Recently saw "Jersey Boys" and was struck by what seemed to me to be a sub-text; that is, for a group of guys who grew up within the strict manners and mores of a society and a Church to decide to do whatever they felt like doing instead led inevitably to a series of personal and communal disasters.
This was by no means the Message of the film, although I suspect that Clint Eastwood would not have been bothered if told about its presence. But to "read the text" of the film was to see clearly that one selfish and hurtful act leads to a geometric progression of subsequent selfish and hurtful acts.
In short, the history of "the '60's" and thereafter.
Two or three generations from now, someone with the necessary emotional distance will be able to write the definitive book about the effects of this time. That book will not be written by people who suffered through it, partly because the pain is too paralyzing but mostly because most of us still believe --- despite all evidence to the contrary --- that all the various liberating ideologies were right.
It's a little easier to examine how and why it happened, although like all major cultural shifts, its chronology and causality are intricately intertwined and complex. One element, and only one, is the influence of the Humanistic Psychologists --- Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, Erich Fromm et al. These were men who came to their personal and professional maturities in the period leading up to and during the unspeakable horrors of World War II and who concluded that the rationality and faith of Western Civilization were --- patently and obviously were --- inherently corrupt. There was no other explanation for why the Germans --- especially but not uniquely --- had acted the way they had. It could only be true that we had deluded ourselves for hundreds of years that Christianity and science were the paths that led to an ever more humane progress.
Their alternative, articulated and argued in smart, thoughtful, and effective books, was to replace rationality with emotion, religious faith with the dynamics of personal relationship. Hence Dr. Rogers' "client-centered therapy" grounded in Rousseauian ideals of the inherent perfection of every human and meant to lead to the flowering of each uniquely wonderful self.
Another element was how innocent, naive, and --- therefore --- vulnerable our generation was to these seductions. It has long been a cliche that the generation of men returning from service in World War II were steadfastly silent about their experiences. The result was a social and psychic separation from their children that had many consequences, few of them beneficial.
They had lived through one kind of horror during the long Great Depression and a whole other set of horrors during the War. Now they came back, moved to the new suburbs, had children, and committed to protecting them from the kind of pain they had endured for so long. The unhappy unintended consequence of this approach to child-rearing was to keep us ignorant of "how the world wags and what wags it." That kind of ignorance leads to a lack of wisdom, foolishness, and that made us vulnerable.
A third element was that those on whom we depended for guidance --- not only parents but priests and pastors and nuns, teachers and counselors, professors and politicians, and eventually the entirety of the mass and massively influential entertainment complex --- had been seduced by the primacy of emotion and desire.
After a while, neither from the pulpit nor in popular entertainment, was one encouraged to believe that acting on principle was better --- for individuals and for society --- than acting on feeling.
I am reminded often lately of a moment during my first Rehearsal Dinner. I was expected to stand up and say something. Nor surprisingly, I was not prepared and had never thought for a moment about preparing something. As I stood there hemming and hawing, my best friend and Best Man said, "Just tell us how you feel." To him, to me, and to everyone there, that seemed perfectly apposite. I realize now that it was a metaphor for what was to come.
Barely more than 5 months after the event that began "The '60's" as a cultural phenomenon and we were already imbued.
The wisdom writers, to use a general phrase, are still available to us and one day we will turn back to them. In the meantime, there is still the occasional satirical attack on the status quo and the occasional preachment from the mass entertainment complex (especially, perhaps, The Lord of the Rings). And there are the millions of people who choose to lead lives of decency, honesty, truthfulness, modesty, trustworthiness, accountability, and caring.
"There is," as Aragorn said in time of great peril, "always Hope." As we hope, let us do what we can can, as T.S. Eliot said, to "redeem the time."
Sunday, August 10, 2014
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
School Reform
Recently I wrote about school reform mostly as a way to make a point about the current state of political apathy and to make a call for wider and deeper participation in an important discussion. The final paragraph read
We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific,
and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful
conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic society.
Now I would like to attempt to write something coherent and helpful about school reform, not as an object lesson in the importance of political participation, but as an examination and evaluation of some elements of school reform on the merits.
The basic and very frustrating problem with trying to write coherently about school reform is that the topic is akin to 7-level chess; or to some amorphous being which when any part of it is grasped, seven other parts pop out. How, I ask rhetorically, does one make sense of a phenomenon which includes the following:
a commitment to "providing" an education for all without a complementary demand that
all students work to acquire an education
a commitment to sending all students to the same secondary schools because it is the
"democratic" thing to do when all evidence shows that by adolescence students have
demonstrated various levels of intelligence, various talents, and various interests
a teaching corps which deeply desires to be considered professional while demanding
to be unionized and to have virtually untouchable job security
public opinion which harshly criticizes public schooling in the aggregate but has affection
and admiration for the local school
academic content standards which have been carefully chosen, sequentially ordered, and
which offer the opportunity to integrate, but which have led to such a rigorous testing
process aimed at determining accountability that there is less creative, engaging,
and humane teaching
Such a list could be extended by a lot, but these will suffice: Trying to get a handle on school reform in some general way is extremely difficult, so I won't try. What I will do is to touch on what I think is a key aspect of any beneficial school reform, the role of the Principal.
As it now stands, the Principal is not meant to be a visionary, decision-making, personally-engaged leader of a single school but rather a mid-level administrator, a middle manager, whose role is to communicate and enforce the policy decisions presented to her by the district for which she works. In almost all districts, the Principal's role is seen as one that can be filled by anyone who has the requisite credentials, the result being a revolving door of ambitious individuals moving in and out as they work their way up the bureaucratic hierarchy.
Recently I taught a course to graduate students in educational administration in "Transformational and Instructional Leadership." As part of the course, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on "instructional leadership." As you can see, the assumption throughout the presentation was that the Principal was an autonomous professional who had both the right and the duty to make thoughtful and creative decisions regarding the curriculum and teacher performance.
Coincidentally, someone from the university for which I was teaching the course was in class that evening. Her response to the presentation was, "Of course the Principal just has to do what they're told."
Besides being professionally deflating, this was representative of the thoroughly bureaucratic and operational understanding of the Principal's role in the school.
The other important thing to understand about the role of the Principal is that she is not trusted by the people who work for her to make sound, honest professional judgments about the people who work for her. This is part and parcel of the unionization of teachers, a furtherance of the industrial factory model upon which the relation of teachers and administrators was based some 120 years ago. In the world of the factory, there was management and there were the workers. For reasons good and not so good, the workers became organized labor in order to negotiate with management, thereby creating a relationship that was inherently mistrustful and adversarial. This was the model adopted by teachers' unions in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries and which continues today.
On this model, the Principal is "management" and the teachers are "labor." They are not professional colleagues who have different responsibilities but are collaborative colleagues in the best interests of their clients.
But if there is to be genuine school reform, this is one of the things that will have to change. In short, the Principal will have to be in charge of the single school and have both the power and the authority to make decisions about the essential activities of the school, primarily curriculum and teachers.
This would be a radical --- and shocking --- shift. Teachers would have to overcome their mistrust of "management" and learn to conceive of the Principal as a collaborative colleague who also had the authority to hire and fire; that is, as a fellow professional who was also the leader, someone who had the responsibility to lead from within but also had the responsibility to decide, in Jim Collins' now famous phrase, who was to be on the bus and who was to be off the bus.
It is not sufficient to point out that this is a successful, effective, and efficient model for most businesses, for schools are not businesses. But schools are not factories either. Schools are places that should be staffed by autonomous, creative professionals, but that statement has implications regarding demonstrated achievement, ethical adherence, and someone having the decision-making power to reward or admonish, to retain or release.
The contention that the Principal should be an autonomous, creative professional with real decision-making power has implications for far more than the relationship between labor and management and the psychology of teachers. It also has implications for the preparation of teachers and for the preparation of principals.
This is the phenomenon I touched on at the beginning: There is a complex of incoherent and conflicting ideals, ideologies, and mind-sets. It appears to be a Gordian knot, impossible to unravel. Perhaps a more congenial metaphor would be a log jam, in which there is always a key log, which when removed allows the logs to move freely again down the river. In this case, I will choose the role of the Principal as the "key log." Let's see what would happen if we start with a new definition of Principal. What would be necessary? What would have to happen to the preparation of teachers? To the preparation of principals? To the organization of schools? To the thinking about class size and school size? To the concept of accountability?
School reform is dependent on a re-conceiving of what schools are for and how they're organized. In this process of re-conceptualizing, let's start with one thing that we know would be good if it were to be effected and then see what else would have to happen to ensure that. I suggest we start with the re-definition of the Principalship.
We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from the narrow, specific,
and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public, thoughtful, and meaningful
conversation about the role of public schools in a mass, pluralistic society.
Now I would like to attempt to write something coherent and helpful about school reform, not as an object lesson in the importance of political participation, but as an examination and evaluation of some elements of school reform on the merits.
The basic and very frustrating problem with trying to write coherently about school reform is that the topic is akin to 7-level chess; or to some amorphous being which when any part of it is grasped, seven other parts pop out. How, I ask rhetorically, does one make sense of a phenomenon which includes the following:
a commitment to "providing" an education for all without a complementary demand that
all students work to acquire an education
a commitment to sending all students to the same secondary schools because it is the
"democratic" thing to do when all evidence shows that by adolescence students have
demonstrated various levels of intelligence, various talents, and various interests
a teaching corps which deeply desires to be considered professional while demanding
to be unionized and to have virtually untouchable job security
public opinion which harshly criticizes public schooling in the aggregate but has affection
and admiration for the local school
academic content standards which have been carefully chosen, sequentially ordered, and
which offer the opportunity to integrate, but which have led to such a rigorous testing
process aimed at determining accountability that there is less creative, engaging,
and humane teaching
Such a list could be extended by a lot, but these will suffice: Trying to get a handle on school reform in some general way is extremely difficult, so I won't try. What I will do is to touch on what I think is a key aspect of any beneficial school reform, the role of the Principal.
As it now stands, the Principal is not meant to be a visionary, decision-making, personally-engaged leader of a single school but rather a mid-level administrator, a middle manager, whose role is to communicate and enforce the policy decisions presented to her by the district for which she works. In almost all districts, the Principal's role is seen as one that can be filled by anyone who has the requisite credentials, the result being a revolving door of ambitious individuals moving in and out as they work their way up the bureaucratic hierarchy.
Recently I taught a course to graduate students in educational administration in "Transformational and Instructional Leadership." As part of the course, I gave a PowerPoint presentation on "instructional leadership." As you can see, the assumption throughout the presentation was that the Principal was an autonomous professional who had both the right and the duty to make thoughtful and creative decisions regarding the curriculum and teacher performance.
Coincidentally, someone from the university for which I was teaching the course was in class that evening. Her response to the presentation was, "Of course the Principal just has to do what they're told."
Besides being professionally deflating, this was representative of the thoroughly bureaucratic and operational understanding of the Principal's role in the school.
The other important thing to understand about the role of the Principal is that she is not trusted by the people who work for her to make sound, honest professional judgments about the people who work for her. This is part and parcel of the unionization of teachers, a furtherance of the industrial factory model upon which the relation of teachers and administrators was based some 120 years ago. In the world of the factory, there was management and there were the workers. For reasons good and not so good, the workers became organized labor in order to negotiate with management, thereby creating a relationship that was inherently mistrustful and adversarial. This was the model adopted by teachers' unions in the late-19th and early-20th Centuries and which continues today.
On this model, the Principal is "management" and the teachers are "labor." They are not professional colleagues who have different responsibilities but are collaborative colleagues in the best interests of their clients.
But if there is to be genuine school reform, this is one of the things that will have to change. In short, the Principal will have to be in charge of the single school and have both the power and the authority to make decisions about the essential activities of the school, primarily curriculum and teachers.
This would be a radical --- and shocking --- shift. Teachers would have to overcome their mistrust of "management" and learn to conceive of the Principal as a collaborative colleague who also had the authority to hire and fire; that is, as a fellow professional who was also the leader, someone who had the responsibility to lead from within but also had the responsibility to decide, in Jim Collins' now famous phrase, who was to be on the bus and who was to be off the bus.
It is not sufficient to point out that this is a successful, effective, and efficient model for most businesses, for schools are not businesses. But schools are not factories either. Schools are places that should be staffed by autonomous, creative professionals, but that statement has implications regarding demonstrated achievement, ethical adherence, and someone having the decision-making power to reward or admonish, to retain or release.
The contention that the Principal should be an autonomous, creative professional with real decision-making power has implications for far more than the relationship between labor and management and the psychology of teachers. It also has implications for the preparation of teachers and for the preparation of principals.
This is the phenomenon I touched on at the beginning: There is a complex of incoherent and conflicting ideals, ideologies, and mind-sets. It appears to be a Gordian knot, impossible to unravel. Perhaps a more congenial metaphor would be a log jam, in which there is always a key log, which when removed allows the logs to move freely again down the river. In this case, I will choose the role of the Principal as the "key log." Let's see what would happen if we start with a new definition of Principal. What would be necessary? What would have to happen to the preparation of teachers? To the preparation of principals? To the organization of schools? To the thinking about class size and school size? To the concept of accountability?
School reform is dependent on a re-conceiving of what schools are for and how they're organized. In this process of re-conceptualizing, let's start with one thing that we know would be good if it were to be effected and then see what else would have to happen to ensure that. I suggest we start with the re-definition of the Principalship.
