Earlier this week David Brooks, a moderate conservative columnist for the New York Times, wrote how the health care debate is about values, namely two specific ones: security versus vitality. He presented those values as mutually exclusive at worst and like a soft balloon at best when it comes to health care specifically and the country in general. I’ll take the soft balloon analogy just to give him the benefit of the doubt. In that analogy, if you squeeze one end, you enhance the other. In any case, he sets up the classic false dichotomy or dialectic between two goods when there truly isn’t any at all. The country does not face a choice between security and vitality.
The premises he operates from are conservative: people are essentially lazy and are motivated by fear or need; necessity is the mother of invention; providing security undermines vitality in the individual and in the country. The philosophy borrows from the first Newtonian law of physics: objects stay at rest unless a force acts upon them to overcome their inertia.
What conservatives seem to forget, including David Brooks, is that an awful lot of accomplishment that occurs is motivated by desire to accomplish, the satisfaction of accomplishment, and the need to create. All of those are best nurtured from a place of security where the essentials of life are provided for. In the world of conservatives, the starving artist always produces the best art.
For example, kids learn better when they have been provided breakfast. That’s been established as a fact, not a theory. Athletes perform better when the coach has made a decision that they are the starters. Entrepreneurs are more successful when they are fully capitalized, not when they are scrambling around looking for money.
I spent a part of my professional life coaching. The sport I loved most was rowing. What I observed over the nearly three decades I coached was that all boats went faster once I had determined the line-ups. In other words, once the oarsmen knew what seat they were occupying, the boat settled down and got faster. They became a team, pulling for each other and themselves, and the whole nearly always became greater than the sum of its parts. If I kept seat-racing well into the racing season (pitting one oarsman against another by having them switch seats from boat to boat and race over a fixed distance for time) both boats more often than not got slower rather than faster. The team psyche and commitment to each other was more important to outcome than whether or not I had actually assembled the individually strongest oarsmen in one boat. Chemistry seemed to transcend logic, and the chemistry came out of and produced the trust and commitment which teamwork becomes and is in a beautiful example of micro- evolution.
I would contend that providing health care for all Americans would produce a more vital and vibrant work force, a more focused managerial workforce, and a more vital, dynamic economy. Taking that one ball (health care) out of the juggling act for everyone would allow all of us to focus more on the love of work for the sake of accomplishment rather than choosing a company for employment because it has good health benefits. How many disgruntled workers are doing a job they hate only because it offers a good health care program? Is that any way to manage or motivate a work force? Talk about productivity. Have you ever seem a winning team that hates what it does but does it anyway for the money? I think not. If they don’t love the sport first and the money second, they don’t win.
Most of whatever has been accomplished or invented has been done so out of love, not need. If necessity is the mother of invention, the father is love of inventing (What a role reversal that is!). A certain amount of security is necessary for productivity to occur. Encouraging teamwork in the workplace can only enhance productivity, not detract from it. And people can feel a part of a team only if there is a certain amount of security in place: sinecure, no; but security, yes. The guy who invented Microsoft did so out of his parents’ garage; the guys who invented Google did so out of their dorm rooms at Stanford. They didn’t have to scrounge for their own health benefits or put food on their tables; they came from families with means. They had more than a basic sense of security.
And that brings me to dispel the still existent myth of the self-made man, the myth that conservatives will seemingly believe in as long as the last one is standing. Guess what: there is no such thing. Every man who ever made it big has a lot of folks to thank, like it or not. The myth of the self-made man is easily dismissed by John Donne’s famous line, “No man is an island” no matter how hard conservatives work to leave you “on your own.”
Security is the basis for vitality, and security is a social concept, not an individual one. We can only be secure in relation to others. Once that is established, we can then be full of vitality and energy because we have nothing vital to lose. We can go on offense rather than remain stuck in a defensive mode of thinking. In short, security provides the defense from which we can launch our offense. The Japanese figured that out a long time ago, and their factories are the model of efficiency, vitality, teamwork, and security. A new idea or improvement can come from anywhere in the workforce, not just from the top down.
