

Sales have plummeted at this Tampa Bay franchise chain, experts conclude, because the millennials don’t see upscale chains as adventuresome.  They prefer mom and dad, or grandma and grandpa restaurants run by local people in the community.

Typically, and expectedly, these experts see millennials as being “anti-chain” driven when a simpler and more telling explanation is that millennials don’t waste their energy being “anti” about anything. 

They don’t find it necessary to dine where you pay for the ambience or the brand or for the opportunity to rub shoulders with the up and coming, or those who think they are. 

For millennials, it is simply a matter of getting the biggest bang for the buck, and letting those who prefer fancier eating accommodations, all the more power to them. 

Millennials are not into resentment or standing on some soap box and protesting the high prices for low lights and cloth napkins.  They just drive by these eating emporiums.

NOT A NEW FASCINATION

For the past twenty-five years, I have been following the growing presence of what I deemed “personhood” as opposed to the “common good” that has been the rhetoric of the priests, pundits, politicians and academics since time immemorial. 

Since coming back from South Africa in 1969, I have seen a tectonic shift in American values, first almost imperceptible but gradually gaining momentum until I saw it having some considerable force in 1990, when I wrote Work Without Managers: A View from the Trenches (2^nd edition 2014).  I wrote then:

The established culture of American society, the “common good,” has failed to support the society that it would define.  Yet, many of its advocates, often located in American Think Tanks, stubbornly insist it is the only way.  Against this reality, the culture of “personhood” now struggles to establish itself …

“This difference has already had pivotal ramifications across America, from the home to the workplace.  Adversaries have been made of parents and children, teachers and students, the clergy and laity, manager and workers, leaders and followers in all walks of life.  It has also produced a perceptible gap between expectations and achievements in the organization.”  

This chart taken from Work Without Managers that summarized the shift:

My designation of “personhood” hardly made a ripple on public consciousness, not even after Executive Excellence Magazine featured my idea.

It was not until Time Magazine (May 20, 2013) featured a cover story on millennials with the title “The Me Me Me Generation” that Americans started to take stock of this growing phenomenon. 

It shows the power of words.  This word, “millennials,” is a designation beyond the Hippies, “Y” and “X” generation; beyond the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of that moment that had no legs. 

It was not “personhood,” I wrote, “but an angst of the “common good” that was already fading.

If you studied the crowds of malcontents of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement, it was evident there were few if any millennials.  They are not into protest.

Joel Stein made a most salient observation in his Time article on millennials:

“Millennials aren’t trying to take over the establishment; they’re growing up without one.”

Millennials have, indeed, grown to maturity in a climate where words took precedence over deeds, presence over performance, where false expectations were treated as real supported in denial, where justice was often the epitome of injustice, where authority had no teeth, and celebrity created the noise but provided little music.  This has found millennials retreating into themselves, and for it called “narcissistic.”

That said millennials have not had to think, do math in their heads, or weighty research to write school papers.  They plagiarize the Internet without guilt, content to lead ghetto fabulous lives addicted to their computers and mobiles while disinclined to take seriously what they have been taught was important.

With millennials, a philosophy of belief is implied rather than stated.  Whatever millennials may think, religion still provides the spiritual springboard of their lives, while a philosophy of disbelief informs them of the vital need for religion, even if they can dispense with the Bible and God.    

With all their excesses and counterpoint orientation, Joel Stein in Time Magazine thinks they’ll save us all.  On this I am more circumspect as I see them as a work in progress, one gaining momentum and in that process changing the very nature of what we call “civil society.”

   

THE WORLD IN DISORDER

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

© August 4, 2015

A READER ASKS,

WHERE IS THE GOVERNMENT IN THIS?

A READER WRITES:

I don’t often agree completely with simple statements as the world is just too complex, but with these I do with these two of yours: 

“The insanity of the tax code has been a product of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Liberals as well as Conservatives who write the codes.

When it comes to money sense, we have not been an inspiring people.  If you have your doubts, check our history from the beginning.  We throw money at problems hoping it will stick with something approaching solutions.  It seldom does.”

I enjoyed this piece, thanks for sending it out.  A few thoughts raised by it follow.

Your analysis of our history of the foibles of labor, industry, profit and loss is interesting, but it seems to me it should have included government, which has been and is overly involved as I see it, and is less often absent at the downside of economic action than present on the upside.