Saturday, June 15, 2013
Civilized Behavior
It is possible to define civilization as opposed to other terms that signify groups of people: tribe, clan, gang, society, culture. While there is some disagreement about the precise definition of civilization among those who worry about such things, it is possible, I believe, to understand it as something distinct from those other kinds of groupings. Or, to put it in negative terms, one does not have to conflate all those terms as if there were no distinctions to be made.
The most helpful definition I have encountered is the one that says civilization requires three things: learning, religion, and law. To be blunt about it, this is to say that to the extent that a social group lacks any or all of these three things, that group is, to that extent, lacking in civilization. This obviously implies a continuum, with social groups that are more or less civilized at one end and those that are not civilized at the other.
(Not that this is an argument-settling example, but new towns on the Western frontier saw themselves as having passed over into something better when they had added a church, a school, and a law enforcement officer.)
It is important to note that all three of these qualities --- learning, religion, and law --- are not natural; that is, not instinctive. A group of people has to decide to devote time, energy, and money to learning; to set it as an ideal; to push for it for as many people as possible; to honor it; to create the resources necessary to learning, the books and libraries and museums and schools and teachers without which learning is close to impossible. A group of people has to decide to institutionalize religion and use it to give meaning to existence, to provide moral guidelines, to provide common beliefs and common practices. And a group of people has to decide that there will a code of law, derived from a moral code, that will help people refrain from acting in ways that may be "natural" but are also destructive both to the individual and to the society. They have to decide to do these things because they recognize that it is better to do so.
It is this last --- the importance of law --- that has been on my mind recently. Maybe this is nothing more than a function of aging, or maybe I'm reading the wrong daily publications, but it seems to me --- and I will claim nothing more than "it seems" --- it seems to me that there are more and more instances of people acting in ways that can be described as "natural" but are profoundly destructive of themselves and the people around them.
These are the parents who beat and torture their infant children, often to death, because the child has disturbed or interrupted or annoyed them. This is the mother who drives herself and her children into the lake so that they all drown because she feels bad. This is, apparently Jodi Arias, who seems to have felt entirely justified in doing what she did to her erstwhile boyfriend because he rejected her. This is the aggrieved former husband (or, more and more often) boyfriend who kills his ex and their children and, usually, himself as a way of punishing the ex for having caused him pain.
And there is the phenomenon of gangsterism that is so common in some urban areas that we hardly even mention it anymore. Within that world, the logic is clearly that the world is a war of all against all, that the end justifies the means, that the end is that I want something, and that preventing my getting that deserves death.
And there are the mass killers of Columbine and Viginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown. Whatever their mental health diagnoses, on some level of their interior life they "knew" that what they were going to do was justified.
And, perhaps most pertinent, the rapist: I have sexual desire and you will satisfy it, whether you want to or not.
I have never been a watcher of reality TV but I will confess that recently I have found myself staring in slack-jawed amazement at Harcore Pawn. There are several kinds of behavior manifested in these episodes that rightly provoke dismay, but the one that fits here is the person who demands that the pawnshop give him or her money, no matter what. It doesn't matter that there is no ticket, that what the person wants to do is against store policy, or in contradiction to the contract that he or she signed. It doesn't matter; they don't want to hear it.
On some unattractive level, this is amusing. And we can pass it off as simply weird, even aberrant. But I think that both of those responses miss the point: There is a profound sense of self-righteousness in these people which is something like "Because I want it you have an obligation to give it to me. And if you thwart my desire, you deserve to be punished."
And, on another level entirely, there is the Islamist belief that if you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe, you must die. That's a really big time version of this, but as we say in philosophy, it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree.
These are the beliefs and practices that law is meant to protect the society from. Civilized societies know that seeing the world as a "war of all against all," a place where the only ethical code is that the end justifies the means, and that desire defines the end, and that physical violence is the only determiner, is profoundly dangerous to the individual and to the society. And so such societies write law, make policies, and enforce those laws.
But it is obvious to anyone paying attention that the law alone is not sufficient. I believe that we could have as many policeman as civilians and it still wouldn't be "enough." A critical mass of a society has to be self-governing in order for it to be and remain civilized.
And self-governance mostly boils down to choosing to do the right thing rather than the desired thing; to do what is better for the other, or for the group, than what is better for me. To boil it down even further, it means that the parent knows --- deep in his heart, as we say --- that no matter how annoying the child is being, that the parent's primary responsibility is to the welfare of the child. It means that the pawn shop patron knows that no matter how powerful his desire, the contractual and mutally respectful relationship must be maintained. It means that "I want a baby" is not a good reason to have a child. It means that the individual knows that although "the end justifies the means" may result in short-term gain, in the long term it will be destructive to all concerned.
As I said at the beginning, maybe there is no issue here; maybe the vast majority of the American population is effectively self-governing and I should simply stop paying attention to the various sources of sensationalism. I hope that's right.
If it isn't right, then these seemingly separate instances of abberant --- that is, uncivilized --- behavior are harbingers of social breakdown and remedial work cannot begin soon enough,
The most helpful definition I have encountered is the one that says civilization requires three things: learning, religion, and law. To be blunt about it, this is to say that to the extent that a social group lacks any or all of these three things, that group is, to that extent, lacking in civilization. This obviously implies a continuum, with social groups that are more or less civilized at one end and those that are not civilized at the other.
(Not that this is an argument-settling example, but new towns on the Western frontier saw themselves as having passed over into something better when they had added a church, a school, and a law enforcement officer.)
It is important to note that all three of these qualities --- learning, religion, and law --- are not natural; that is, not instinctive. A group of people has to decide to devote time, energy, and money to learning; to set it as an ideal; to push for it for as many people as possible; to honor it; to create the resources necessary to learning, the books and libraries and museums and schools and teachers without which learning is close to impossible. A group of people has to decide to institutionalize religion and use it to give meaning to existence, to provide moral guidelines, to provide common beliefs and common practices. And a group of people has to decide that there will a code of law, derived from a moral code, that will help people refrain from acting in ways that may be "natural" but are also destructive both to the individual and to the society. They have to decide to do these things because they recognize that it is better to do so.
It is this last --- the importance of law --- that has been on my mind recently. Maybe this is nothing more than a function of aging, or maybe I'm reading the wrong daily publications, but it seems to me --- and I will claim nothing more than "it seems" --- it seems to me that there are more and more instances of people acting in ways that can be described as "natural" but are profoundly destructive of themselves and the people around them.
These are the parents who beat and torture their infant children, often to death, because the child has disturbed or interrupted or annoyed them. This is the mother who drives herself and her children into the lake so that they all drown because she feels bad. This is, apparently Jodi Arias, who seems to have felt entirely justified in doing what she did to her erstwhile boyfriend because he rejected her. This is the aggrieved former husband (or, more and more often) boyfriend who kills his ex and their children and, usually, himself as a way of punishing the ex for having caused him pain.
And there is the phenomenon of gangsterism that is so common in some urban areas that we hardly even mention it anymore. Within that world, the logic is clearly that the world is a war of all against all, that the end justifies the means, that the end is that I want something, and that preventing my getting that deserves death.
And there are the mass killers of Columbine and Viginia Tech and Aurora and Newtown. Whatever their mental health diagnoses, on some level of their interior life they "knew" that what they were going to do was justified.
And, perhaps most pertinent, the rapist: I have sexual desire and you will satisfy it, whether you want to or not.
I have never been a watcher of reality TV but I will confess that recently I have found myself staring in slack-jawed amazement at Harcore Pawn. There are several kinds of behavior manifested in these episodes that rightly provoke dismay, but the one that fits here is the person who demands that the pawnshop give him or her money, no matter what. It doesn't matter that there is no ticket, that what the person wants to do is against store policy, or in contradiction to the contract that he or she signed. It doesn't matter; they don't want to hear it.
On some unattractive level, this is amusing. And we can pass it off as simply weird, even aberrant. But I think that both of those responses miss the point: There is a profound sense of self-righteousness in these people which is something like "Because I want it you have an obligation to give it to me. And if you thwart my desire, you deserve to be punished."
And, on another level entirely, there is the Islamist belief that if you don't believe what I think you're supposed to believe, you must die. That's a really big time version of this, but as we say in philosophy, it is not a difference in kind, only a difference in degree.
These are the beliefs and practices that law is meant to protect the society from. Civilized societies know that seeing the world as a "war of all against all," a place where the only ethical code is that the end justifies the means, and that desire defines the end, and that physical violence is the only determiner, is profoundly dangerous to the individual and to the society. And so such societies write law, make policies, and enforce those laws.
But it is obvious to anyone paying attention that the law alone is not sufficient. I believe that we could have as many policeman as civilians and it still wouldn't be "enough." A critical mass of a society has to be self-governing in order for it to be and remain civilized.
And self-governance mostly boils down to choosing to do the right thing rather than the desired thing; to do what is better for the other, or for the group, than what is better for me. To boil it down even further, it means that the parent knows --- deep in his heart, as we say --- that no matter how annoying the child is being, that the parent's primary responsibility is to the welfare of the child. It means that the pawn shop patron knows that no matter how powerful his desire, the contractual and mutally respectful relationship must be maintained. It means that "I want a baby" is not a good reason to have a child. It means that the individual knows that although "the end justifies the means" may result in short-term gain, in the long term it will be destructive to all concerned.
As I said at the beginning, maybe there is no issue here; maybe the vast majority of the American population is effectively self-governing and I should simply stop paying attention to the various sources of sensationalism. I hope that's right.
If it isn't right, then these seemingly separate instances of abberant --- that is, uncivilized --- behavior are harbingers of social breakdown and remedial work cannot begin soon enough,
Sunday, June 2, 2013
Democratic Participation
There are two conceptual problems when trying to talk about “school
reform.” The first is that those who are already involved in the debate are
fighting for specific policies that they want to see implemented now, while
lacking any historical or philosophical understanding of American public
schooling; in other words, no understanding of how we got here and, therefore,
little or no informing background concerning what public schooling ought to be
and why.
The second is that the debate is being waged by a relatively
small group of people, while the great majority of the population is entirely
disengaged from it. It is an extreme example of “inside baseball,” even though
the questions and the potential answers affect everyone in the polis, and in serious ways.
These two conceptual problems create a practical problem.
Because the debate is focused entirely on the operational, any attempt to place
the debate in a larger historical and philosophical context will inevitably be
seen as pedantic, inapplicable, and boring.
This has created a classic vicious circle: The people who
will be most affected by any such policy decisions don’t want to hear about it
thereby allowing the handful of people who do care about it to fight it out
without awareness or participation from the larger public. This makes it an
excellent metaphor for all the political questions of our time and well our
politicians know it. While some pundits decry the lack of honest and
intellectual public grappling with important issues, successful politicians and
their handlers know that it is much safer to speak banalities and pre-approved
catch-phrases, which the larger public is apparently happy to let them do.
It would be helpful to understand that this democratic
process --- that is, a political process which engages all citizens so that it
can in fact be “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people”
--- is at the heart of the creation of schools paid for by public funds and
then requiring all students to attend them for as long as possible in the
context of over 300 million persons. It would not be an exaggeration to say
that choosing to do such a thing was and is the greatest experiment in
democracy ever attempted.
Although we now take the ubiquitous public school for
granted, it was not always thus. During the Colonial Period and well into the
19th Century, virtually all schools were funded by private money, by
tuition. It wasn’t until the 1830’s and 1840’s that states took the
extraordinary step of imposing a new tax to support schools for all students.
To show what a remarkable step this was, consider the fact that Thomas
Jefferson went to the Virginia House of Burgesses three separate times to
request funding for a free grades 1-3 education for all students. All three
times, his proposal was rejected.
Why, then, did state legislators, then as now leery of
imposing taxes, choose to fund schools with public money? The answer is simple
and straightforward and easy to understand: By the 1830’s, the United States
had committed to a democratic republic form of government, one in which they
knew that the suffrage would be extended more and more, and they knew that if
citizens were going to be granted liberty, they would have to be taught how to
use that liberty well. While they still could take for granted the influence of
home and church, the way that the State would form citizens by imbuing them
with the right principles and the right practices, would be at school. To put
it another way, religious sectarianism and ethnic solidarity were fine in the
home and in the neighborhood, but the way young people would all become
Americans was in what Horace Mann called “the common school.”
Over time, more and more young people went to school and
spent longer and longer there. It happened slowly, but it happened steadily,
until by the 1950’s it was taken for granted that (virtually) everyone would
graduate from high school. We take this for granted (to the point where those
who ‘drop out’ of high school are a scandal) but historically this was not just
unprecedented, it was remarkably odd. That everyone should read and virtually
everyone should vote was unimaginable through most of human history.
That schooling in the United States has become more and more
democratic --- that is, more and more
inclusive --- is a straightforward story, based on a kind of faith that more
schooling makes for more personal and social success.
Where the story has not been straightforward but, rather,
full of contradiction and conflict, has been in our definition of the deep
purposes of publicly-funded schools.
From the time of the Colonial one-room school house until
the end of World War I in 1918, there was a remarkable consistency in the
publicly understood purposes of schooling. To review the history of this period
of some 300 years is to reveal what seem like big changes, but the common
element, despite huge changes in circumstance, was the belief that public schools
were meant to form students as American citizens. But, as with so many things,
that was no longer the case after 1918. From that time to the present, there
have been deep and powerful conflicts within the American public over the role
and purpose of public schools. Rather than a commitment to a fairly consistent
set of principles, the period since the end of World War I has seen dramatic
shifts in our thinking about the purposes of public schooling: progressives vs
traditionalists; essentialists vs those who believed in a child-centered
curriculum; scientific curriculum-making vs social meliorism; life-adjustment
vs back-to-basics.
