20 December 2012

Your Gift



We arrive in this world by circumstance and spend much of our life trying to reconcile the gift.  We endure our struggles and ascribe our lot with the certainty of burden.  Between the jubilation, pain, and occasional humility we scrape a path that is ours alone.  In the seam of these struggles life offers brilliance: the warmth of late summer’s sun quenching our shoulders as we gaze across a horizon of promise; the magical touch of a child’s hand who clasps ours for comfort; the flash of a smile from a heart who loves ours too.  We are placed here to express a life all our own.  Tear away the wrapping, therein lies the gift.
Our choices are many, perhaps too many.  Some wring their hands over pearlized ivory or satin cream, over the eight-place setting or twelve.  Some pay others to tell them how to dress, behave, and raise their children.  Some find decision making an unbearable burden, fearful of those who may judge their choices as wrong.  Still others among us are addled by success; frozen by a world we herald as great. Those who understand their gift grant short shrift to such contrivances and lean forward into tomorrow.
Every morning offers beauty.  Every day arrives as a clean slate, if we look past the indelible erasures.  When the sky is dark, the wind unyielding and the news dire, there is reason to smile.  We each possess the promise of greatness: to thrust our spirit into the light where our gift can shine.  The choice is ours, in this moment and every moment that follows.  Look at that person who stares back at you in the morning mirror and accept your gift.  Draw those near who nourish your soul.  Let others pass.
This season take a morning walk in the silence of new-fallen snow; lift a child upon your knee and tell them a story about your grandfather; sit outside at night until the sky throws a star your way.
Listen.
Love.
Laugh.
            Embrace your gift.

03 November 2012

Sandy's Last Victim: (President) Romney

-->
In August at the Republican National Convention, Candidate Romney mocked President Obama when he said: “Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet” which drew groans and laughter from the Party loyals festooned in elephas regalia.  While Romney followed up his mocking with a reasonable pledge to instead concern himself with the American family as opposed to the sophomoric “Drill, Baby, Drill!” chant of four years earlier, he may have offended more than Obamians and human-hating environmentalists. He may have offended Mother Nature herself who sent the ambiguously gendered climate changer hurricane Sandy to submerge Romney’s campaign in its final days.
            I may be proven wrong four days from now, but after studying the numbers posted at Real Clear Politics yesterday afternoon, it appears that Obama will win reelection.  There are too many ways he can win, and really no plausible pathway for Romney.  What was new and somewhat startling, however, was what appears to be Sandy’s effect on Florida; a state he/she rained on but passed on his/her way to slam the Northeast.  Florida, recently seen as a Romney certainty, may swing to Obama.  If Obama gets those 29 electoral votes he can lose every other swing state to Romney and still be reelected.
            The Sandy effect on Florida is fairly easy to understand.  Floridians know a thing or two about hurricanes and are very sympathetic to their victims.  Obama has received great praise for his handling of the aftermath, which has, among other things, produced a November bromance-a-trois between himself, Mayor Bloomberg, and Governor Christie.  And remember, millions of Floridians either came from the Northeast or have family there today. Finally, Floridians are also aware – and were reminded again this week – that Obama appointed their former head of emergency management (a Jeb Bush man), William Fugate, as his head of FEMA who is also being (mostly) lauded for his handling of the Sandy aftermath.  Obama reached across the aisle to avoid a W/Katrina/Brownie disaster.
            Last Thursday in the New York Times, Timothy Egan opined, “in the election of 2012, it looks like nature votes last."  If it does, its deciding vote may leave Romney wishing that Obama had succeeded in his quest to “slow the rise of the oceans” that put the sunshine state on the tally sheet of President Obama.
           


03 September 2012

Is the Doctrine of Common Interest Dead?


The concepts of general welfare and collective action are core elements in the Constitution of the United States, which I collectively refer to here as common interest.  Although common interest has been with us since the birth of our nation, and has been a fundamental component of social order since the days of hunter-gatherers, it appears to be in peril today.  The phrase itself draws ire from all political corners: some deride the invocation of common interest as a dangerous slide toward socialism, while others argue it marks the deceitful rhetoric of plutocrats who wish to extract wealth from the middle class.  Yet, our history suggests when our common interest is served – when we work together toward mutually beneficial ends – America is at its best; we are all better off.  President Kennedy’s ambitious objective of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” launched one of the most successful programs of political initiative and private enterprise in the history of the United States.[1]  Among other gains, the miniaturization of computing power necessary to accomplish this feat is why we have laptop computers today.  There are many other examples of the benefits of common interest, but the point is this: the security and prosperity of America has never been won by the few, it has been assured by the many with the support of both private and public entities.  So why is common interest being attacked from all sides?  What follows here are some possible contributing factors.