The sixteenth amendment was a massive change in this country’s life.   With it “we the people” provided the government, via constitutional dictate, a claim over all property by virtue of giving it prior authority over all income earned in the nation.  The individual citizen (or business) has since owned nothing, but what the government decided to leave him. 

What is a “Fair share” is totally subjective opinion as is one of the other popular phrases used today, “Living wage”. 

How does one fairly decide “Fair share”, or accurately compute “Living wage”?  I don’t know how that would be properly done, but do believe it hasn’t happened yet.  Nor do I think I would trust the folks championing either of those conditions to honestly make the call.  One reason being their demonstrated tendency to confuse “want” with “need”.  This I think bears on the issue:

The Congressional Budget Office has just published a study, The Distribution of Household Income and Federal Taxes, 2010, which shows that the top 40% of income earners paid 106.2% of total federal income taxes, while the bottom 40% paid -9.1%.

This isn’t the study’s headline, so you have to dig a bit to get that information, but look at Table 3 on page 13 of the study to find that information.

The Table shows that the top 20% of income earners paid 92.9% of total income taxes in 2010 (the latest year available), and the next-highest 20% paid 13.3% of total income taxes, so the top 40% paid 106.2%.

Since 92.9% of the tax burden deemed proper by our political system isn’t, in the minds of some, a “fair share” one wonders what an appropriate definition would be and, of course, who would be best qualified to write it?

Is income alone the best measure of how well the middle, or any other economic class is doing?  Might it not be as much misleading as helpful to honest discussion to focus exclusively on dollar income?  Twenty years ago neither king nor pauper had the access today provided to all who have a smartphone and that includes nearly all middle class and most lower income folks. 

You say, 

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.” 

 It is interesting that the Federal government’s Agricultural Dept. includes the SNAP (food stamp) program and proudly boasts of feeding 40 plus millions of citizens annually. 

That same government includes the Dept. of the Interior which operates the National Park System of which both the government and “We the People” are justly proud. 

Ironically, in all our dozens of national parks there are lots of signs, but none so ubiquitous as “Don’t feed the animals”.  If you ask why, they tell you with great concern it makes the animals dependent and unable to look after themselves.” 

I keep hearing that America has the highest corporate tax rate in the world.  Is that true or not? 

If American companies could get by without paying taxes why do they so often try to move their headquarters overseas to lower their tax burden?  Also, is it not true that the decline in corporate tax payments as a percentage of government revenue occurred primarily as a result of revenue growth provided by the graduated income tax system?  In fact, I believe the government lowered excise taxes specifically to gain support for the new tax amendment.

Your comments on the importance of education are spot on.  Any failure of anyone in the top .1% of wage earners in this country to pay a “fair share” pales in its impact when compared to the failure of individuals to take advantage of the opportunities made available to them and the increasing spiral of opportunity that grows from just completing high school. 

I do not accept the argument that failure to complete high school is caused by poverty.  That argument insults every poor person who stayed and got a diploma.  The reasons for failure to graduate are more complex.

You quote C. Ingraham as writing:

“All my black friends have a bunch of white friends.  And all my white friends have one black friend.” 

That is an interesting way to suggest that integration is a failure and segregation still abounds, especially among those racist whites.  Yet there is the question, “What is a bunch?”  Could eight be a bunch?  Non-Hispanic blacks constitute 12.2% (2010 census) of the US population.  Me thinks Mr. Ingraham may be more about his agenda than facts that prove a point.

This has been fun and I could go on, but let me just finish by thanking you for continuing to bring thought to the world.

Take care,

Ted

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Ted,

This is a remarkable piece of work.  You bring up a number of valid points, which I’m sure will stimulate other readers upon reading yours, hopefully to check out some of your references. 

You are quite right about my intentions. 

These are difficult times and there are no simple answers to our societal problems, indeed, to our world problems. 

We are a society like any other times in the history of man only now we are a global society needing the participation of all voices from all perspectives to get a handle on our common destiny. 

Thank you for taking the time to give a well thought out response.