This is a frustrating story, at least for those of us who
believe it’s possible to settle on a set of right purposes and figure out how
best to achieve them. But here is the comforting or confounding thing about
this story (depending on how you look at it): Our commitment to democracy has
led to our inability or unwillingness to commit to a form of schooling
specifically aimed at preparing young people to be thoughtful, active, and
principled citizens of a mass and pluralistic democracy.
Within the great democratic conversation, there is so much disagreement that we have not --- for good or ill --- been able to come to a consensus about what the deep purposes of school should be. As a result, our default setting is to think of schools as places that are relatively safe, where a reasonable number of academic and other activities are available, and where young people can be free to “develop” without attempts by teachers, administrators, or the State to “form” them.
Within the great democratic conversation, there is so much disagreement that we have not --- for good or ill --- been able to come to a consensus about what the deep purposes of school should be. As a result, our default setting is to think of schools as places that are relatively safe, where a reasonable number of academic and other activities are available, and where young people can be free to “develop” without attempts by teachers, administrators, or the State to “form” them.
Currently, the battle over the purpose of public schooling
is dominated by the conflict between what we can imprecisely call the “standards”
people and those who represent the “ante-standards”
people. These are shoddy descriptors that would rightly offend both sides, but
some kind of shorthand is needed.
After the institutional self-immolation of the ‘60’s and ’70’s,
there was first a public outcry against what was happening in public schools,
and then the Federal pamphlet “A Nation at Risk,” and then the governors of the
several states committing to a re-definition of public school curriculum, and
then to each state creating a set of academic content standards.
Logically, having standards in any field of human endeavor
implies having an assessment to find out if those standards have been met, so
there had to be some form of testing and given the many millions of students,
that testing would have to be standardized. With the involvement of the Federal
government in the “No Child Left Behind” act, given the immense amounts of
money that almost every school district depended on, standardized testing
became the tail that would wag the dog.
The not necessarily wise but logical development of this
process has brought us to “Race to the Top” and the Core Content Standards, both of which have
provoked a reaction, mostly by teachers but apparently by more and more
parents. Anger over the dominance of standardized testing, a frustration which
has been growing greater and greater over the last dozen or so years, has led
some teachers and others outside the system to contend that students, parents,
and teachers should “opt out,” which would amount to a kind of passive
resistance movement.
Anger over the Core Content Standards is a whole other
kettle of fish, but is related because of its connection to and its dependence
on the standardized testing industry.
I think it is essentially important to see the current
conflict in two larger contexts. The first is that it is just the current
manifestation of the on-going and ever more complicated debate since 1919 over
what the purpose of public schools is and how that purpose should be pursued.
The second is that everyone involved on both sides of this
conflict is convinced that they are right and the other guys are wrong. This is
at the very heart of the great democratic conversation and so is entirely
understandable. Both sides are involved in an incredibly varied, rich,
frustrating, and engaging democratic process, and the stakes seem incredibly
high.
Bu like all the battles fought before it in this on-going
war, this will be resolved, one way or another and life will go on.
There have been so many ebbs and flows, triumphs and
failures, in this process since 1919, that I’m less worried about the specifics
of the current iteration and much more worried about the apathetic self-removal
of the larger public from the conversation.
We live in a time where self-interest and self-importance
predominate. If I don’t have children in public school, I don’t care. Even if I
do have children in public school, I care only about them and their experience.
But this conflict requires that eventually the public come
to a meaningful conclusion about the deep purposes of the most “public” institution
in the United States.
We have to hope that someone will start to move us away from
the narrow, specific, and moment-bound policy debates and toward a public,
thoughtful, and meaningful conversation about the role of public schools in a
mass, pluralistic democracy.
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
All You Need is Love
Yesterday I had lunch with 17 men whose only common bonds were their friendship with and affection for Pat Mullen and their having gone to the Jesuits for high school and/or college. It was almost entirely a wonderful experience. The conversation was easy; no one was texting or checking his cell phone; and there were lots of funny stories, most of them true, all of them self-deprecating.
But I am prone to abstracting things beyond all recognizability so part of me part of the time was wondering about the people from those stories who were no longer with us, who had died. Died! These were vital, enjoyable people, people whose presence in my life made it better and more meaningful, and now they were gone. How could that possibly happen? What could that possibly mean?
And given that the lunch group was made up of men who were 70 and 71, I smoothly shifted into wondering about our deaths. How we looked and how we acted did not line up with my image of being 70 and yet I know that none of us has too terribly long to be here. Being there in the midst of all that vitality and energy and humor, it was almost impossible to imagine.
This kind of thinking leads one almost inevitably to some kind of fatalism, a spiritual throwing-up-of-hands, a giving up, and I could tell that I wasn't far from that.
This morning I was blessed by a Facebook post by Darya Bronston, a long version of the Liberty Mutual TV ads based on the notion of paying it forward (you can see it here), and it struck me that in the midst of all the confusion and contradiction that is life, the one thing that is always true, that always matters is acting in love.
Aristotle taught essentially the same thing, except that he framed it as "practicing the virtues." He knew that the only way to achieve happiness --- not pleasure or the satisfaction of desire, but happiness --- was to act well.
And, of course, it was Jesus of Nazareth who taught this most powerfully: "Love another as I have loved you."
For those who are tempted to believe that this teaching has to do only with romantic or filial or familial affection, read Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 4-7. This is seriously demanding stuff.
And the much more recent Immanuel Kant argued that we must never treat other people as "objects" but only as "subjects;" that is, that we must never use people for our own purposes as if they were things but must always treat them with the respect that is due them because of their inherent worth and dignity.
To act in love always. Always. To use a line from one of the characters in the James Lee Burke novels, "everything else is just rock 'n' roll."
I recommend the video that Darya posted. I also recommend a Valentine's Day meditation I wrote almost five years ago: Devotions
And, as I say in the "Devotions," properly understood, John and Paul were right: "All You Need is Love."
But I am prone to abstracting things beyond all recognizability so part of me part of the time was wondering about the people from those stories who were no longer with us, who had died. Died! These were vital, enjoyable people, people whose presence in my life made it better and more meaningful, and now they were gone. How could that possibly happen? What could that possibly mean?
And given that the lunch group was made up of men who were 70 and 71, I smoothly shifted into wondering about our deaths. How we looked and how we acted did not line up with my image of being 70 and yet I know that none of us has too terribly long to be here. Being there in the midst of all that vitality and energy and humor, it was almost impossible to imagine.
This kind of thinking leads one almost inevitably to some kind of fatalism, a spiritual throwing-up-of-hands, a giving up, and I could tell that I wasn't far from that.
This morning I was blessed by a Facebook post by Darya Bronston, a long version of the Liberty Mutual TV ads based on the notion of paying it forward (you can see it here), and it struck me that in the midst of all the confusion and contradiction that is life, the one thing that is always true, that always matters is acting in love.
Aristotle taught essentially the same thing, except that he framed it as "practicing the virtues." He knew that the only way to achieve happiness --- not pleasure or the satisfaction of desire, but happiness --- was to act well.
And, of course, it was Jesus of Nazareth who taught this most powerfully: "Love another as I have loved you."
For those who are tempted to believe that this teaching has to do only with romantic or filial or familial affection, read Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 13, Verses 4-7. This is seriously demanding stuff.
And the much more recent Immanuel Kant argued that we must never treat other people as "objects" but only as "subjects;" that is, that we must never use people for our own purposes as if they were things but must always treat them with the respect that is due them because of their inherent worth and dignity.
To act in love always. Always. To use a line from one of the characters in the James Lee Burke novels, "everything else is just rock 'n' roll."
I recommend the video that Darya posted. I also recommend a Valentine's Day meditation I wrote almost five years ago: Devotions
And, as I say in the "Devotions," properly understood, John and Paul were right: "All You Need is Love."
Monday, January 21, 2013
A Reminder from the Reverend Doctor King
"Moral principles have lost their distinctiveness. For modern man, absolute right and wrong and are a matter of what the majority are doing. Right and wrong are relative to the likes and dislikes and customs of a particular community. We have unconsciously applied Einstein's theory of relativity, which properly describes the physical universe, to the moral and ethical realm.....This mentality has brought a tragic breakdown of moral standards, and the midnight of moral degeneration deepens."
from "A Knock at Midnight" (1963)
from "A Knock at Midnight" (1963)
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Our Time
My perception is that we live in a particularly confounding time, and the more history, literary criticism, and culture criticism I read, the more convinced I am that I'm right.
There are, however, two things that I must keep in mind when heading into this. The first is that temperamentally I am prone to pessimism. I have fought against this my whole life, and I like to think that I've hidden it pretty successfully, but I know it's there and I certainly don't want my version of culture analysis to be nothing more than a feelings-driven rant.
The second is that I have lived through a time of remarkable change, in matters small and large, and the tendency --- especially as one gets older --- is to see change as leading to things that are not just different but worse. This, too, I hope to transcend.
For a long time, I have thought that the period between the Civil War and World War I was a time of defining change in American life; that the change took place before the War; and that the period after the War right up until our own time is of a piece. In other words, and in very broad strokes, that there was an American life before the Civil War that was irretrievably lost; that there were a large number of economic, social, and political changes in the period between 1865 and 1914; and that the new American life that came about because of those changes has been remarkably the same since 1919, despite the obvious differences on the surface.
I make this point partly for its own sake but mostly to set up an example. The changes in American life between the Civil War and World War I were huge and most, if not all, of them were driven by the changes in our economic life. The North's victory had committed the United States to the modern way of doing things which positioned us perfectly to take advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's. Put briefly, this led to the creation of monopolies and to the creation of vast new wealth, much of it held by people from places different from the established centers of economic and political power in the East.
These were "the new men," the nouveaux riches, the "men of affairs," the masters of what Twain called The Gilded Age. These were men for whom wealth was all, except to the extent that wealth led to power. There was much talk of an "invisible government," the influence wielded by the wealthy on matters of public policy. And it was not mere talk: Commodore Vanderbilt once said, "Law! What do I care about law? Hain't I got the power?"
These new economic realities provoked a number of reformist (and even revolutionary) responses; it was a time of a great deal of unrest. But the movement that won out was Progressivism and the most visible sign of its real-world triumph was that it held the White House from 1901 to 1917, under Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
Progressivism is difficult to talk about because it is made up of a complex and even contradictory set of attitudes and goals. In general, the Progressive story is about the conflict between liberal righteousness and evil. But in practice, the movement included a revolutionary mood but resulted in no revolution; it was the political champion of the middle class but also encouraged socialism; it was devoted to the poor and downtrodden but also enthusiastic about imperialism. So it's not that Progressivism was a unified and coherent movement.
But either despite its incoherence or because of it, Progressivism became the popular response to the economic evils of the time. There was an enthusiasm for it unlike anything that we have seen in our lifetime.
One of the many things that I find confounding about our time is that although many of the same economic evils exist today, there is no generally embraced response to them.
Both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were meant to be reformist but it didn't take very long for both of them to be quietly moved to the sidelines.
Bankers and other versions of financiers have committed the most egregious crimes against both the law and the people to whom they had a moral obligation, yet, with the exception of a few highly publicized scapegoats, they are not only not in jail but are continuing to make obscene amounts of money.
It is also hard --- hard for me, at any rate --- to believe that federal and state executives and legislators are as inept as they appear to be. It is far easier to believe that there is still an "invisible government," one that influences through power that comes from wealth and economic influence.
And while our involvement in overseas wars is not popular, there is little enthusiasm, much less a wide-spread popular movement, against them.
So, despite living with essentially the same phenomena that created Progressivism in the 1890's, we mostly just go about our business, tacitly giving our approval to the way things are.
It's important to remember that while it is true that industrial capitalism has produced great wealth for a few people, and created a perhaps-too-large gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, it is also true that industrial capitalism has --- contra Marx's prediction --- created wealth and distributed that wealth much more widely than anyone could possibly have predicted 100 years ago. Most of us have a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of which didn't even exist 60 years ago.
So maybe the reason we are as tolerant of economic and political misbehavior as we are is that most of us are so well off. We have bread and we have circuses, and we have very, very little knowledge of the past and its meaning for the present. (And the few financiers and politicians who are revealed, shamed, removed from their positions, and jailed are seen as just part of the circus.)
The Progressives of the 1890's rightly saw the miserable conditions of the new industrial cities as a target for reform. Industrial capitalism had created a widespread and intense poverty that was morally unacceptable. The victories of the Progressives, although hardly total, were victories against that poverty.
We have no analog to that progressive enthusiasm, perhaps because most of us are so well off and few of us are aware of and morally outraged by the morally unacceptable conditions of our own time.
But just as it is difficult to talk about Progressivism because of its complexity, it is difficult to talk about our own time in this regard. While it seems obvious to me that there is not a generally felt enthusiasm for reform, it is also true that there are thousands of public and private agencies that work tirelessly on behalf of those who are in need.
Maybe that lack of generalized enthusiasm is because we have been so successful in creating "progressive" social agencies and we now see that as a reform already accomplished.
I don't know. I told you: I find this time confounding.
There are, however, two things that I must keep in mind when heading into this. The first is that temperamentally I am prone to pessimism. I have fought against this my whole life, and I like to think that I've hidden it pretty successfully, but I know it's there and I certainly don't want my version of culture analysis to be nothing more than a feelings-driven rant.
The second is that I have lived through a time of remarkable change, in matters small and large, and the tendency --- especially as one gets older --- is to see change as leading to things that are not just different but worse. This, too, I hope to transcend.