  1. The Ascent of Me-ism.  While doing my doctoral research on the rise of religion in the political sphere by the mid-1970s I came across a monograph on the 1960s by Mark Hamilton Lytle wherein he argued (much to this baby boomer’s chagrin) that “many people in the sixties passed off self-indulgence and arrogance as moral and political commitment.”  In other words, while we traveled in the clothing of righteous liberation, we were actually just enjoying the hell out of ourselves.  Lytle continues, “by listening to Dylan, smoking dope, marching for civil rights, wearing long hair, and protesting the war in Vietnam, anyone could claim to have joined, though what they belonged to was far from clear.”[2]  More recently, Kurt Andersen at The New York Times joined Lytle in boomer bashing when he suggested that the late 1960s marked the beginning of individualism run amok.  Andersen argues, “‘do your own thing’ is not so different than ‘every man for himself.’”[3]  He further finds that the “Me” decade of the 1960s expanded to encompass the entire last half of the century giving rise to a super-selfish culture that has lost its capacity for considering the interests of others.  Recently, this selfish hyper-individualism has been cloaked in a veil of self-deterministic rhetoric most often conveyed by those who identify with the Tea Party.  These are the folks who live in the fantasy of self-sufficiency, while often disproportionately relying on government support programs like Medicare, agricultural subsidies, mortgage interest deductions, federal mortgage guarantees, and Social Security.  They suffer from what philosopher Firmin DeBrabander calls the “delusional autonomy of Freud’s poor ego.”[4]  For Tea Partiers (unless they are thebeneficiaries) all government programs are evidence of toxic socialism.  The questions are, how has this selfish impulse been generalized in American society, and how is it sustained?  Part of the answer lies in three largely exogenous variables: affluence, technology, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
  1. Affluence, Technology, and Hubris.  Three structural events have occurred since the 1960s to fuel our selfishness and contempt for common interest: we’re rich, we suffer the illusion of ‘connection’ with others, and a force equal to ours no longer threatens us.  Let’s start with affluence.  Don’t get me wrong, I love wealth, but it can produce nefarious effects.  Since Saigon fell and we retreated “with honor” as President Nixon often claimed, the Dow Jones Industrial Average has increased sixteenfold.  By most any measure there is no wealthier nation than the United States, and money (and the debt capacity it supports) has been a significant sustaining force of our selfishness.  If we wanted something, we were a swipe of a credit card, or another issuance of US Treasury bills away from getting it.  Even though the US is fast approaching technical insolvency, the rules of financial prudence do not apply to us since the dollar is (for now) the world’s reserve currency of choice.  Next up: technology.  Again, I love it, but I also recognize it has produced its own deleterious effects.  Humans need to be connected to form a sense of empathy, which is the foundation of many things including our subscriptions to human rights and common interest.  Technology has tricked us into thinking we are connected and that we are bonded by common interest.  We are not. We suffer the illusion of connection and common interest.  Just because someone ‘friended’ you or ‘follows’ you does not mean they know you, or care about you. Just try reaching out to your so-called friends and followers when you are in need.  Absent an established sense of empathy, those cheerful beeps, ringtones, and vibrations that signal friendship quickly fade to silence.  Finally, there has been no other state since the collapse of the Soviet Union to keep the US from imperial overreach; the natural boundaries of power collapsed as well. The result: we, like empires before us, risk decline at our own hand.  Hubris is deadly to both people and states and we Americans have been quite full of ourselves in the last twenty years, as we have sought to remake the world in our own (selfish) image.  Other contributors to the threat to common interest include what I describe here next as the twin delusions.
  2. The Twin Delusions: Free Markets and Big Government.  Both sides of the great political debate of this presidential season – those who hold fast to their belief in free markets and those who believe with equal certitude that more government is better government – are wrong.  Neither thesis alone has any chance of solving the problems we face, yet to even suggest a middle ground that includes elements of both ideological extremes is met with hatred and hostility.  The Affordable Healthcare Act (aka Obamacare) has been one lightening rod of these twin delusions. Healthcare is not a right, nor is it a privilege (as it is most often debated by adversaries); rather, it is a classic example of a public good.  When we are healthy individually, we are also collectively better off.  I often ask: do we really want those who teach our children in school, or prepare our meals in restaurants, to be without healthcare?  Public goods like security, financial stability, and clean air & water are only created out of a subscription to common interest.  As Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel argued persuasively in his new book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, markets alone are an ineffective tool in the production and sustainability of public goods.  He cites our slide from a “market economy to being a market society” as a dangerous illustration of the moral limits of markets.[5]  Public goods, like landing a man on the moon, or healthcare, or addressing the onset of climate change, are accomplished with a blend of market flexibility and centralized governance. All public goods rely on competitive and innovative markets as well as centralized command and control.  Healthcare should be addressed in the same manner.  The good news is there is more than enough money in the system today to make it work for more people at a level of service unmatched in the world.  However, common interest must be established once again or issues like this will continue to be hijacked by small thinkers and powerful interest groups, which endangers the future of America.  (In the case of climate change there may not be enough interest or resources to address it, but that is another story.[6])  The next factors that threaten common interest include those related to cognitive degeneration.