Jim 

The Peripatetic Philosopher offers:

THE WORLD IN DISORDER – 

AN EXCHANGE

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

© September 14, 2014

“You probably don’t know me, but like you I am one of those .01%ers, a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, co-founded and funded more than 30 companies across a range of industries—from itsy-bitsy ones like the night club I started in my 20s to giant ones like Amazon.com, for which I was the first nonfamily investor. Then I founded aQuantive, an Internet advertising company that was sold to Microsoft in 2007 for $6.4 billion. in cash. My friends and I own a bank. I tell you all this to demonstrate that in many ways I’m no different from you. Like you, I have a broad perspective on business and capitalism. And also like you, I have been rewarded obscenely for my success, with a life that the other 99.99 percent of Americans can’t even imagine.”

Nick Hanauer, “The Pitchforks Are Coming…For Us Plutocrats” (Special Report: July/August 2014)  

A READER WRITES:

Please explain to your readers that liberals in the United States are not delusional and don’t wish to “take money away” from the rich (to redistribute).  We simply want the uber-rich (all 2- 3,000 families) to pay their fair share… since examination shows they don’t. 

In 1918, US top tax increased to 77% (for over one million dollars) to finance WWI; was reduced to 58% in ’22; to 25% in ’25; to 24% in ’29. 

In ’32, top marginal tax rates to 63% during Great Depression & increased thereafter: 1954- 1951 to 91%, to 92% in ‘52/’53; 91% ’54- ’63; ‘64’s top to 77%  and to 70% 1965- ’81; to 50%, 1982-’86;  for ’87   to 38.5% for individuals;  to 33% 1988-1990; 31%  ’91-’92.  In ’93 39.6 thru 2000. 35% 2003-201?

No wonder we now have inadequate revenue!  Corporations once paid @ 2/3 of all U.S. taxes; NOW, they pay 9%; and many pay zero!  This has a cumulative effect!

Read David Cay Johnston’s “Perfectly Legal” (2005) to see how our tax codes stack the deck. 

Read Nick Hanauer’s op-ed “They’re Coming to Get Us Plutocrats with Pitchforks,” where he (a billionaire) makes the case that TAKING CARE OF PEOPLE (i.e., this country’s middle-class ‘engine’) will enhance our economy. 

The liberal objective isn’t economic equality, just equal opportunity.  Today, someone earning a $60,000 salary pays a larger percentage of his income in taxes than the 400 richest Americans.  And that’s just wrong.

Liberals want to protect worker rights & benefits, aid the less fortunate, seek solutions to society’s problems and try to leave the world a better place for future generations.  That’s a liberal. -  We need more liberals.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Your statistics are accurate as America’s tax code has been a boondoggle from the first with politicians using it to grease the skids to ensure their reelections.  Your references – David Cay Johnson and Nick Hanauer – support your data although I was surprised to see Nobel Laureate for Economics, Paul Krugman, not mentioned. 

There is a breach here between the statistics you offer and the fact that we have yet to find a way to generate capital for business investment and expansion, which translates into employment, without inducing wealth creators to take such risks.  

The insanity of the tax code has been a product of Democrats, Republicans and Independents, Liberals as well as Conservatives who write the codes. 

When it comes to money sense, we have not been an inspiring people.  If you have your doubts, check our history from the beginning.  We throw money at problems hoping it will stick with something approaching solutions.  It seldom does.

The Federal Reserve Board shows economic improvement from 1989 to 2013 has been steady for the top 3 percent, flat for the next 7 percent, and declining for the bottom 90 percent with nearly a 20 percent gap of 3 to 7 percent.  Wealth separates us into the equivalent of concaves.

Psychologist Ed Benner shows nearly a perpendicular curve between wealth and the number of friends on Facebook, whereas beat writer Christopher Ingraham shows that social segregation is still a fact in 2014: “All my black friends have a bunch of white friends.  And all my white friends have one black friend.”  

The Tampa Times columnist Jeff Harrington shows how far middle class workers on the lower rungs are falling behind:

·       The lowest 25 percent making less than $20,000 a year show virtually no improvement. 

·       The next 25 percent making $30,000 but less than $40,000 show a sharp dip to less than $20,000 in 1990, but recovered to normal earnings level but with no improvement. 

·       The next highest 25 percent increased to $40,000 but were unable to rise above that level. 

·       The highest 25 percent rose from $60,000 to about $85,000 in 2000, then leveled off at $90,000 to the present.

Popular myth has the median household income in the US at $75,000.  The Economic Policy Board shows it is $53,890 in 2014.  For most earners, wages aren’t keeping pace with inflation dropping as much as 2.7 to 4.2 percent in actual spendable income.