For a long time, I have thought that the period between the Civil War and World War I was a time of defining change in American life; that the change took place before the War; and that the period after the War right up until our own time is of a piece. In other words, and in very broad strokes, that there was an American life before the Civil War that was irretrievably lost; that there were a large number of economic, social, and political changes in the period between 1865 and 1914; and that the new American life that came about because of those changes has been remarkably the same since 1919, despite the obvious differences on the surface.
I make this point partly for its own sake but mostly to set up an example. The changes in American life between the Civil War and World War I were huge and most, if not all, of them were driven by the changes in our economic life. The North's victory had committed the United States to the modern way of doing things which positioned us perfectly to take advantage of the Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's. Put briefly, this led to the creation of monopolies and to the creation of vast new wealth, much of it held by people from places different from the established centers of economic and political power in the East.
These were "the new men," the nouveaux riches, the "men of affairs," the masters of what Twain called The Gilded Age. These were men for whom wealth was all, except to the extent that wealth led to power. There was much talk of an "invisible government," the influence wielded by the wealthy on matters of public policy. And it was not mere talk: Commodore Vanderbilt once said, "Law! What do I care about law? Hain't I got the power?"
These new economic realities provoked a number of reformist (and even revolutionary) responses; it was a time of a great deal of unrest. But the movement that won out was Progressivism and the most visible sign of its real-world triumph was that it held the White House from 1901 to 1917, under Theodore Roosevelt, Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson.
Progressivism is difficult to talk about because it is made up of a complex and even contradictory set of attitudes and goals. In general, the Progressive story is about the conflict between liberal righteousness and evil. But in practice, the movement included a revolutionary mood but resulted in no revolution; it was the political champion of the middle class but also encouraged socialism; it was devoted to the poor and downtrodden but also enthusiastic about imperialism. So it's not that Progressivism was a unified and coherent movement.
But either despite its incoherence or because of it, Progressivism became the popular response to the economic evils of the time. There was an enthusiasm for it unlike anything that we have seen in our lifetime.
One of the many things that I find confounding about our time is that although many of the same economic evils exist today, there is no generally embraced response to them.
Both the Tea Party and the Occupy Movement were meant to be reformist but it didn't take very long for both of them to be quietly moved to the sidelines.
Bankers and other versions of financiers have committed the most egregious crimes against both the law and the people to whom they had a moral obligation, yet, with the exception of a few highly publicized scapegoats, they are not only not in jail but are continuing to make obscene amounts of money.
It is also hard --- hard for me, at any rate --- to believe that federal and state executives and legislators are as inept as they appear to be. It is far easier to believe that there is still an "invisible government," one that influences through power that comes from wealth and economic influence.
And while our involvement in overseas wars is not popular, there is little enthusiasm, much less a wide-spread popular movement, against them.
So, despite living with essentially the same phenomena that created Progressivism in the 1890's, we mostly just go about our business, tacitly giving our approval to the way things are.
It's important to remember that while it is true that industrial capitalism has produced great wealth for a few people, and created a perhaps-too-large gap between those at the top and those at the bottom, it is also true that industrial capitalism has --- contra Marx's prediction --- created wealth and distributed that wealth much more widely than anyone could possibly have predicted 100 years ago. Most of us have a whole bunch of stuff, a lot of which didn't even exist 60 years ago.
So maybe the reason we are as tolerant of economic and political misbehavior as we are is that most of us are so well off. We have bread and we have circuses, and we have very, very little knowledge of the past and its meaning for the present. (And the few financiers and politicians who are revealed, shamed, removed from their positions, and jailed are seen as just part of the circus.)
The Progressives of the 1890's rightly saw the miserable conditions of the new industrial cities as a target for reform. Industrial capitalism had created a widespread and intense poverty that was morally unacceptable. The victories of the Progressives, although hardly total, were victories against that poverty.
We have no analog to that progressive enthusiasm, perhaps because most of us are so well off and few of us are aware of and morally outraged by the morally unacceptable conditions of our own time.
But just as it is difficult to talk about Progressivism because of its complexity, it is difficult to talk about our own time in this regard. While it seems obvious to me that there is not a generally felt enthusiasm for reform, it is also true that there are thousands of public and private agencies that work tirelessly on behalf of those who are in need.
Maybe that lack of generalized enthusiasm is because we have been so successful in creating "progressive" social agencies and we now see that as a reform already accomplished.
I don't know. I told you: I find this time confounding.
Wednesday, January 16, 2013
The Meaning of Music
The music we compose; the music we listen to, in concerts and in the car and at home and on our MP3 players; the music we dance to and sing along with --- that music is not mere distraction or entertainment, not merely the sound track to our lives, not merely sound to drown out the silence. Besides being all those things, all that music is also representative of how we think about ourselves, each other, and the world.
Music, in other words, reveals and represents the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist. This is more true of our time than of any other because music, for the first time in history, is available to everyone all the time; and the nature of the music we listen to is formed by the tastes of the great mass of people as never before. Or, rather, the incredible variety of musical types is formed by the tastes of the unfathomable diversity of the listening audience.
It's worth noting that historically this is a great oddity. Through most of the history of the West, the experience of listening to music was limited to performance and performance was usually for the privileged few. It wasn't until the late 18th Century that the performance of music had moved from the chambers of the aristocracy to the public halls, and not until the 1950's, with the invention of the transistor radio and the car radio and the home stereo system, that listening to music all the time became possible. We have no idea what the great operatic voices of the 1770's sounded like but we have every recorded note of contemporary singers available to us through a variety of media.
And music, like almost everything else in modern life, has been commodified, so that giving the customer what he wants has become the driving force behind musical creativity. This has many drawbacks, as does the commodification if so many inherently worthwhile things, but it also means that contemporary music is more revealing of the zeitgeist than music has ever been. Previously, one could argue that while the great musical composer might have seen the world in a certain way, it was impossible to say with any certainty, using music as evidence, how the great mass of people understood human nature and the nature of the rest of creation.
But if we allow that music is representative of how we see ourselves, how we see our relationships to one another, and how we see our place in great scheme of things, then we have a historically unique amount of data to use in the process of using music to reveal the spirit of our time.
I write this because I have lately been in mind of a clever cultural insight from a mid-20th Century English author: "When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order. When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling 'Look at me! Look at me!'" With apologies to him, and with well-deserved humility, I want to try expand that insight, both backward and forward:
When I listen to Bach, I hear the divine order.
When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order.
When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
When I listen to the "serious" music of the 20th Century (Stravinsky, Cage, Glass et al) I hear confusion and disorder.
This last is not an insult, although I admit to loathing 20th Century music. Confusion and disorder were the self-conscious goals of musical composers, choreographers, and visual artists of the early 20th Century, a revolt against what they saw as the unnatural and repressive constraints of the past. To me it is clear that the talented, even gifted, composers and choreographers and artists of our time have succeeded grandly.
What is particularly interesting is how confusion and disorder inform so much of popular music. While much --- but not all --- of contemporary balladry still maintains a clear language, there is a whole world out there of very popular music which is little more than beat and rhythm covered by lyrics that are not only incoherent but which, under any kind of analysis, reveal no clear meaning, even line to line.
The interesting part is that this is exactly what the aesthetic revolutionaries of the early 20th Century were pushing for. They believed that there was no meaning and that rules of composition were arbitrary and without meaningful purpose. Their goal was the sensational, the shocking, the momentary. Life was made up of a series of feelings, insights, desires, fears, etc., without pattern, and certainly without meaning, and art --- if it were to be genuine --- should represent that reality. Life was chaotic and mostly based on the senses and an honest art should reflect the truth of that experience.
Whether in the concert hall or on ear-buds, music reveals and reinforces an understanding of reality and one's place in it. While many of us are prone to dismiss the criticism of contemporary distractions by saying, "Oh, it's just entertainment," on some level we know better. We live in a time when what the people want is the ultimate arbiter of taste, so what do we want? Or, to really push it, what should we want?
Music, in other words, reveals and represents the spirit of our time, the zeitgeist. This is more true of our time than of any other because music, for the first time in history, is available to everyone all the time; and the nature of the music we listen to is formed by the tastes of the great mass of people as never before. Or, rather, the incredible variety of musical types is formed by the tastes of the unfathomable diversity of the listening audience.
It's worth noting that historically this is a great oddity. Through most of the history of the West, the experience of listening to music was limited to performance and performance was usually for the privileged few. It wasn't until the late 18th Century that the performance of music had moved from the chambers of the aristocracy to the public halls, and not until the 1950's, with the invention of the transistor radio and the car radio and the home stereo system, that listening to music all the time became possible. We have no idea what the great operatic voices of the 1770's sounded like but we have every recorded note of contemporary singers available to us through a variety of media.
And music, like almost everything else in modern life, has been commodified, so that giving the customer what he wants has become the driving force behind musical creativity. This has many drawbacks, as does the commodification if so many inherently worthwhile things, but it also means that contemporary music is more revealing of the zeitgeist than music has ever been. Previously, one could argue that while the great musical composer might have seen the world in a certain way, it was impossible to say with any certainty, using music as evidence, how the great mass of people understood human nature and the nature of the rest of creation.
But if we allow that music is representative of how we see ourselves, how we see our relationships to one another, and how we see our place in great scheme of things, then we have a historically unique amount of data to use in the process of using music to reveal the spirit of our time.
I write this because I have lately been in mind of a clever cultural insight from a mid-20th Century English author: "When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order. When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling 'Look at me! Look at me!'" With apologies to him, and with well-deserved humility, I want to try expand that insight, both backward and forward:
When I listen to Bach, I hear the divine order.
When I listen to Mozart, I hear the imperial order.
When I listen to Beethoven, I hear a little man on a rock yelling "Look at me! Look at me!"
When I listen to the "serious" music of the 20th Century (Stravinsky, Cage, Glass et al) I hear confusion and disorder.
This last is not an insult, although I admit to loathing 20th Century music. Confusion and disorder were the self-conscious goals of musical composers, choreographers, and visual artists of the early 20th Century, a revolt against what they saw as the unnatural and repressive constraints of the past. To me it is clear that the talented, even gifted, composers and choreographers and artists of our time have succeeded grandly.
What is particularly interesting is how confusion and disorder inform so much of popular music. While much --- but not all --- of contemporary balladry still maintains a clear language, there is a whole world out there of very popular music which is little more than beat and rhythm covered by lyrics that are not only incoherent but which, under any kind of analysis, reveal no clear meaning, even line to line.
The interesting part is that this is exactly what the aesthetic revolutionaries of the early 20th Century were pushing for. They believed that there was no meaning and that rules of composition were arbitrary and without meaningful purpose. Their goal was the sensational, the shocking, the momentary. Life was made up of a series of feelings, insights, desires, fears, etc., without pattern, and certainly without meaning, and art --- if it were to be genuine --- should represent that reality. Life was chaotic and mostly based on the senses and an honest art should reflect the truth of that experience.
Whether in the concert hall or on ear-buds, music reveals and reinforces an understanding of reality and one's place in it. While many of us are prone to dismiss the criticism of contemporary distractions by saying, "Oh, it's just entertainment," on some level we know better. We live in a time when what the people want is the ultimate arbiter of taste, so what do we want? Or, to really push it, what should we want?
Sunday, December 9, 2012
The Meaning of Christmas
No matter how conscientious one is at trying to stay out of line of fire and wait for the attack to be over, it seems impossible to avoid entirely the almost literally non-stop bombardment of "holiday" ads --- in print, on television, on billboards, on the radio, before movies, on virtually every site in the virtual world of the internet. It can be done, of course, but it would require a true retreat from the world, not merely a vague attempt to ignore, and I'm not willing to do that, so I continue to be hit, as it were. I wish that they were, as so many old movies and TV shows put it, only flesh wounds, but I know better: each one is a blow to the soul.
This has been going on for so long that most of us take it for granted, although I think that it goes beyond that. My intuition is that some critical mass of us now positively affirms the contemporary nature of "the holidays" with all its pressure to buy exactly the right thing for all those people who are going to be disappointed and critical if you don't; to entertain friends, neighbors, and family, and to do it in a way that will not allow for criticism from them; and to be "joyful" through it all. "The Holidays" as social and emotional obligation: One can almost see the old cartoon portrayals of the fat, cigar-smoking capitalists chuckling with satisfaction at how cleverly they have co-opted the events and manipulated us.
This is, of course, not just cognitive dissonance but the imposition --- and now the embracing --- of obligations that are impossible to meet. Through the influence of the most talented and effective industrial psychologists in the world, we have become our own crazy-making torturers.
(From 1958, here is Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas" wherein he satirizes the commercialization of Christmas. He was right then, but the current reality has gone way beyond what he was seeing. For one, we have successfully commodified all the traditions of Christmas. Even the most faithful or the most sentimental stories are vaguely accepted as just part of the great blob of "holiday tradition.")
I suggest that, to the extent each of us finds it possible, to step outside this dance circle and think about and act on either of two actually meaningful ways of looking at these end-of-year celebrations. (There are other traditional and meaningful celebrations at this time of year, none of which I know enough about to include here.)
The first is the orthodox Christian understanding of Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, the coming into the world of the Messiah, God Himself choosing to live not only among His creatures but as one of them; to live a fully human life with all its joys and sorrows; and ultimately to suffer and die, just as we do. The story as it used to be told was this: After Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin, one of the effects was that Heaven was closed to humans, and it would take a sacrifice to overcome the effects of that sin and to re-open the gates of Heaven, and that is why the Son of God came to live among us and to die for us.