Conservatives would do well to begin looking at what actually works, rather than rely on old aphorisms that have been handed down from generation to generation like the neighbor in Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” who won’t go behind the saying, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Friday, November 27, 2009
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Honor and Honesty
I once taught in the South at an old fashioned, southern gentleman’s prep school located just below the Mason-Dixon Line. The culture of the school was fiercely southern, I imagine, because it was located so close to “Yankeedom.” It was a long time ago, but as I watch the Republican remnants and their fellow travelers like Joe Liebermann rant and rave about the need to preserve free market capitalism in all its purity, I am reminded of some of my students from the southern landed gentry stock who challenged me whenever I confronted them about looking over on Beauregard’s or Hampton’s paper for an answer to a quiz question. Their response was inevitably, “Are you questioning my honor, sir?”
I would answer with, “I don’t know exactly what you mean by honor, but I am certainly questioning your honesty.” What I saw was a complete disconnect between honesty and honor. The latter was some abstract notion of reputation that must be defended at all costs, while the whole concept of actual honesty seemed lost on these young men. Fortunately I was never challenged to a duel during my three years of exile in that disturbing land, and finally I escaped back to New England.
I see the same disconnect in the southern Republican defense of free enterprise. They insist it should be defended at all costs no matter what. There is in them the same false chivalry I witnessed as a young teacher. Their notion of integrity is to defend principles no matter what, even if they have proven themselves to be worthy of questioning, as evidenced by the latest bubble and bust scenario acted out on Wall Street. Their sense of absolute integrity in defense of pure market economies as the only way to conduct business falls right in line with the history of the South as a whole: they were adamant about maintaining the institution of slavery in the face of its obvious immorality and growing economic disadvantages for the region; they were adamant about preserving Jim Crow; they were adamant about the idealization and paradoxical subservience of their white women; and now they are adamant about maintaining the deregulation of free markets at any cost. Everything becomes a last stand against the undermining of principle by Yankee liberalism and pragmatism.
Even The Economist, probably the best weekly news magazine in the world and a defender of market economies, sees the need for some kind of regulation by governments in the wake of the unregulated market debacle, but the southern Republicans will stick to principle and frame issues in terms of Thomas Paine-like absolutes, although they would not cite Paine because he was a nominal Yankee.*
The southern Republican is not the last vestige of a culture that simply will not die. NASCAR is another. Born of whiskey-running, revenuer escaping outlaws, Today’s NASCAR is the epitome of the institutionalization of red-neck southern values, and it has grown to the point that it has become mainstream American entertainment. The vast majority of its contestants are white as are most of its viewers. It celebrates a modern version of the single combat warrior of old who lives outside the law, risks his life, and maneuvers through obstacles (other drivers) to attain victory. Although there are rules and regulations governing among other aspects the size of engines and the horsepower, the spirit of single combat in that individual contestants duel it out for huge cash prizes is preserved. Fatalities do occur from time to time, so the liberties they take can result in death. The illusion, at least, of unregulated, all-out-aggression and individually heroic life-risk is preserved.
The reality, however, is that NASCAR is regulated. It is not a place where anyone can bring any kind of car to the track and do anything he wants. There are rules, restrictions, and constant revisions as technology and safety issues evolve. If the quintessential modern southern sport has rules, why can’t Wall Street? Is it just another disconnect that sport should have rules but real life should not? Maybe it’s just confusion between freedom and license that the South never sorted out except in NASCAR. Real freedom is not doing whatever you want until you get caught and then retreating into self-righteous indignation when confronted or blowing blue smoke out your exhaust pipe to escape the revenuers.
One of the definitions of integrity, in fact the first, is honesty. But then again, the southern mind has always been able to compartmentalize in ways that astound, such as the disconnect I witnessed long ago, between honor and honesty. It appears that the modern southern Republican mind’s focus on principle is so strong that it is blinded from honesty in any real sense.
*Actually, he lived in Philadelphia for a rather short period of time and then New Rochelle, New York, although he spent a good deal of his life abroad and was born in England.
I would answer with, “I don’t know exactly what you mean by honor, but I am certainly questioning your honesty.” What I saw was a complete disconnect between honesty and honor. The latter was some abstract notion of reputation that must be defended at all costs, while the whole concept of actual honesty seemed lost on these young men. Fortunately I was never challenged to a duel during my three years of exile in that disturbing land, and finally I escaped back to New England.