Meanwhile, there is some encouraging news.  Real and projected spending per Medicare recipient in 2014 dollars show a leveling off and far below those projected over the next ten years.

It may seem this is an open declaration in support of your liberal thesis when clearly it is not.  The key is education for young people to take education seriously and stay in school.

THE PREFERRED ELIXIR, EDUCATION

Society has never had sufficient wealth to carry a population that cannot read or write or think quantitatively proficiently enough to develop the skill base to be employable and self-supportive.

Count on politicians and academics to mouth the pejorative words the disadvantage want to hear about wealth creators, not realizing wealth creation is not a zero sum game but the responsibility of each of us to take care of ourselves and our loved ones.  

Education develops self-acceptance which leads to self-reliance and self-direction.  This spells confidence.  In “Confident Thinking” (2014), education is presented as the complement to formal education, not its replacement. 

We will always have the “uber-riche.”  In the long history of man, the formula has seldom varied, not even in the United States.  The top ten percent controls the majority of the assets in land, water and mineral rights, as well as political clout be the ideology autocratic or democratic across the globe.

BRIEF HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

In ancient history, it was the conquerors (Genghis Kahn, Attila the Hun), then emperors (Alexander the Great, Napoleon), followed by the rise of monarchies (Suleiman I of the Ottoman Empire, James I of England) and the papacy of the Roman Catholic Church that controlled wealth and power. 

Feudalism flourished into the 16^th century when Martin Luther and John Calvin broke away from the Roman Catholic Church and established Protestantism.  The Protestant work ethic shattered conventional boundaries in power and enterprise giving rise to capitalism.

Fledgling democracies followed ending the Feudal Age and leading to mercantile capitalism.  Into this midst rose the American and French Revolution, then the American Civil War, which spiked the Industrial Revolution. 

Totalitarian states also emerged (German Nazism and Russian Communism) with each societal eruption technological change left the conventional world behind playing catch up to the present day.

Early in the 20^th century, the working middle class came to share in this wealth by organizing into labor unions and suing for better wages and working conditions.  Workers went awry by also giving up control of work for comfort and security.  This shadow now foils their progress. 

The 20^th century was marred by constant conflagration (i.e., WWI, WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War, etc.) and  led to wide fluctuations in the economy.  Wealth creators profited immensely during these wars swaying the working middle class away from labor unions to greater corporate control with such incentives as wage and entitlement benefits. 

When profits declined, these wealth creators downsized, outsourced work, reengineered operation, sponsored a litany of redundancy exercises or relocated to cheaper labor abroad.  Workers believed themselves powerless to do anything as they had become complacent and counter dependent on the workplace for their total well-being.

Conditioning is a powerful weapon when the mind cannot grasp life beyond its programming.

Contrast this with the fact that over the past sixty plus years or since the end of WWII in 1945, position power in industry and commerce has shifted gradually to knowledge power with workers, not management possessors of this knowledge.  Yet workers still behave as if unskilled laborers, reactive and dependent up on management.  It would be comic if it weren’t so tragic.

The United States now has the best educated workforce in the history of mankind with 80 percent of all workers belonging to this professional class.

The problem is that these professionals remain complacent, dependent and wait for wealth creators to rescue them when they have most of the power. 

It is the other 20 percent, the foot draggers, the high school dropouts, the malcontents, the drug addicts, the social misfits, the young people playing house and having children when they are still children, handicapping themselves to a life of poverty and despair that complicates the problem further. 

These people attempt to make their poor choices everyone else’s problems.  This gets the attention of academics, economists, and social thinkers with little or no attention given to the 80 percent highly qualified professionals who are underutilized and dangling on the vine as if terminally adolescents comparable to mid-20^th century unskilled workers. 

More absurd, few seem to have a proper perspective on the situation as many of these professionals bemoan their status while living at home or on the welfare dockets blaming their woes on everyone but themselves as well. 

Society has not leveraged the 80 percent professional working class to advantage.  Consequently, wealth creators have been allowed to treat this new class of workers as the “Robber Barons” treated unskilled workers in the early 20^th century.   

This astounds immigrants who have come to this country, sought an education sometimes against impossible odds, then took the risks and absorbed the pain to realize successful careers.  They display a passionate belief in America because they have found that through hard work and dedication opportunity finds them.