Whatever your theological position on this story, it is undeniably, as Fulton Oursler put it, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
So Christmas --- the Mass of the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah --- is the remembrance, the celebration of what believing Christians see as the most auspicious event in the history of the world. (It is no accident the world of Christendom saw history as separated into the time before the coming of the Christ and the time after the coming of the Christ.)
In this way of thinking about Christmas, the giving of gifts to one another is a small, symbolic representation of the great gift of Salvation given by God to His creatures. And it is supposed to be a reminder that, to put it crudely, we are all in this together, that God came to be with all of us so that we all could be redeemed, that we are all eternally loved creatures of an eternally and infinitely loving God. So gathering in some kind of communion is also a way to symbolize the great truths of our existence and of history.
I think it's obvious that the emphasis on material and emotional vanities has very little to do with Christmas as understood in this orthodox way. On this understanding, Christmas is a formalized opportunity for us to remember and to affirm the greatest truth of our existence.
The second is a pagan understanding. Our reptilian hind brain is still at work and one of the things it registers is that the sun, immediately after the summer solstice, begins to head south with no guarantee that it will ever come back. Try to imagine our most ancient ancestors, aware enough of natural changes to pay attention to the shortening days and lengthening nights and dropping temperatures, but not sophisticated enough to be sure that the process would reverse itself and that the sun would come back north, the days would get longer, and the temperatures would rise.
So historically there are pre-Christian and non-Christian celebrations that come only days after the winter solstice, as the sun starts to come back and the days get a little longer, because once again we have been spared the catastrophe that the sun's dropping off to the south and disappearing from our lives would bring.
What is common to both understandings is that we have been saved, and what is called for is humble and celebratory gratitude. Whether in the sacramental tradition of Christianity or the feasting tradition of paganism, what is appropriate is celebratory thanksgiving.
"The Holidays" are not meant to be a time that we celebrate getting together but a time when we get together to celebrate our salvation, however we define that.
If you want to fight back against the "corporate fat cats," re-claiming the end-of-year celebrations as meaningful rather than materialistic would be great way to do it.
This has been going on for so long that most of us take it for granted, although I think that it goes beyond that. My intuition is that some critical mass of us now positively affirms the contemporary nature of "the holidays" with all its pressure to buy exactly the right thing for all those people who are going to be disappointed and critical if you don't; to entertain friends, neighbors, and family, and to do it in a way that will not allow for criticism from them; and to be "joyful" through it all. "The Holidays" as social and emotional obligation: One can almost see the old cartoon portrayals of the fat, cigar-smoking capitalists chuckling with satisfaction at how cleverly they have co-opted the events and manipulated us.
This is, of course, not just cognitive dissonance but the imposition --- and now the embracing --- of obligations that are impossible to meet. Through the influence of the most talented and effective industrial psychologists in the world, we have become our own crazy-making torturers.
(From 1958, here is Stan Freberg's "Green Christmas" wherein he satirizes the commercialization of Christmas. He was right then, but the current reality has gone way beyond what he was seeing. For one, we have successfully commodified all the traditions of Christmas. Even the most faithful or the most sentimental stories are vaguely accepted as just part of the great blob of "holiday tradition.")
I suggest that, to the extent each of us finds it possible, to step outside this dance circle and think about and act on either of two actually meaningful ways of looking at these end-of-year celebrations. (There are other traditional and meaningful celebrations at this time of year, none of which I know enough about to include here.)
The first is the orthodox Christian understanding of Christmas, the feast of the Incarnation, the coming into the world of the Messiah, God Himself choosing to live not only among His creatures but as one of them; to live a fully human life with all its joys and sorrows; and ultimately to suffer and die, just as we do. The story as it used to be told was this: After Adam and Eve had committed the Original Sin, one of the effects was that Heaven was closed to humans, and it would take a sacrifice to overcome the effects of that sin and to re-open the gates of Heaven, and that is why the Son of God came to live among us and to die for us.
Whatever your theological position on this story, it is undeniably, as Fulton Oursler put it, The Greatest Story Ever Told.
So Christmas --- the Mass of the Christ, the Savior, the Messiah --- is the remembrance, the celebration of what believing Christians see as the most auspicious event in the history of the world. (It is no accident the world of Christendom saw history as separated into the time before the coming of the Christ and the time after the coming of the Christ.)
In this way of thinking about Christmas, the giving of gifts to one another is a small, symbolic representation of the great gift of Salvation given by God to His creatures. And it is supposed to be a reminder that, to put it crudely, we are all in this together, that God came to be with all of us so that we all could be redeemed, that we are all eternally loved creatures of an eternally and infinitely loving God. So gathering in some kind of communion is also a way to symbolize the great truths of our existence and of history.
I think it's obvious that the emphasis on material and emotional vanities has very little to do with Christmas as understood in this orthodox way. On this understanding, Christmas is a formalized opportunity for us to remember and to affirm the greatest truth of our existence.
The second is a pagan understanding. Our reptilian hind brain is still at work and one of the things it registers is that the sun, immediately after the summer solstice, begins to head south with no guarantee that it will ever come back. Try to imagine our most ancient ancestors, aware enough of natural changes to pay attention to the shortening days and lengthening nights and dropping temperatures, but not sophisticated enough to be sure that the process would reverse itself and that the sun would come back north, the days would get longer, and the temperatures would rise.
So historically there are pre-Christian and non-Christian celebrations that come only days after the winter solstice, as the sun starts to come back and the days get a little longer, because once again we have been spared the catastrophe that the sun's dropping off to the south and disappearing from our lives would bring.
What is common to both understandings is that we have been saved, and what is called for is humble and celebratory gratitude. Whether in the sacramental tradition of Christianity or the feasting tradition of paganism, what is appropriate is celebratory thanksgiving.
"The Holidays" are not meant to be a time that we celebrate getting together but a time when we get together to celebrate our salvation, however we define that.
If you want to fight back against the "corporate fat cats," re-claiming the end-of-year celebrations as meaningful rather than materialistic would be great way to do it.
Friday, November 30, 2012
The Gift of Music
And the young man said, "Speak to us of the Great American Songbook."
"To know the Songbook is a life's work, albeit an enjoyable and rewarding one," the Prophet said, "and, as with many things, we can start with the excellent article in Wikipedia.
"But the best way to learn is to listen:
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume I
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume II
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Gershwin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald, The Intimate Ella
Ella Fitzgerald, Like Someone In Love
Frank Sinatra, The Voice
Frank Sinatra, Songs for Swingin' Lovers
Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours
Frank Sinatra, A Swingin' Affair
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely
Carly Simon, My Romance
Carly Simon, Moonlight Serenade
Linda Rondstadt, What's New?
Linda Rondstadt, 'Round Midnight
Diana Krall, From This Moment On
Diana Krall, The Look of Love
Various artists, American Popular Song
"Go, my son, go and listen, and learn, and grow in spirit. As a wise old professor once said, 'The duty of the poet is to bolster the nation's courage.' Living with these wonderful melodies and great lyrics, the best work of the poets of our own time, will bolster yours."
"To know the Songbook is a life's work, albeit an enjoyable and rewarding one," the Prophet said, "and, as with many things, we can start with the excellent article in Wikipedia.
"But the best way to learn is to listen:
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume I
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Rodgers and Hart Songbook, Volume II
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Cole Porter Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Gershwin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Irving Berlin Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald Sings the Jerome Kern Songbook
Ella Fitzgerald, The Intimate Ella
Ella Fitzgerald, Like Someone In Love
Frank Sinatra, The Voice
Frank Sinatra, Songs for Swingin' Lovers
Frank Sinatra, In the Wee Small Hours
Frank Sinatra, A Swingin' Affair
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely
Carly Simon, My Romance
Carly Simon, Moonlight Serenade
Linda Rondstadt, What's New?
Linda Rondstadt, 'Round Midnight
Diana Krall, From This Moment On
Diana Krall, The Look of Love
Various artists, American Popular Song
"Go, my son, go and listen, and learn, and grow in spirit. As a wise old professor once said, 'The duty of the poet is to bolster the nation's courage.' Living with these wonderful melodies and great lyrics, the best work of the poets of our own time, will bolster yours."
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Devolution
We are well into Advent and the great feast of Christmas will soon be here so the question of presents looms large, especially what presents are appropriate for whom. For several people on my list, I will give, in one form or another, the gift of music. Pondering the possibilities inevitably led me into my favorite pastime, abstracting things beyond all recognizability; in this case, considering the state of contemporary popular music and what it says about us.
I was reminded of a scene from "10" where the Dudley Moore character has followed the Bo Derek character and her new husband to a posh Mexican resort where they will be spending their honeymoon. On his first night there, the Dudley Moore character goes to a lovely poolside bar where the bartender is played by Brian Dennehy. There is a very nice arrangement of "Laura" in the background, played on a piano.
The two men engage in the following conversation:
Moore: "They don't make music like that anymore. At least, not much anymore, anyway."
Dennehy: "Is that good or bad?"
M: "What do you think?"
D: "Actually, I'm opposed to bartenders making value judgments while on duty."
M: "How old are you?"
D: "37, but I look 40."
M: "No, you look 33."
D: "That's because I'm really 25."
M: "Well, each of us is the product of an era. That music is my era. Beautiful melody, great lyric.
"If you were 19 and 20 years from now you were dancing with your wife or girlfriend you knew in high school and you said to her, 'Darling, they're playing our song,' do you know what they would be playing?
D: "Uh-uh."
M: "'Why Don't We Do It in the Road'. What kind of f...ing era is that?!"
D: "To each his own."
M: "Now that's a good song."
(You can see the whole scene here.)
I was going to update the gag by referring to some particularly hideous example of contemporary popular music from 2012 but the research process was overwhelming. There is so much that is so awful --- aesthetically and morally --- that I had to withdraw, so you fill in the blank.
Recently I read a wonderful review in The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz of a new book by Ted Gioia, Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. Gioia's book sounds terrific, offering "a guide to more than 250 key jazz compositions --- the 'building blocks of the jazz art form'," and I plan to give it this year to my jazz-playing barber.
But Schwarz's thesis, and this is the title of the review, is that we have come to "The End of Jazz" because the Great American Songbook is gone. John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is quoted as saying,
Jazz developed while the great popular music was being turned out. It was a
golden age for songs. They had a classic quality in length and shape and form
and flexibility of harmony. The jazz musicians were drawn to this music as a
source of material.
Schwarz's conclusion is that
The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular,
sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the
crucial wellspring of jazz....and there is no reason to believe that jazz can be
a living, evolving art form decades after its major source --- and the source
that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment --- has
dried up.
There is a long story --- not a joke but a story with a moral --- the conclusion of which is that the ultimate wisdom is "This, too, shall pass." Undoubtedly true. But when thinking about the current state of things musical, it's very difficult not to see a pretty steep downward curve from 19th Century lieder and Stephen Foster, to the greats of the Songbook --- Berlin, Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, et al, to the breakthroughs in rock'n'roll in the '50's, to whatever it is we have now.
The music business, like real estate, is one of the great examples of capitalism: people will pay for what they want. No one is forcing contemporary music down our throats; we are being given what we ask for and will pay for.
Christmas remains a profoundly important time, despite the tidal-wave of time and energy devoted to commercializing it, and one of the most important elements of it is a kind of defiant act of faith in ourselves and our future. Just days after the shortest day of the year, deep in "the bleak midwinter," we celebrate life and the hope that is symbolized by the Incarnation.
So I will not give in to despair about our music but will keep the faith, in whatever ways I can, but especially by listening to music with "a classic quality in length and shape and form and flexibility of harmony." A gift indeed.
Bonus: An audience participation question. If you wanted to update the conversation from "10," and assuming that "Laura" would still stand as representative of the Songbook, what contemporary song would you use to replace "Why Don't We Do It In The Road"?
I was reminded of a scene from "10" where the Dudley Moore character has followed the Bo Derek character and her new husband to a posh Mexican resort where they will be spending their honeymoon. On his first night there, the Dudley Moore character goes to a lovely poolside bar where the bartender is played by Brian Dennehy. There is a very nice arrangement of "Laura" in the background, played on a piano.
The two men engage in the following conversation:
Moore: "They don't make music like that anymore. At least, not much anymore, anyway."
Dennehy: "Is that good or bad?"
M: "What do you think?"
D: "Actually, I'm opposed to bartenders making value judgments while on duty."
M: "How old are you?"
D: "37, but I look 40."
M: "No, you look 33."
D: "That's because I'm really 25."
M: "Well, each of us is the product of an era. That music is my era. Beautiful melody, great lyric.
"If you were 19 and 20 years from now you were dancing with your wife or girlfriend you knew in high school and you said to her, 'Darling, they're playing our song,' do you know what they would be playing?
D: "Uh-uh."
M: "'Why Don't We Do It in the Road'. What kind of f...ing era is that?!"
D: "To each his own."
M: "Now that's a good song."
(You can see the whole scene here.)
I was going to update the gag by referring to some particularly hideous example of contemporary popular music from 2012 but the research process was overwhelming. There is so much that is so awful --- aesthetically and morally --- that I had to withdraw, so you fill in the blank.
Recently I read a wonderful review in The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz of a new book by Ted Gioia, Jazz Standards: A Guide to the Repertoire. Gioia's book sounds terrific, offering "a guide to more than 250 key jazz compositions --- the 'building blocks of the jazz art form'," and I plan to give it this year to my jazz-playing barber.