  3. The Demise of Critical & Integrative Thinking.  The now notorious decline of the American education system – particularly in math and science in our secondary schools – means that other nations will soon (if not already) exceed the United States in developing the critical thinkers who will produce tomorrow’s innovations to address our most urgent needs.  Through a combination of neglect, unintended policy consequences, and disengaged parenting, the education our children receive today is inferior to the education we boomers received that was achieved with fewer resources and analog technologies.  This condition has been further exacerbated by xenophobic attitudes toward immigrants who are educated in our superior universities, but who are then forced to return home when they would prefer to become the next generation of American innovators.  I am not sure whom we believe we are protecting with this backwater thinking, but it is most certainly not the future of America.  The other cognitive victim to the bipolar, zero-sum, us vs. them mind-set that has developed in the United States over the last few decades is integrative thinking.  Complexity, which is the nature of the globalized world we live in, requires multiple disciplines that each provide a piece of a solution that must be combined, or integrated, into an option that had never been thought of before.  This skill, or predilection, is what Roger Martin calls “the opposable mind.”  Martin suggests that, “integrative thinking shows us a way past the binary limits of either-or.  It shows us that there is a way to integrate the advantages of one solution without cancelling out the advantages of an alternative solution.  Integrative thinking affords us, in the words of poet Wallace Stevens, ‘the choice not between, but of.’”[7]  Integrative thinking has, however, fallen victim in part to the hubris mentioned above, and also from the application of cognitive constructs that have their roots in absolutist and universalistic thinking, which emanates from different places; preeminent among them today is religious-based certitude.  In short, the religious righteousness that has ascended unabated since the early 1970s has closed our minds to options that reside in the relativism and complexity of the real world.  Moral certitude has placed absolutism right where we need it least: in addressing complexity.
  4. The Rise of Religious Certitude.  For the last four years I have studied the impact of religious beliefs and convictions on presidential decision making in foreign policy.  I am often asked if religion is a good or bad thing when it comes to policymaking.  For me, the question is moot; it doesn’t matter.  What matters is that religious beliefs and convictions are a factor that we need to understand much better than we do.  Depending on the individual, religious beliefs contribute with varying emphasis on decision making and, of course, the beliefs themselves differ both inter- and intra- faith.  When I construct the cognetic profile of a president each is as individualized as a fingerprint: no two are the same.  What applies more broadly here however, is that the level of religiosity in any given era matters, and in the contemporary era religion matters a great deal.  Since the mid-1970s, religion has been fully ensconced in the private, public, and political spheres in the US.  Throughout history this condition is not unprecedented, but the crescendo that has occurred over the last four decades matches if not exceeds other periods of high religiosity in US history.  During these periods – for better or worse – faith-based religious cognitive constructs find higher expression in all decision making.  While all religions purport a number of common values including tolerance, inclusion and, moreover, an expectation that we would all like to be treated well by our neighbors, the monotheistic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) – the dominant religions of the Middle East and the West – produce a dangerous irony: they demand of their followers a strict adherence to their particular traditions that (by their monotheistic subscription) does not allow room to consider other religious traditions as theologically valid or worthy.  This sets up a cognitive construct of absolutism and universalism (black and white thinking applied to everyone and everywhere) which compromises the values of tolerance and inclusion that are necessary to form the empathy that is the foundation of common interest.  Absolutism and universalism may arguably be appropriate in establishing moral foundations, but they are ill-suited to deal with the complexity of those issues that effect all people – where common interest must be established and where integrative thinking is required to succeed. In effect, these cognitive constructs get too much playing time in periods of high religiosity that has a chilling effect on common interest.