I see the same disconnect in the southern Republican defense of free enterprise. They insist it should be defended at all costs no matter what. There is in them the same false chivalry I witnessed as a young teacher. Their notion of integrity is to defend principles no matter what, even if they have proven themselves to be worthy of questioning, as evidenced by the latest bubble and bust scenario acted out on Wall Street. Their sense of absolute integrity in defense of pure market economies as the only way to conduct business falls right in line with the history of the South as a whole: they were adamant about maintaining the institution of slavery in the face of its obvious immorality and growing economic disadvantages for the region; they were adamant about preserving Jim Crow; they were adamant about the idealization and paradoxical subservience of their white women; and now they are adamant about maintaining the deregulation of free markets at any cost. Everything becomes a last stand against the undermining of principle by Yankee liberalism and pragmatism.
Even The Economist, probably the best weekly news magazine in the world and a defender of market economies, sees the need for some kind of regulation by governments in the wake of the unregulated market debacle, but the southern Republicans will stick to principle and frame issues in terms of Thomas Paine-like absolutes, although they would not cite Paine because he was a nominal Yankee.*
The southern Republican is not the last vestige of a culture that simply will not die. NASCAR is another. Born of whiskey-running, revenuer escaping outlaws, Today’s NASCAR is the epitome of the institutionalization of red-neck southern values, and it has grown to the point that it has become mainstream American entertainment. The vast majority of its contestants are white as are most of its viewers. It celebrates a modern version of the single combat warrior of old who lives outside the law, risks his life, and maneuvers through obstacles (other drivers) to attain victory. Although there are rules and regulations governing among other aspects the size of engines and the horsepower, the spirit of single combat in that individual contestants duel it out for huge cash prizes is preserved. Fatalities do occur from time to time, so the liberties they take can result in death. The illusion, at least, of unregulated, all-out-aggression and individually heroic life-risk is preserved.
The reality, however, is that NASCAR is regulated. It is not a place where anyone can bring any kind of car to the track and do anything he wants. There are rules, restrictions, and constant revisions as technology and safety issues evolve. If the quintessential modern southern sport has rules, why can’t Wall Street? Is it just another disconnect that sport should have rules but real life should not? Maybe it’s just confusion between freedom and license that the South never sorted out except in NASCAR. Real freedom is not doing whatever you want until you get caught and then retreating into self-righteous indignation when confronted or blowing blue smoke out your exhaust pipe to escape the revenuers.
One of the definitions of integrity, in fact the first, is honesty. But then again, the southern mind has always been able to compartmentalize in ways that astound, such as the disconnect I witnessed long ago, between honor and honesty. It appears that the modern southern Republican mind’s focus on principle is so strong that it is blinded from honesty in any real sense.
*Actually, he lived in Philadelphia for a rather short period of time and then New Rochelle, New York, although he spent a good deal of his life abroad and was born in England.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Manifest Destiny 2009
The shooting at Fort Hood is beginning to look like another story in the long history of manifest destiny narratives. What they all have in common is that some kind of god told a person (or a people) that he should listen to the voice in his head (presumably the voice of God) and do what it says. Whether it is a voice telling Israelis to keep building their houses on occupied Palestinian lands, or Christian settlers usurping Indian lands in the settling of the American West, or Islamic Jihadists detonating suicide bombs, or right-wing Christians killing abortion doctors, they all have the voice of God as their navigator or inspiration.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
Most of the time throughout history the voice of God has been benign. Most believers in God have used that voice to tell them to be good or to do good works. The problem is, as soon as a person decides that voice in his head is the voice of God, all bets are off as to what head voice messages are assigned to God and what are not. God’s voice is hard to distinguish from whatever other voices exist in the head. You can assign God to the deep voices or to the little bird-type voices. The problem remains: how can you tell for certain which messages are God’s and which are not?
The safer course is to assume that all voices in your head are of your own making, not anyone else’s, especially a god’s, and to question every voice you hear no matter what. Relinquishing authority to someone else, especially an invisible voice, is kind of dangerous. It leaves you open to the possibility of believing a message to kill someone is a good thing.
That’s why we would be a whole lot better off if we question authority, especially if that authority comes to us in the form of a voice or in the form of an authority who is telling us to do something our reason or the law tells us is quite wrong.
Therefore, it is probably better to listen to the narratives that are life-affirming and respectful of others rather than those that are not. That way, we won’t end up thinking God told us to do something or start believing homicide is better than suicide because at least we are thinking of others when we kill them.