A PERSONAL ASIDE

Having grown up in a poor white family, my mother made it clear the only way I would go anywhere was with an education, which meant to study hard.  Taking her advice, I finished in the top ten percent of my high school class winning an academic scholarship to university, where I graduated Phi Beta Kappa.  Life has been good for having earned an academic education.  Many others have done equally well by being essentially self-educated with the results being strikingly similar.

Francis Fukuyama writes in the September/October 2014 issue of FOREIGN AFFAIRS (“America in Decay: The Sources of Political Dysfunction”) that our interior secular socioeconomic structure is anachronistic, which translates, our programming is all wrong for the times.  In Meet Your New Best Friend (2015), I write:

“To attempt to do for others what they best do for themselves is to weaken their resolve and diminish them as persons.  The same holds true of ourselves.”

Author-philosopher Charles D. Hayes is a totally self-educated man who has written widely on this problem of education, saying “Education is not something you get; education is something you take.”

We are not all as motivated as author Hayes is “to take” an education, and since credentials rule the day, it is pragmatic to get an education simply to earn a job interview.    

Many children are likely to be educated the same or less educated than their parents as parents have drifted into the role of being their children’s “best friend,” when parenting is an adult guidance system into self-dependence and has nothing to do with friendship.

WHERE AMERICA STANDS IN EDUCATION

According the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, of the 23 countries surveyed, the United States is fourth from the bottom with barely 30 percent of US adults having achieved a higher level of education than their parents did.  Even bleaker as education bottom feeders, only 1 in 20 Americans ages 25-34 from parents who did not receive a high school education have graduated from college. 

Compare this to the 20 richest countries in the OECD survey where it is one in four.

The gap between high school and college graduates in annual earnings between 1979 and 2012 was $30,000 after inflation.  This is only likely to widen with time putting more people on the dole, more people criticizing the super rich, whose children attain education levels equal to or exceeding their parents, meaning, wealth creators will remain dominant well into the future.

Badgering the rich for not paying their fair share is academic.  The rich still pay most of the tax revenue collected by the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, DC.  That, too, has always been true. 

Eduardo Porter, OECD statistician writes in The New York Times (September 14, 2014):

Educational attainment of children that is greater than that attained by their parents varies from nearly 60 percent at the top to just over 20 percent at the bottom:

ORDER OF RANKINGS: Russia, Korea, Finland, Belgium, France, Ireland, Poland, Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Sweden, Australia, Spain, Britain, Denmark, Norway, Italy, Slovak Republic, UNITED STATES, Austria, Germany, Czech Republic. 

If this is not disturbing, it is difficult to think what might be so considered.

*     *     *

The Peripatetic Philosopher shares:

Genius Realized:

Getting First Published at Age 96

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

© July 31, 2015

REFERENCE:

This was first published on March 30, 2015.  It is to appear in a collection of essays in a book to be titled SELF-CONFIDENCE: The Illusive Key to Health and Happiness.  

“Genius is only the power of making continuous effort. The line between failure and success is so fine that we scarcely know when we pass it, so fine that we are often on the line and do not know it. How many a man has thrown up his hands at a time when a little more effort, a little more patience, would have achieved success. As the tide goes clear out, so it comes clear in.  In business, sometimes prospects may seem darkest when really they are on the turn. A little more persistence, a little more effort, and what seemed hopeless failure may turn to glorious success. There is no defeat except from within; there is no failure except in no longer trying, no really insurmountable barrier save our own inherent weakness of purpose.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915), American pragmatic philosopher

IT IS NEVER TOO LATE!

Harry Louis Bernstein (May 30, 1910 – June 3, 2011) was a British-born American writer whose first published book, The Invisible Wall: A Love Story That Broke Barriers (2007), dealt with his long suffering mother Ada's struggles to feed her six children; an abusive, alcoholic father, Yankel; the anti-Semitism Bernstein and his Jewish neighbors encountered growing up in a Cheshire mill town (Stockport, now part of Greater Manchester) in northwest England; the loss of Jews and Christians from the community in World War I; and the Romeo and Juliet-like romance experienced by his sister Lily and her Christian boyfriend.

The book was started when Bernstein was 93 and published in 2007, when he was 96. The loneliness he encountered following the death of his wife, Ruby, 91, in 2002, after 67 years of marriage, was the catalyst for Bernstein to begin work on his book.