While James Madison warned us of the danger of factions in his Federalist Papers, and Thomas Jefferson worried about the role of the church in the affairs of state, Tocqueville also observed the curious synthesis of individualism and community that he surmised was fundamental to the success of Americans.  These concerns and observations all point to the importance of common interest and to its preservation at all costs.  Today’s political discourse too often threatens the doctrine of common interest espoused by our Founding Fathers and memorialized in the Constitution.  Selfish hyper-individualism, affluence, technology, the absence of a formidable foe, the twin delusions of free markets and big government, cognitive degeneration, and absolutist thinking that emanates from religious certitude, all contribute to the peril facing the doctrine of common interest today.  It is time for our leaders to find the center again and to set aside notions of absolutism and exclusion in favor of compromise and integrative thinking.  We must once again embrace the concept of ‘the many’ over the idiocentric beliefs and needs of ‘the few’.


[1] John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to Congress on the Nation’s Urgent Needs,” May 25, 1961, www.jfklibrary.org.
[2] Mark Hamilton Lytle, America’s Uncivil Wars: The Sixties Era from Elvis to the Fall of Richard Nixon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. xiii.
[3] Kurt Andersen, “The Downside of Liberty,” The New York Times, July 3, 2012, www.nytimes.com. See also, Letters to the Editor, “Sunday Dialogue: Are Americans Selfish?” The New York Times, July 14, 2012, www.nytimes.com; and Frank Bruni, “Individualism in Overdrive,” The New York Times, July 16, 2012, www.nytimes.com.
[4] Firmin DeBrabander, “Deluded Individualism,” The New York Times, August 18, 2012, www.nytimes.com.
[5] See Michael Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012), p. 10.
[6] For a (reasoned) skeptic’s view on the climate change debate, see Bjorn Lomborg, “Environmental Alarmism, The and Now,” Foreign Affairs (July/August 2012), pp. 24-40.  For a decidedly unsettling account of climate change, see Bill McKibben, “The Reckoning,” Rolling Stone (August 2, 2012), pp. 52-60.
[7] Roger L. Martin, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2007), p. 9.

25 June 2012

The Re-emergence of Personal Sovereignty


It has been six months since my last post, “American Empire (?): The Way Forward.”  I imposed a kind of self-banishment from blogging to finalize my PhD dissertation and complete my viva voce. Upon emerging from my academic cave a couple of weeks ago, I was greeted by the realization that little has changed.  I now know how Punxsutawney Phil must feel every February 2nd when the same old drunk Penn-men get dressed up to greet him and violate what for this subterranean mammal must be a blissful slumber including hopeful dreams that something new awaits him on the morning of next winter’s wake up call.  Similarly, the same knucklehead politicians and pundits seem to be with me after my academic reclusion, although fewer of the more colorful and stupefying ones like Perry, Bachmann, Santorum, and Gingrich are with us in their aspiring form.  I must admit that my masochistic evil twin misses them a great deal.[1]  However, notwithstanding the constancy of our national leadership deficit some things do feel different, which I interpret (using the much maligned term) as hopeful.
            As I identified in December, the US does appear to be experiencing a decoupling from the woes of the world, especially that emanate in Europe.  While not entirely decoupled, our markets are certainly benefiting as a relatively safe place to store wealth, especially for monied folks in the southern Latin clines of the euro who want to avoid catastrophic losses with a return of the drachma or the peseta.  Among other things, they are buying up big-city US real estate; and it is important to note that US Treasuries, slammed by S&P last July, are doing quite well, thank you.  The reality is that while we have gained a great deal of weight that should compromise our prospects as the most attractive (one-night) romantic target at closing time at the local bar, demand for all things American remains at unprecedented levels.  However, there is a greater (hopeful) decoupling development, which is more local and more personal that appears to be taking hold: people seem to be ignoring bad news and have begun to find ways to get on with their lives.  In the absence of national leadership – particularly in Congress – individuals are leading for themselves.  It is as if they have declared the current crisis moot.
            This condition amounts to another ‘work-around’ to be added to the list of three others in my last post; this one is, in effect, a psychological work-around where we each – one-by-one – reclaim our personal sovereignty.  People are beginning to turn the noise off and listen to their own music.  They are making tough choices (in many cases because there is no other choice) and moving on.  They are forging new pathways and new identities to escape the banality of the current crisis to produce what for them is transcendence toward a more manageable future.  This development is not based in apathy, or denial, or anger; it is based in reality and, I believe, is for the most part a very good thing.  While reclaiming sovereignty can be interpreted as a dangerous trend toward isolation and disunion, in the current crisis it may be just what our leaders need to sober up and start serving their constituents again.  Can you imagine the tectonic shift that will occur when our leaders realize that no one cares what they have to say anymore?  Who is elected this November, or in the coming two or three election cycles, may become irrelevant.
            Nearly two centuries ago Alexis de Tocqueville observed of Americans that they had a particular sense of sovereignty that began with the individual and eventually “emerged from the towns and took possession of the government.”[2]  Perhaps reclaiming our personal sovereignty is a first step, however painful, to reclaiming America’s seat at the table of greatness.


[1] Although I read this morning that Bachmann has had her staff reserve precious lawn space outside Congress to herald the expected battering of Obamacare by the Supreme Court, no doubt with her trademark bimbonic stare.  My twin awaits re-satiation.
[2] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 2004), p. 63.