As soon as we turn our lives over to the care of God, we have relinquished some responsibility for governing our own lives. That is why I have a hard time understanding why conservatives advocate taking more responsibility for ourselves and yet also stand behind the notion of a God whose voice can surely be mistaken or invented as an excuse to take the law into ones’ own hands.
I would rather leave out trying to tell which voices in my head are God’s or someone else’s and assume they are all just voices in my head. That way, I will not empower some voices more than others and will remain skeptical of them all.
However, in American culture we have the triple-edged sword of freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech. In other words, we are free to believe anything we think and free to purchase a gun to act on those beliefs without regard to consequences until after the action has occurred, unless we have previously sent enough verbal signals in advance to call attention to our intentions. Unless those verbal signals are confronted, it is often too late to prevent the consequences. Such is the dilemma of freedom of speech, of religion, of the right to bear arms.
In the case of the Fort Hood shooter, the verbal signals were there. Apparently the supply of Army counselors was so small in relation to the demand that the screening process was made loose enough to keep the supply of counselors greater than was safely advisable. Sending a devout Muslim with extremist sympathies to Afghanistan was the straw that broke the back of what was left of the shooter’s sanity because it put him in a psychological double bind: he was going to have to hear the confessions of American soldiers who would be apparently killing his own religious brethren. He could not imagine withstanding that personal torture. Belief in absolutes trumps mundane duty to one’s profession when the two conflict.
The respect America gives to freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, and freedom of speech will continue to be ingredients readily available to produce a “bomb” ready to go off almost anywhere in America, even at a military installation. That’s the price we pay for those freedoms, and this Fort Hood narrative is just one more in the pantheon of sad narratives that are a part of the on-going American story. And we hear them in one form or another when the body count is large or valued enough or the perpetrators initially seem unlikely (an American soldier shooting other soldiers on an Army base).
Maybe we need more counselors for all of us, especially those of us who are prone to view the world in terms of absolutes and those of us who have trouble identifying the voices in our heads. But that would mean universal mental health care coverage, and we can’t even get to universal physical health care without diluting compromise. You’re still on your own there, but you can have all the guns you want without a prescription.
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Grace
The word grace has had religious connotations for centuries. Religion has presented it essentially in two forms: something earned from or something freely given by a god. In either case, the human being on the receiving end of supposed divine grace was better off than those who were not. Grace was seen as a blessing, an advantage, or a desirable elite status.
I would contend that we would be a lot better off if we simply recognized the concept of grace as a desirable human characteristic and sought to maximize its existence among us. After all, it is we who gave our gods the capacity to bestow it in the first place so why not own it ourselves to produce as much of it as we can. Of all the shortages we can see around us today (jobs, money, happiness, civility) grace is the least present of all.
But just what is this humanistic grace of which I speak? And what is it not? When we think of it at all, it is usually in the form of an adjective: graceful. The dancers who appear on So You Think You Can Dance are often viewed as graceful in their movement even when they are dancing a very rigorous tango or salsa. But the program itself is not at all graceful in that it emphasizes judgment and competition as the measure of success, thus producing a pair of winners and a host of losers. There is little grace in the outcome. There is also no grace in the name of the program which throws down a gauntlet-like challenge and dares you to prove that you can do what you think you can. It’s no encouraging set of words like The Little Engine That Could.
When I was coming of age in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, American Bandstand captivated a whole generation of teenagers who admired the dancing skills of the cast members who were never put in the position of becoming winners or losers. They were all winners much the same way the Mouseketeers were on the Mickey Mouse Club created by Walt Disney. The viewing audiences in both cases were given a variety of personalities to admire and even emulate. The dancing was good, but as a viewer I never felt the need to see a showdown in order to determine who the best dancer was on either program. Must everything be reduced to winners and losers? Was not the grace of it the fact that they were dancing?
Discourse has suffered the same fate of late as dance. Diatribe has replaced dialogue as the means of communication. The win-at-all-cost monologue championed by self-appointed and self-righteous talk show hosts whose might- (following) makes-right attitude has replaced the measured, nuanced rhetoric of well-mannered and thoughtful pursuers of truth like Walter Lippmann and William F. Buckley. Blind certitude is asserted in the face of complexity with a vehemence that precludes any humility or doubt. It is about winning, the truth already having been established. The idea of being graceful is brushed aside as a sign of weakness.