His second book, The Dream, published in 2008, centered on his family’s move to the West Side of Chicago in 1922 when he was twelve.

In 2009, Bernstein published his third book, The Golden Willow, which chronicled his married life and later years. A fourth book, What Happened to Rose, was published posthumously in 2012.  He died four days past his 101^st birthday.

Before his retirement at age 62, Bernstein worked for various movie production companies, reading scripts and working as a magazine editor for trade magazines. He also wrote freelance articles for such publications as Popular Mechanics, Family Circle and Newsweek.

Bernstein lived in Brick Township, New Jersey.  He died at the age of 101, on June 3, 2011.

The Invisible Wall tells the story of his older sister doing the unthinkable.  She falls in love with a Christian boy.  But they are separated culturally by an “invisible wall” that divides the Jewish families on one side of the cobble stone street from the Christian families on the other. 

When the young Harry Bernstein discovers the secret affair quite by accident, he has to choose between the strict morals that he has been taught all his life, his loyalty to his religious and selfless mother, and what he knows is right in his own mind.

THE PATIENCE OF GENIUS

From Harry’s earliest recollections, as early as when he was four-years-old and started to read words on a page, he felt an urge to write.  Through grammar school and high school composition was his favorite subject.

As a young man out of high school, he attempted to publish, but received only rejection slips, but he persisted, finding work where he could but always wanting to be an author.  

He met his wife, Ruby, at a dance, and it was love at first sight.  He loved her to pieces and took a job reading movie scripts of authors’ books, but changed his focus from his writing obsession to enjoying her completely. 

They had two children, and a happy home, but he was put into a total funk when she died, and found the only way to fill his loneliness was writing, which he had always done throughout his life, publishing an article here and there, but never able to capture enough attention to make a living at it.

The Invisible Wall at first experienced a fate of which he was quite familiar – constant rejections.  

He attempted to write a novel after a short piece generated enough interest that an editor asked him to give the novel idea a try, which he did, but without success.

After Ruby died, he decided to go back to the beginnings of his life, nearly ninety years in the past, and found that he had a retentive memory of those early days as if they were only yesterday. 

Instead of being discouraged at the rejections The Invisible Wall generated, he admits in the afterward of this book that he’s never lacked confidence in himself or his ability to write.  In an amusing aside, he admits to being a rather cocky soul.

In any case, an editor from Random House called, and said she had read his manuscript and that Random House would like to publish it in a small printing.  He was so elated he couldn’t believe his good fortune.

Random House published the book, and the book reviews were unanimously positive, while The New York Times put his picture on the front page of the newspaper celebrating his being a published author for the first time at the age of 96.

Columnist from across the Western World called or visited him for interviews.  He was in demand on radio, television and in magazines.  He satisfied all these demands willingly and enthusiastically.

Other publishers wanted to publish his works.  So, at 96, he wrote a sequel to The Invisible Wall and followed it with another published during his lifetime, with one published posthumously. 

Were Elbert Hubbard alive, he would have joined the celebration as he believed with all his heart that genius was not rare, but common.  The problem, he argued, was that people pay too much attention to those that say “you’re wasting your time” or whatever, not listening enough to that inner voice that says, success is right around the corner!

The Peripatetic Philosopher Reports: ARE WE TRAPPED BETWEEN TWO WORLDS? James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

© July 30, 2015

A READER REACTS:

I would take issue with your headline "We are not living in a religious age."

We may be in transition, but religion continues to play a prominent role in the lives of followers and non-followers alike.

Whether it is used as an excuse for infringing on the rights of others, or as a purpose for communities to join in support of the less fortunate, religion both unites and divides us. Just as it has for thousands of years.

For a long time religion had a monolithic quality. Heretics began to question and disprove much of the religion-based science that church dogma had forced on its constituency.

Martin Luther and King Henry VIII chose to ignore the center of power and do what was convenient. We bemoan the breakdown of society and attribute that to the dissolution of the nuclear family pointing to the ease with which parents can divorce and now don't even bother to marry. Thank you King Henry VIII.

This massive case of group think foisted upon us by religion finally boiled over to two world wars and tens of millions of deaths.

The collective "slap in the face" eroded our confidence in institutional leaders. Wow, look what these guys did. They killed and maimed our brothers and sisters, destroyed our families, wiped out large portions of international sects for what?

