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.
Sunday, December 9, 2012
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.
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