A friend once remarked that if we, as human beings, were completely uninhibited, we would sing to each other rather than talk. Life would be a combination of opera and ballet. It would be about the grace of it all, not the meanness. It would be about bringing out the best in each other in everyday life, which would mean bringing out the grace each of us has inherent in us as human beings. Grace, by my definition, goes beyond mere civility or generosity or art. It is the combination of all human qualities that produce goodness in all its forms and facets. It is the combination of qualities that help us harmonize with our habitats and sing the song of life. It is about singing rather than bickering; dancing rather than trudging; skipping rather than plodding. It is about painting ourselves out of corners rather than into them, and being the am and drinking the tea in team.
The Puritans thought they knew what grace was and believed that you either had it or you didn’t. They had located it in their god, personified it (he) and then doled it out to the select few whose crops did not fail or ships did not sink. We’re still seeing the remnants of that legacy in those who tell us that because they are materially successful or know (for certain) how that happens, that they are the elect who must convey their wisdom to their hopeful followers. Ultimately it is self-serving rationalization, not true grace.
The question is not “So you think you can dance?” The question is will you.
I would contend that we would be a lot better off if we simply recognized the concept of grace as a desirable human characteristic and sought to maximize its existence among us. After all, it is we who gave our gods the capacity to bestow it in the first place so why not own it ourselves to produce as much of it as we can. Of all the shortages we can see around us today (jobs, money, happiness, civility) grace is the least present of all.
But just what is this humanistic grace of which I speak? And what is it not? When we think of it at all, it is usually in the form of an adjective: graceful. The dancers who appear on So You Think You Can Dance are often viewed as graceful in their movement even when they are dancing a very rigorous tango or salsa. But the program itself is not at all graceful in that it emphasizes judgment and competition as the measure of success, thus producing a pair of winners and a host of losers. There is little grace in the outcome. There is also no grace in the name of the program which throws down a gauntlet-like challenge and dares you to prove that you can do what you think you can. It’s no encouraging set of words like The Little Engine That Could.
When I was coming of age in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, American Bandstand captivated a whole generation of teenagers who admired the dancing skills of the cast members who were never put in the position of becoming winners or losers. They were all winners much the same way the Mouseketeers were on the Mickey Mouse Club created by Walt Disney. The viewing audiences in both cases were given a variety of personalities to admire and even emulate. The dancing was good, but as a viewer I never felt the need to see a showdown in order to determine who the best dancer was on either program. Must everything be reduced to winners and losers? Was not the grace of it the fact that they were dancing?
Discourse has suffered the same fate of late as dance. Diatribe has replaced dialogue as the means of communication. The win-at-all-cost monologue championed by self-appointed and self-righteous talk show hosts whose might- (following) makes-right attitude has replaced the measured, nuanced rhetoric of well-mannered and thoughtful pursuers of truth like Walter Lippmann and William F. Buckley. Blind certitude is asserted in the face of complexity with a vehemence that precludes any humility or doubt. It is about winning, the truth already having been established. The idea of being graceful is brushed aside as a sign of weakness.
A friend once remarked that if we, as human beings, were completely uninhibited, we would sing to each other rather than talk. Life would be a combination of opera and ballet. It would be about the grace of it all, not the meanness. It would be about bringing out the best in each other in everyday life, which would mean bringing out the grace each of us has inherent in us as human beings. Grace, by my definition, goes beyond mere civility or generosity or art. It is the combination of all human qualities that produce goodness in all its forms and facets. It is the combination of qualities that help us harmonize with our habitats and sing the song of life. It is about singing rather than bickering; dancing rather than trudging; skipping rather than plodding. It is about painting ourselves out of corners rather than into them, and being the am and drinking the tea in team.
The Puritans thought they knew what grace was and believed that you either had it or you didn’t. They had located it in their god, personified it (he) and then doled it out to the select few whose crops did not fail or ships did not sink. We’re still seeing the remnants of that legacy in those who tell us that because they are materially successful or know (for certain) how that happens, that they are the elect who must convey their wisdom to their hopeful followers. Ultimately it is self-serving rationalization, not true grace.
The question is not “So you think you can dance?” The question is will you.
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