But Schwarz's thesis, and this is the title of the review, is that we have come to "The End of Jazz" because the Great American Songbook is gone. John Lewis of the Modern Jazz Quartet is quoted as saying,
Jazz developed while the great popular music was being turned out. It was a
golden age for songs. They had a classic quality in length and shape and form
and flexibility of harmony. The jazz musicians were drawn to this music as a
source of material.
Schwarz's conclusion is that
The Songbook, a product of a fleeting set of cultural circumstances when popular,
sophisticated music was aimed at musically knowledgeable adults, was the
crucial wellspring of jazz....and there is no reason to believe that jazz can be
a living, evolving art form decades after its major source --- and the source
that linked it to the main currents of popular culture and sentiment --- has
dried up.
There is a long story --- not a joke but a story with a moral --- the conclusion of which is that the ultimate wisdom is "This, too, shall pass." Undoubtedly true. But when thinking about the current state of things musical, it's very difficult not to see a pretty steep downward curve from 19th Century lieder and Stephen Foster, to the greats of the Songbook --- Berlin, Kern, Porter, the Gershwins, et al, to the breakthroughs in rock'n'roll in the '50's, to whatever it is we have now.
The music business, like real estate, is one of the great examples of capitalism: people will pay for what they want. No one is forcing contemporary music down our throats; we are being given what we ask for and will pay for.
Christmas remains a profoundly important time, despite the tidal-wave of time and energy devoted to commercializing it, and one of the most important elements of it is a kind of defiant act of faith in ourselves and our future. Just days after the shortest day of the year, deep in "the bleak midwinter," we celebrate life and the hope that is symbolized by the Incarnation.
So I will not give in to despair about our music but will keep the faith, in whatever ways I can, but especially by listening to music with "a classic quality in length and shape and form and flexibility of harmony." A gift indeed.
Bonus: An audience participation question. If you wanted to update the conversation from "10," and assuming that "Laura" would still stand as representative of the Songbook, what contemporary song would you use to replace "Why Don't We Do It In The Road"?
Wednesday, November 28, 2012
Questioning Authority
The '60's --- that is, November 22, 1963, to August 8, 1974 --- gave us many things. One of those things was the advent of what one wag referred to as "bumper sticker philosophy," the posting on automobile bumpers of pithy statements of (allegedly) deep meaning: "One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day" or "War is unhealthy for children and other living things" or "I"ll give you my gun when you pry it from my cold dead hands," to cite a few of the more memorable.
One of the most common of these was the one that demanded, "Question Authority." And apparently it was not just a popular bumper sticker. I've seen it described as a fundamental tenet, a kind of rallying cry, for only a fairly large but very influential group of young people, most of them undergraduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities.
In context, given the high level of moral condemnation of the Vietnam War and, by extension, the moral condemnation of the government that was waging it; and the behavior of local and state governments in response to various activities of the civil rights movement; and the Watergate scandal that seemed to demonstrate that all previous skepticism about the federal government in particular and authority in general was not only justified but understated, such an attitude is understandable, maybe even inevitable.
There are dangers involved in giving in to that level of distrust but that's another topic for another day. What I want to poke at today is the elimination of the notion of authority from the ways that we understand, think about, and talk about all manner of personal and institutional relationships.
In the academic and intellectual conversations that I have in which the concepts of "power" and "authority" are pertinent, I have seen two epistemic and psychological phenomena come up over and over. The first is the conflation of the two terms. I know very smart and highly educated people who believe that the two terms are synonymous; that "power" and "authority" mean exactly the same thing.
The second is that even the possibility of authority is seen by some people as leading inevitably to patriarchal oppression of women and racial submission of blacks and stigmatizing of homosexuals and so on. To these people, even allowing the notion of authority is to put in danger all the social, cultural, and political gains we have made over the last century.
So, one at a time.
There are serious problems that arise from conflating "power" and "authority." "Power" resides in the ability of one person (or group) to force another person (or group) to do what the one with the power wants even if they don't want to. A crude example is when Ralph has the gun and I don't. Ralph can insist that I do something that I don't want to do because if I don't he will kill me. But any time an individual or an institution or a bureaucracy creates a situation in which someone has to do things he doesn't want to do or suffer, it is a function of power.
There is no question that power is necessary in the world. Power is, as I see it, morally neutral. The question of importance is how power is used, for good or ill.
"Authority," on the other hand, is something else entirely. Where I can take power if I get the gun away from Ralph, I can't take authority; it has to be granted to me because I have earned it. Authority is granted because of expertise, good character, or a particular kind of revered status --- the Pope or the Dalai Lama, for example.
We grant authority of various kinds to the doctors who diagnose and treat us; to the lawyers who represent us; to some teachers and professors; to some clergy; to tennis coaches; and so on. The important point is that we grant it and we can take it away. Authority is conferred upon those others who deserve it, or who have convinced us that they deserve it.
The notion of "authority" has always been at least a little tenuous in the United States. The concepts of royalty and aristocracy, based on heredity, never took root here and, as time passed, even the watered down versions of those concepts lost their influence in the way that people thought about themselves and their relationships to others. When Quakers refused to doff their hats when passing "the better sort" on the sidewalk it was a harbinger of a process that would move faster and get bigger and more influential.
Democracy, at least as it has been practiced here, always skates perilously close to egalitarianism and sometimes a crude egalitarianism (if that isn't redundant) is incapable of separating the notion of equal rights from the notion of deserved authority. It seems apparent to me that we are living in a moment where a kind of simplistic belief that "I'm just as good as anybody else" has moved over into something like "no one is any better than I am and so no one deserves to be treated as an authority."
It is probably true that "this, too, shall pass." But in the meantime, having removed a properly understood "authority" from our understanding, our thinking, and our talking, we are left with only "power," and that is highly dangerous. If we frame everything in terms of power, we are driven into selfishness, self-protectiveness, and ultimately into what Hobbes called "a war of all against all."
The problem with the bumper sticker, or perhaps with the way that the bumper sticker was interpreted, was that it established a false dichotomy: either one "questioned" authority or one was a mindless (even cowardly) conformist.
"Authority" was something to be wary of, even to fear. Now we see this being played out in the attitude of children toward their parents; students toward their teachers and professors; patients toward their doctors; employees toward their employers; congregants toward their pastors.
There are those who don't see this as problematic; who see it, in fact, as a great step forward. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. I think we need --- and I use the word advisedly --- to let go of this mass vanity and re-establish "authority."
Which gets us to the second phenomenon, the fear that allowing any version of "authority" into the conversation will lead inevitably into the submission of anyone who is not a rich white man. It seems obvious to me that this is a false dichotomy: That we can have either freedom for all or submission to authority. Democracy allows for, even requires, a variety of personal and institutional relationships, some of which can be egalitarian, some meritocratic, and some based on a voluntary and contingent submission to authority.
We live in a time where many people who we need to be worthy of being granted authority are not worthy of it, especially in the worlds of politics and organized religion. And it is also true that we --- all of us --- have turned into our idols a bunch of people who are most certainly not worthy of being granted authority.
There are two things necessary to get out of this. The first and more necessary is that we --- all of us --- demand the behavior and character that are worthy of being granted authority. The second and just as important is that people who take positions which by nature involve the possibility of authority manifest those behaviors and characteristics that deserve to be granted authority.
But the very first step is probably bringing back into the conversation, bringing back out of intellectual exile, the concept of authority.
One of the most common of these was the one that demanded, "Question Authority." And apparently it was not just a popular bumper sticker. I've seen it described as a fundamental tenet, a kind of rallying cry, for only a fairly large but very influential group of young people, most of them undergraduates at our most prestigious colleges and universities.
In context, given the high level of moral condemnation of the Vietnam War and, by extension, the moral condemnation of the government that was waging it; and the behavior of local and state governments in response to various activities of the civil rights movement; and the Watergate scandal that seemed to demonstrate that all previous skepticism about the federal government in particular and authority in general was not only justified but understated, such an attitude is understandable, maybe even inevitable.
There are dangers involved in giving in to that level of distrust but that's another topic for another day. What I want to poke at today is the elimination of the notion of authority from the ways that we understand, think about, and talk about all manner of personal and institutional relationships.
In the academic and intellectual conversations that I have in which the concepts of "power" and "authority" are pertinent, I have seen two epistemic and psychological phenomena come up over and over. The first is the conflation of the two terms. I know very smart and highly educated people who believe that the two terms are synonymous; that "power" and "authority" mean exactly the same thing.
The second is that even the possibility of authority is seen by some people as leading inevitably to patriarchal oppression of women and racial submission of blacks and stigmatizing of homosexuals and so on. To these people, even allowing the notion of authority is to put in danger all the social, cultural, and political gains we have made over the last century.
So, one at a time.
There are serious problems that arise from conflating "power" and "authority." "Power" resides in the ability of one person (or group) to force another person (or group) to do what the one with the power wants even if they don't want to. A crude example is when Ralph has the gun and I don't. Ralph can insist that I do something that I don't want to do because if I don't he will kill me. But any time an individual or an institution or a bureaucracy creates a situation in which someone has to do things he doesn't want to do or suffer, it is a function of power.
There is no question that power is necessary in the world. Power is, as I see it, morally neutral. The question of importance is how power is used, for good or ill.
"Authority," on the other hand, is something else entirely. Where I can take power if I get the gun away from Ralph, I can't take authority; it has to be granted to me because I have earned it. Authority is granted because of expertise, good character, or a particular kind of revered status --- the Pope or the Dalai Lama, for example.
We grant authority of various kinds to the doctors who diagnose and treat us; to the lawyers who represent us; to some teachers and professors; to some clergy; to tennis coaches; and so on. The important point is that we grant it and we can take it away. Authority is conferred upon those others who deserve it, or who have convinced us that they deserve it.
The notion of "authority" has always been at least a little tenuous in the United States. The concepts of royalty and aristocracy, based on heredity, never took root here and, as time passed, even the watered down versions of those concepts lost their influence in the way that people thought about themselves and their relationships to others. When Quakers refused to doff their hats when passing "the better sort" on the sidewalk it was a harbinger of a process that would move faster and get bigger and more influential.
Democracy, at least as it has been practiced here, always skates perilously close to egalitarianism and sometimes a crude egalitarianism (if that isn't redundant) is incapable of separating the notion of equal rights from the notion of deserved authority. It seems apparent to me that we are living in a moment where a kind of simplistic belief that "I'm just as good as anybody else" has moved over into something like "no one is any better than I am and so no one deserves to be treated as an authority."
It is probably true that "this, too, shall pass." But in the meantime, having removed a properly understood "authority" from our understanding, our thinking, and our talking, we are left with only "power," and that is highly dangerous. If we frame everything in terms of power, we are driven into selfishness, self-protectiveness, and ultimately into what Hobbes called "a war of all against all."
The problem with the bumper sticker, or perhaps with the way that the bumper sticker was interpreted, was that it established a false dichotomy: either one "questioned" authority or one was a mindless (even cowardly) conformist.
"Authority" was something to be wary of, even to fear. Now we see this being played out in the attitude of children toward their parents; students toward their teachers and professors; patients toward their doctors; employees toward their employers; congregants toward their pastors.
There are those who don't see this as problematic; who see it, in fact, as a great step forward. Maybe they're right, but I don't think so. I think we need --- and I use the word advisedly --- to let go of this mass vanity and re-establish "authority."
Which gets us to the second phenomenon, the fear that allowing any version of "authority" into the conversation will lead inevitably into the submission of anyone who is not a rich white man. It seems obvious to me that this is a false dichotomy: That we can have either freedom for all or submission to authority. Democracy allows for, even requires, a variety of personal and institutional relationships, some of which can be egalitarian, some meritocratic, and some based on a voluntary and contingent submission to authority.
We live in a time where many people who we need to be worthy of being granted authority are not worthy of it, especially in the worlds of politics and organized religion. And it is also true that we --- all of us --- have turned into our idols a bunch of people who are most certainly not worthy of being granted authority.
There are two things necessary to get out of this. The first and more necessary is that we --- all of us --- demand the behavior and character that are worthy of being granted authority. The second and just as important is that people who take positions which by nature involve the possibility of authority manifest those behaviors and characteristics that deserve to be granted authority.
But the very first step is probably bringing back into the conversation, bringing back out of intellectual exile, the concept of authority.
Vulnerability
L'affaire Petreaus has been much in the news. Although I haven't seen everything printed or posted about this, what I have seen has been surprisingly mild. With a few exceptions, I have seen little crowing either from the point of view of moral superiority or from the point of view of political schadenfreude. One can only hope that this is not an anomaly but a small sign of a trend.
The whole sad situation has reminded me of two lines that are both apposite and helpful to reflect on. The first is the old and well-known, "There but for the grace of God go I." This is meant to be not just a statement of gratitude, and certainly not just a way to express relief, but an acknowledgement of the disagreeable truth that we are all susceptible to temptation, that at one time or another we all fail, we all fall. Reminders of this are important because our natural tendency is to avoid such thoughts. While that great philosopher Johnny Mercer was right, we should "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," it is also true that temptation is sneaky and seldom if ever ugly and obnoxious. It's helpful to be reminded of our inherent vulnerability.
But it was another line that struck me as even more appropriate, a line from the Eagles' song "A New York Minute":
If you find somebody in this world to love
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
The whole sad situation has reminded me of two lines that are both apposite and helpful to reflect on. The first is the old and well-known, "There but for the grace of God go I." This is meant to be not just a statement of gratitude, and certainly not just a way to express relief, but an acknowledgement of the disagreeable truth that we are all susceptible to temptation, that at one time or another we all fail, we all fall. Reminders of this are important because our natural tendency is to avoid such thoughts. While that great philosopher Johnny Mercer was right, we should "accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative," it is also true that temptation is sneaky and seldom if ever ugly and obnoxious. It's helpful to be reminded of our inherent vulnerability.