What did we learn? Well, let's have smaller wars instead, Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq, and maybe Iran.

The great thing about technology is it has allowed more of us to separate ourselves from the mass. It has allowed us to express that we are individuals who do not necessarily want to follow blindly the leaders who wish the common person to protect their lives of privilege.

We shouldn't let our confusion over how that individuality is expressed to obscure why people want to separate from a culture that has over and again attempted to pit the have nots against each other so the top can sustain its self-actualizing lifestyles.

DR. FISHER RESPONDS:

Thank you, Michael, for your candid remarks.

The purpose of my writing is to get readers to think, usually to things they take for granted. 

What you learn or fail to learn from what I say has much to do with your own set of biases, as my writing has to do with mine.  We never totally escape what has been programmed into our heads practically from birth no matter how much education, experience to the contrary or the reality of that experience.

Don't be offended when I say I disagree with you in this response in nearly every way. 

Religion was once responsible and accountable for something approaching a civil society. Religion has become increasingly political and combative fearing the handwriting is on the wall of its relevance if not extinction. 

Religion has gravitated to the status of a civil religion where money and power dominate.  The church is as guilty as any other institution fighting to have a share of this brand of civility, which I find is not very civil at the moment.

Civil society no longer exists in the United States or many other parts of the world.  Everything is ultimately measured in terms of wealth and power.

Nor is religion a functioning reality as purported in Christianity, Judaism, or many other isms.  These ideologies have become tainted with postmodernity greed and corruption as progress is measured in territorial imperatives. 

Conflict is the operational protocol of the planet and no place is safe with nuclear weapons of mass destruction the appetite of rogue nations.  

The only comforting aspect, and I agree we are in transition and in transformation, is that power is not having a good day. 

Power corrupts, as Lord Acton suggests, and absolutely power corrupts absolutely. 

The negative aspect of this is that leadership has become leaderless and dissonance reigns supreme.  Nobody is in charge!

It is a curiosity of the times that Harper Lee who is nearly blind and deaf has been encouraged to publish her first novel, which is the antithesis of "To Kill a Mockingbird." 

"Go Set a Watchman" (2015) exposes the other side of her mind, perhaps the real side.   The world so wanted to believe that side did not exist.

If you have ever read some of Mark Twain's dark prose, you have had an introduction to this sad and some might say sick side of his mind.  Only those interested in the exoteric are likely to know such writing exists.

The difference today is that this the sick side of the mind, the side we all have, has become commercial.  I call this the "surreal economy" for reason.

As far as technology connecting us, in my view, it has done just the opposite.  It has not only separated us from each other but separated us from ourselves. 

It is no accident that Bernie Zilbergeld has written a book with the title, "The Shrinking of America: Myths of Psychological Change" (1983).  Thirty-two years later, it still holds true only it has been accelerating into obfuscating mythology, fertile soil for exploitation.

Nor has technology liberated us, but instead incessantly bombards our sensitivities subliminally with a recipe of sick, senseless messages that we all have adopted to various degrees as variations of corporate speak.

Once, Roman Catholicism was my anchor and the focus of my life, but I came to find it was more political and vicious than any of my corporate employers only it could hide it with impressive subtlety.  

Every age has an explosive vocabulary that seeds confusion that assists those in power to remain so.  I've written about this in some detail in THE WORKER, ALONE!  Here I will mention only a couple of expressions: "false expectations."

Most Americans, whatever the color of their skin or circumstance, are precisely where they expect to be.  We gravitate to where we see ourselves being and how we see ourselves living. 

No matter how smart you are, no matter how well educated, no matter how low you are born into the food chain, no one owes you a living.  That is the mantra of America and has been since colonial days. 

Another expression is "social justice."  This expression is predicated on the misleading concept of what we all refer to has "the haves and the have nots." 

When barely 50 percent of those eligible to vote find the will to do so, and when those who vote tend to vote for people who express the same vitriolic contempt for the other side that they do, then the "haves" have no threat, no threat at all.

Just as politics have become vanilla with Democrats and Republicans being equally ineffective and dissembling and the same, religion has become vanilla as well. 

We live in a vanilla age and this has been unwittingly amplified by the Information Age.

Obviously, you disagree with me, but that is all right.  You have had the courage to express your views and that is your private window to your soul.  I respect that.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts, and

Always be well,

Jim