But it was another line that struck me as even more appropriate, a line from the Eagles' song "A New York Minute":
If you find somebody in this world to love
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
Monday, November 12, 2012
The Long Campaign
My elder son, in whom I am well-pleased, is a smart, thoughtful, aware man who follows current affairs and cares deeply about them. He also believes I am politically somewhat dim, so he sends me things to read, sometimes things which he has written and sometimes things from (mostly) respectable journals which publish on-line.
Yesterday, he sent a piece by David Frum, who writes for Newsweek and The Daily Beast but who also has some conservative credentials. Whatever your take on the election and the consequent post-mortem, I think it's worth reading.
There are a couple of points in the Frum piece itself that I want to poke at a bit, but mostly I want to meditate on what I see as the long campaign of which the election of 2012 was only the most recent event.
First, Frum commits a logical error which is shocking coming from someone with his credentials. He contends that Bill O'Reilly is the spokesman for conservatism, quotes O'Reilly's latest silliness, and then criticizes --- condemns? --- that point of view: O'Reilly represents conservatism; O'Reilly is an idiot; therefore conservatism is, at least, suspect. In the world of logical fallacies, we call this a "straw man." It is like ridiculing the concept of monarchy because Joseph DeMaistre supported it (which is actually a pretty good line if you're hip to this particular bit of esoterica). If you're interested in thoughtful and measured post-election reflections by conservatives, I suggest this by Charles Krauthammer and this by George Will.
Second, Frum repeats a trope common over the last 30 years or so, that the political battle is over the center, that advantage shifts from center-left to center-right and back again. I'm not enough of a political scientist to know the extent to which this oft-repeated claim is true, but I am hesitant to accept it, just as I am hesitant to accept any form of conventional wisdom. There is something about it which just seems too easy.
But the real point of this post is that the election of 2012 is really not very important or interesting as a discrete event (although it will be very interesting to see if the socially libertarian and egalitarian decisions on marijuana and gay marriage turn out to be the wave of the future or something that will not last).
There is, I'm afraid, a certain amount of pedantic exposition necessary here. The election of 2012 is just the latest event in an ideological and practical conflict that goes back to the end of the 19th Century. The North's victory in the Civil War eliminated the split between half a country devoted to modern political and economic principles and other half devoted to pre-modern political and economic principles.
The Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's, helped propel the United States headlong into industrial capitalism, so that a country which in 1850 had been a non-factor in the world's industrial economy would become by 1920 the great industrial power.
This process had many effects, the most important of which were social, cultural, and political. The democratic capitalism envisioned by Jackson and Lincoln became the corporate capitalism of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The factory system drew larger and larger portions of the population into cities, a process increased further by the second great wave of immigration, this one made up almost entirely of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, almost entirely Catholics and Jews.
As it always has, industrial capitalism led to an improved standard of living, more personal freedom, and more social mobility; but the dynamism which allowed for these improvements also created great and painful disruptions.
The move to the cities had created a situation in which people found themselves living within a mass, rather than in a society, as they had in the small towns from which most of them came. The impersonality, the unpredictability, and the very energy of this new situation were frightening to many, and that fright played itself out in different ways within different populations.
Workers tried to unionize and there were riots. Farmers whose understanding of basic economic principles was drastically upset by the effects of now-global markets demonstrated, organized into political groups, and pushed for currency reform. And corporations pushed harder and harder for more and more control over larger and larger sections of the economy.
Amidst all this unrest, compounded by the mass immigration of people whose cultural assumptions and practices were so different, the middle class felt abandoned. Political and economic forces were at play that seemed to threaten their preeminence in American life. Organized labor, organized farmers, conspiring corporations, and the background "noise" of the profound social changes created by just the presence of the immigrants --- all undermined the confidence and sense of cultural importance of the middle class.
There was a certain sense of fear for survival, but mostly it was a feeling that there were forces at play of which they had little understanding and against which they had no defense. This was a different kind of politics, a politics of competing interests, and the middle class had no organized political representation.
One of the reasons that this had happened was that the federal government, with some notable exceptions, had stayed out of the economic life of the country during the 19th Century. Not laissez-faire, strictly speaking, but certainly something approaching a hands-off policy.
But by the end of the Century, it was clear that the government was going to have to get back in. While it was true that a big part of the reason the government had to get back in was for government to be a counter-balance to the ever-growing power and influence of big business, it was also true that thoughtful people realized that a politics of competing interest groups demanded a disinterested, centralized authority to maintain an orderly and civil political process.
The result was the Progressives, the political group that gave us Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, and that gave us the referendum, the recall, and the ability of the people to put potential legislation on the ballot through propositions.
At some level of decision-making, it was determined that the political culture of the middle class should be enshrined as the defining elements of the new politics, the politics of the new reality, the politics of the industrial and multicultural city.
But it was never quite that simple because the question always was, and still is, to what extent should the government become involved? This is not only an extremely complex question on its face, the specifics are always changing because of the very dynamism of industrial capitalism. No one in 1912 could possibly have predicted the technology that we take for granted in 2012 (see "21st Century Skills") and every one of those technological advances has political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. So even if someone had figured out the exactly right formula for how much, and in what ways, the government should be involved in 1912 (and many tried), that formula would have been outdated by 1922 and completely inappropriate by 1932. And the process of globalization, interrupted by the great European civil war of 1914-1989 but now back in full swing, increases the complexity by factors.
The dynamism of the process which is at the heart of how we live is the very reason that we can't figure out exactly what the right formula is.
If this is what David Frum means by the contest being over the middle, sometimes moving to the center-right and sometimes to the center-left, then okay. I prefer to think of it as an on-going tension within American society in which the body politic pushes in one direction and then the next depending on an almost literally unbelievable --- and ever-increasing --- set of factors.
It takes a real democrat to trust the people in such a process.
Yesterday, he sent a piece by David Frum, who writes for Newsweek and The Daily Beast but who also has some conservative credentials. Whatever your take on the election and the consequent post-mortem, I think it's worth reading.
There are a couple of points in the Frum piece itself that I want to poke at a bit, but mostly I want to meditate on what I see as the long campaign of which the election of 2012 was only the most recent event.
First, Frum commits a logical error which is shocking coming from someone with his credentials. He contends that Bill O'Reilly is the spokesman for conservatism, quotes O'Reilly's latest silliness, and then criticizes --- condemns? --- that point of view: O'Reilly represents conservatism; O'Reilly is an idiot; therefore conservatism is, at least, suspect. In the world of logical fallacies, we call this a "straw man." It is like ridiculing the concept of monarchy because Joseph DeMaistre supported it (which is actually a pretty good line if you're hip to this particular bit of esoterica). If you're interested in thoughtful and measured post-election reflections by conservatives, I suggest this by Charles Krauthammer and this by George Will.
Second, Frum repeats a trope common over the last 30 years or so, that the political battle is over the center, that advantage shifts from center-left to center-right and back again. I'm not enough of a political scientist to know the extent to which this oft-repeated claim is true, but I am hesitant to accept it, just as I am hesitant to accept any form of conventional wisdom. There is something about it which just seems too easy.
But the real point of this post is that the election of 2012 is really not very important or interesting as a discrete event (although it will be very interesting to see if the socially libertarian and egalitarian decisions on marijuana and gay marriage turn out to be the wave of the future or something that will not last).
There is, I'm afraid, a certain amount of pedantic exposition necessary here. The election of 2012 is just the latest event in an ideological and practical conflict that goes back to the end of the 19th Century. The North's victory in the Civil War eliminated the split between half a country devoted to modern political and economic principles and other half devoted to pre-modern political and economic principles.
The Second Industrial Revolution, the one of the 1870's, helped propel the United States headlong into industrial capitalism, so that a country which in 1850 had been a non-factor in the world's industrial economy would become by 1920 the great industrial power.
This process had many effects, the most important of which were social, cultural, and political. The democratic capitalism envisioned by Jackson and Lincoln became the corporate capitalism of Rockefeller and Carnegie. The factory system drew larger and larger portions of the population into cities, a process increased further by the second great wave of immigration, this one made up almost entirely of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, almost entirely Catholics and Jews.
As it always has, industrial capitalism led to an improved standard of living, more personal freedom, and more social mobility; but the dynamism which allowed for these improvements also created great and painful disruptions.
The move to the cities had created a situation in which people found themselves living within a mass, rather than in a society, as they had in the small towns from which most of them came. The impersonality, the unpredictability, and the very energy of this new situation were frightening to many, and that fright played itself out in different ways within different populations.
Workers tried to unionize and there were riots. Farmers whose understanding of basic economic principles was drastically upset by the effects of now-global markets demonstrated, organized into political groups, and pushed for currency reform. And corporations pushed harder and harder for more and more control over larger and larger sections of the economy.
Amidst all this unrest, compounded by the mass immigration of people whose cultural assumptions and practices were so different, the middle class felt abandoned. Political and economic forces were at play that seemed to threaten their preeminence in American life. Organized labor, organized farmers, conspiring corporations, and the background "noise" of the profound social changes created by just the presence of the immigrants --- all undermined the confidence and sense of cultural importance of the middle class.
There was a certain sense of fear for survival, but mostly it was a feeling that there were forces at play of which they had little understanding and against which they had no defense. This was a different kind of politics, a politics of competing interests, and the middle class had no organized political representation.
One of the reasons that this had happened was that the federal government, with some notable exceptions, had stayed out of the economic life of the country during the 19th Century. Not laissez-faire, strictly speaking, but certainly something approaching a hands-off policy.
But by the end of the Century, it was clear that the government was going to have to get back in. While it was true that a big part of the reason the government had to get back in was for government to be a counter-balance to the ever-growing power and influence of big business, it was also true that thoughtful people realized that a politics of competing interest groups demanded a disinterested, centralized authority to maintain an orderly and civil political process.
The result was the Progressives, the political group that gave us Robert LaFollette, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson, and that gave us the referendum, the recall, and the ability of the people to put potential legislation on the ballot through propositions.
At some level of decision-making, it was determined that the political culture of the middle class should be enshrined as the defining elements of the new politics, the politics of the new reality, the politics of the industrial and multicultural city.
But it was never quite that simple because the question always was, and still is, to what extent should the government become involved? This is not only an extremely complex question on its face, the specifics are always changing because of the very dynamism of industrial capitalism. No one in 1912 could possibly have predicted the technology that we take for granted in 2012 (see "21st Century Skills") and every one of those technological advances has political, economic, social, and cultural consequences. So even if someone had figured out the exactly right formula for how much, and in what ways, the government should be involved in 1912 (and many tried), that formula would have been outdated by 1922 and completely inappropriate by 1932. And the process of globalization, interrupted by the great European civil war of 1914-1989 but now back in full swing, increases the complexity by factors.
The dynamism of the process which is at the heart of how we live is the very reason that we can't figure out exactly what the right formula is.
If this is what David Frum means by the contest being over the middle, sometimes moving to the center-right and sometimes to the center-left, then okay. I prefer to think of it as an on-going tension within American society in which the body politic pushes in one direction and then the next depending on an almost literally unbelievable --- and ever-increasing --- set of factors.
It takes a real democrat to trust the people in such a process.
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Leadership
I have recently been reminded of the profound truth of two statements that border on the cliche but which are true nonetheless. The first, and more general, is that in any organization, the character, personality, and temperament of the personnel is the single most important factor in the health and success of the organization; the second, and somewhat more specific, is that the character, personality, and temperament of the head of the organization is the most important factor of all.
For whatever reasons, it is easier for me to imagine situations in which bad forms of character, personality, and temperament lead to toxicity and dysfunction. I hope that rather than a mere self-indulgent screed, that such a description will make the necessity of the right forms more obvious.
First, a word about the descriptions of organizations undermined by bad forms of character, personality, and temperament. We are prone to describe such situations as "dysfunctional," but that, while not inaccurate, is misleading. It is obviously true that organizations do perform functions, and performing those functions effectively and efficiently is essential to organizational success. But to focus on the functions themselves, and on the functionality of the organization's processes, is to emphasize the mechanical, the technical, and the outcomes. While it is true that organizations that suffer from bad forms of character, personality, and temperament do also suffer from reduced efficiency and efficacy, that is not the more important element.
The more important element is that such organizations are, to use the other current jargon, toxic; that is, they suffer from a systemic infection, not just reduced efficiency and efficacy.
Consider an extreme example, a kind of perfect storm of wrong character, personality, and temperament embodied in the leader of an organization. This hypothetical person is unscrupulous, arrogant, and --- at least relative to the demands of his position --- lacking in intelligence. This is a person who is absolutely sure of his own rightness; is not smart enough to see the larger picture or to question his assumptions and desires; and who feels not only free to impose his will on those he employs but who feels a kind of righteous self-assurance about imposing that will.
Such a person sees organizational leadership solely in terms of power: he must establish it and maintain it. The obvious way to accomplish this is to create fear and the most obvious way to do that is to punish enough people so that the rest become subservient. More often than not, that punishment takes the form of driving people out; simply dismissing them; or demoting them in humiliating ways. It doesn't take very many such events for the rest of the people in the organization to realize that they are dealing with power and nothing else, and that their alternatives are to conform, whatever new and different forms that takes from time to time, or to suffer.
Such a person, if sufficiently clever, knows that the stick is not enough; there must also be the carrot. In many cases, this amounts to the rewarding of two kinds of people: those who are truly and most obviously loyal and those who espouse some essentially harmless and unthreatening cause or program but whose support can be sold as courageous and principled when it is seldom anything of the kind.
This process is not about function, although functions are certainly affected; they are about the resultant infection to the institutional body. Fear is a great motivator but it motivates toward self-protection, toward reading the signs and symbols in order to say and do the safe thing, toward competition instead of cooperation and collaboration, toward survival as the only vital goal.
Which gets us back to the importance of personnel generally. In organizations run by those like our hypothetical example, the vicious, undermining, poisonous, gossiping, and back-stabbing are not only tolerated but actively encouraged. The inmates become their own jailers.
There's nothing new or shocking about this, especially after the huge institutional versions of it that dominated the 20th Century. The difference between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the hypothetical situation I described above is one of degree, not of kind. We've seen it all before.
It is one of many, many examples of how tempting power is and how corrupting it is.
Real leadership takes not only a principled vision and managerial expertise. It also takes the personal and professional courage to define the institutional culture, to face down the bullies, and to insist on everyone's commitment to the principles that inform the organization.
A difficult challenge, perhaps more difficult in our time than ever before because of the universal sense of entitlement and self-importance, but anything less is inhumane.
We should be aware of and grateful for the examples of right leadership that there are about us. And in those situations where people suffer from rule-by-fear, we should strive for reform or maybe even revolution.
For whatever reasons, it is easier for me to imagine situations in which bad forms of character, personality, and temperament lead to toxicity and dysfunction. I hope that rather than a mere self-indulgent screed, that such a description will make the necessity of the right forms more obvious.
First, a word about the descriptions of organizations undermined by bad forms of character, personality, and temperament. We are prone to describe such situations as "dysfunctional," but that, while not inaccurate, is misleading. It is obviously true that organizations do perform functions, and performing those functions effectively and efficiently is essential to organizational success. But to focus on the functions themselves, and on the functionality of the organization's processes, is to emphasize the mechanical, the technical, and the outcomes. While it is true that organizations that suffer from bad forms of character, personality, and temperament do also suffer from reduced efficiency and efficacy, that is not the more important element.
The more important element is that such organizations are, to use the other current jargon, toxic; that is, they suffer from a systemic infection, not just reduced efficiency and efficacy.
Consider an extreme example, a kind of perfect storm of wrong character, personality, and temperament embodied in the leader of an organization. This hypothetical person is unscrupulous, arrogant, and --- at least relative to the demands of his position --- lacking in intelligence. This is a person who is absolutely sure of his own rightness; is not smart enough to see the larger picture or to question his assumptions and desires; and who feels not only free to impose his will on those he employs but who feels a kind of righteous self-assurance about imposing that will.
Such a person sees organizational leadership solely in terms of power: he must establish it and maintain it. The obvious way to accomplish this is to create fear and the most obvious way to do that is to punish enough people so that the rest become subservient. More often than not, that punishment takes the form of driving people out; simply dismissing them; or demoting them in humiliating ways. It doesn't take very many such events for the rest of the people in the organization to realize that they are dealing with power and nothing else, and that their alternatives are to conform, whatever new and different forms that takes from time to time, or to suffer.
Such a person, if sufficiently clever, knows that the stick is not enough; there must also be the carrot. In many cases, this amounts to the rewarding of two kinds of people: those who are truly and most obviously loyal and those who espouse some essentially harmless and unthreatening cause or program but whose support can be sold as courageous and principled when it is seldom anything of the kind.
This process is not about function, although functions are certainly affected; they are about the resultant infection to the institutional body. Fear is a great motivator but it motivates toward self-protection, toward reading the signs and symbols in order to say and do the safe thing, toward competition instead of cooperation and collaboration, toward survival as the only vital goal.
Which gets us back to the importance of personnel generally. In organizations run by those like our hypothetical example, the vicious, undermining, poisonous, gossiping, and back-stabbing are not only tolerated but actively encouraged. The inmates become their own jailers.
There's nothing new or shocking about this, especially after the huge institutional versions of it that dominated the 20th Century. The difference between the Stalinist Soviet Union and the hypothetical situation I described above is one of degree, not of kind. We've seen it all before.
It is one of many, many examples of how tempting power is and how corrupting it is.
Real leadership takes not only a principled vision and managerial expertise. It also takes the personal and professional courage to define the institutional culture, to face down the bullies, and to insist on everyone's commitment to the principles that inform the organization.
A difficult challenge, perhaps more difficult in our time than ever before because of the universal sense of entitlement and self-importance, but anything less is inhumane.
We should be aware of and grateful for the examples of right leadership that there are about us. And in those situations where people suffer from rule-by-fear, we should strive for reform or maybe even revolution.
Wednesday, November 7, 2012
A Post-Election Day Meditation
Now that the results are in, there already are, and no doubt will continue to be, pleas for bipartisan cooperation; for reaching across the aisle; for putting aside partisan preferences in favor of working toward the common good.
On the face of it, this seems unlikely. As several of the talking heads pointed out last night, campaigning in 2012 cost something like 6 billion dollars and resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo ante. Despite Mr. Obama's election night contention that there is not a real split in the American people, the election results themselves seem to deny that.
One can hope that it does not turn out that our elected representatives continue to act as they have in the recent past. Predicting the future on the basis of the present is almost always wrong, so maybe everyone involved will come to see things in a different way. It is devoutly to be wished.
I am skeptical, not because of the election result numbers but because I think that they reflect something very deep and very real. I don't know how to label it; I suspect that many will try to do so in the next few years. But I think that there has been a profound shift in the zeitgeist, a re-defining of the dominant cultural paradigm and that this election, even more than the election of 2008, manifested this. This election was contested on many different levels of political, economic, social, and cultural consideration, but I think that the single most significant element was that Mr. Obama --- and, by extension, his organization and those who ran in other races who reflected his point of view --- not only embraced but embodied the characteristics of that new paradigm.
To vote for Mr. Obama was, as his favorite slogan had it, to be "Forward" thinking, feeling, and acting; to vote against him was akin to trying to hold back the tide.
This is intuitive, of course, but my sense is that what it comes down to for many people is a choice between being progressive or reactionary; to be in favor of moving forward or in favor of trying to prevent moving forward.
(This raises the question of what form a genuinely conservative [as opposed to reactionary] response --- or alternative --- could be to these new social and cultural realities. After 1945, when the Republican party had become a political afterthought, a conservative intellectual movement articulated a coherent and attractive position that eventuated in the Reagan presidency. That coherent set of ideas, and the authentic coalition that grew around it, are gone. Mr. Romney and his campaign were obviously not the people to develop, articulate, sell, and govern by a conservative vision appropriate to our time and circumstances. Will there be such a person and what will be that vision? But these questions are for another time.)
The point here is that the chances of there being a bi-partisan approach are, as the old line has it, slim and none. Of the many reasons that I think this is true, to me the most significant is that this is not just a political or economic divide; it is not just an ideological divide; it is a philosophical divide. To the people actively involved in electoral politics, the stakes seem ever and ever higher, and each side sees itself on the side of right.
(I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song "With God On Our Side." Maybe we ought to lock them all in a room and force them to listen to that over and over until they come to their senses.)
Last night someone suggested that the President call for a kind of summit meeting of the major players and that it should be away somewhere; Camp David, for example. Maybe away from the "noise" of the Capital, they could concentrate on addressing the issues.
I would suggest, rather, a Humility workshop. As long as all the players are absolutely --- even arrogantly --- convinced of their own rightness and see the opposition as mindlessly refusing to go along with what is obviously right, there will be no bi-partisanship and we will continue to beat on one another. We will, as the post-modernist/multi-cultural folks like to say, "other" one another.
As Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see."
This means you.
On the face of it, this seems unlikely. As several of the talking heads pointed out last night, campaigning in 2012 cost something like 6 billion dollars and resulted in nothing more than the maintenance of the status quo ante. Despite Mr. Obama's election night contention that there is not a real split in the American people, the election results themselves seem to deny that.
One can hope that it does not turn out that our elected representatives continue to act as they have in the recent past. Predicting the future on the basis of the present is almost always wrong, so maybe everyone involved will come to see things in a different way. It is devoutly to be wished.
I am skeptical, not because of the election result numbers but because I think that they reflect something very deep and very real. I don't know how to label it; I suspect that many will try to do so in the next few years. But I think that there has been a profound shift in the zeitgeist, a re-defining of the dominant cultural paradigm and that this election, even more than the election of 2008, manifested this. This election was contested on many different levels of political, economic, social, and cultural consideration, but I think that the single most significant element was that Mr. Obama --- and, by extension, his organization and those who ran in other races who reflected his point of view --- not only embraced but embodied the characteristics of that new paradigm.
To vote for Mr. Obama was, as his favorite slogan had it, to be "Forward" thinking, feeling, and acting; to vote against him was akin to trying to hold back the tide.
This is intuitive, of course, but my sense is that what it comes down to for many people is a choice between being progressive or reactionary; to be in favor of moving forward or in favor of trying to prevent moving forward.
(This raises the question of what form a genuinely conservative [as opposed to reactionary] response --- or alternative --- could be to these new social and cultural realities. After 1945, when the Republican party had become a political afterthought, a conservative intellectual movement articulated a coherent and attractive position that eventuated in the Reagan presidency. That coherent set of ideas, and the authentic coalition that grew around it, are gone. Mr. Romney and his campaign were obviously not the people to develop, articulate, sell, and govern by a conservative vision appropriate to our time and circumstances. Will there be such a person and what will be that vision? But these questions are for another time.)
The point here is that the chances of there being a bi-partisan approach are, as the old line has it, slim and none. Of the many reasons that I think this is true, to me the most significant is that this is not just a political or economic divide; it is not just an ideological divide; it is a philosophical divide. To the people actively involved in electoral politics, the stakes seem ever and ever higher, and each side sees itself on the side of right.
(I am reminded of the Bob Dylan song "With God On Our Side." Maybe we ought to lock them all in a room and force them to listen to that over and over until they come to their senses.)
Last night someone suggested that the President call for a kind of summit meeting of the major players and that it should be away somewhere; Camp David, for example. Maybe away from the "noise" of the Capital, they could concentrate on addressing the issues.
I would suggest, rather, a Humility workshop. As long as all the players are absolutely --- even arrogantly --- convinced of their own rightness and see the opposition as mindlessly refusing to go along with what is obviously right, there will be no bi-partisanship and we will continue to beat on one another. We will, as the post-modernist/multi-cultural folks like to say, "other" one another.
As Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see."
This means you.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
An Election Day Meditation
You may not be aware that the readership of this blog is well up into the single digits. One of those readers responded to the "seek after peace and pursue it" post by sending a paraphrase of the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot control,
Courage to control the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot control,
Courage to control the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.
Something about this struck me as not entirely apposite to the point I was making, but it was not immediately clear why. So in the spirit of writing to find out what one knows, as opposed to writing in order to tell what he knows, I offer this meditation.
It seems to me that there are two levels of reason for humbly accepting that one cannot control everything. The first is a psychological reason (or perhaps a psychological and social reason): a person is much more at peace, with himself and with others, when he does not try to control everything. This is a very good reason because internal peace and contentment may be the single happiest state we can achieve.
The second is a theological reason, the belief that there is a personal and infinitely loving God whose "eye is on the sparrow;" that is, a God who is actively involved in the world He created and moves in it in loving ways. If such a thing is true, then we can truly "Let Go; Let God." I believe that this is an even better reason.
Both reasons seem to proceed from the assumption that it is not a good thing to be in control of much of anything.
But doesn't this fly in the face of the practicalities of our lives? We have our physical selves to maintain and protect; we have our relatives and friends to support and defend; we have our professional and creative activities to practice. In all these ways, we hope to succeed and even to prosper. Are not these good things? Do we not have an obligation to love ourselves the way that He loves us? And to love one another as we love ourselves? And not to hide our light under the proverbial bushel basket but to shine in the world?
In life, we see examples of responses to these apparently contradictory requirements that span a wide spectrum. The hermit, the monk, the religious who lives in community, the resident of the kibbutz --- these occupy one end of the spectrum. The person who is acquisitive, selfish, and materialistic but involved in all kinds of social, political, and economic activities is at the other end.
The Greeks (and the Romans after them, imitating them as in most things) preached balance in our lives. One
formulaic version of this is the saying "moderation in all things" which always reminds me of the Jesuit who said to us, "Moderation in all things, including moderation." As with most clever lines from Jesuits, there's a lot to that.
Emerson said, "Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds." Moderation as a mindless habit doesn't seem like what the Ancients were advising.
So how are we to be humble enough to let go of the temptation to control others; loving enough to trust ourselves and to trust others, even when we are afraid to do so; and wise and courageous enough to do the right thing in the world?
These are the questions that have bedeviled thoughtful men and women from time immemorial. The licentious don't care about these questions; they get to do whatever they want. And the conformist don't care; they simply follow the rules of whatever institution they've turned themselves over to. And the supremely confident in their own rightness find such questions befuddling.
The free man takes on the burden of grappling with these questions and courageously living with the existential doubt that inevitably accompanies them.
That existential doubt is inevitable because "now we see through a glass, darkly." That is our lot and we can either take on that burden or shun it.
None of us will ever get it exactly right. No matter how hard we try, we are all imperfect. We should keep that in mind when we find ourselves thinking that we know what other people should do and be.
Not a bad meditation for Election Day, I think.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)