Death of an Uncommon Man

“And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk;
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.” — William Stafford, A Ritual to Read to Each Other

When Michel Montaigne (1533-1592), Renaissance statesman and the father of the modern essay, was thirty-six, he had a near-death experience. He was riding in the forest with three or four companions, servants in his household, musing over something intriguing to him, when suddenly he took a tremendous blow to his back, was flung from his horse, and landed ten yards away, unconscious. It seems that one of his men, a burly fellow, had spurred his horse to full gallop to impress his friends, and had misjudged the distance between himself and his master, inadvertently knocking  Montaigne and his little horse off the path. 

Sara Bakewell tells the story in her book, How to Live or A Life of Montaigne. At the time, Montaigne felt himself to be drifting peacefully toward eternal sleep, although he was actually retching up blood and tearing at his belly as though to claw it open for release. For days he lay in bed recovering, full of aches and grievous pains, marveling at the experience he’d had and trying to recall every moment of it. It changed his life, which, until then, had been dedicated to learning how to die with equanimity and grace. 

In an essay on death, written some years after the incident, Montaigne rather offhandedly sums up the lesson, “If you don’t know how to die, don’t worry. Nature will tell you what to do on the spot, fully and adequately. She will do this job perfectly for you; don’t bother your head about it.” 

Bakewell notes that this became Montaigne’s answer to the question of how to live. In fact, not worrying about death made it possible to really live. In an era in which a man of thirty-six could, by the limits of those times, see himself on the verge of getting old, the contemplation of death had been refined to a high art. Montaigne picked this up from his voluminous study of the Greek and Roman classics, his admiration for the Stoics, like Seneca, and the Roman orator, statesman and philosopher, Cicero, who famously wrote, “To philosophize is to learn how to die.”

Death was an obsession for Montaigne when he was in his twenties and early thirties. In succession, his best friend died of the plague in 1563, his father died in 1568, and in 1569 his younger brother died in a freak sporting accident. In that same year Montaigne got married; his first child, born that same year lived only two months. Montaigne lost four more children, only one of six living to adulthood. Yet, in spite of all that early sorrowful practice, he had grown no easier with death. 

It wasn’t until his near-fatal accident that he began to understand how little our own death need affect us. His experience of it was one of peaceful release; he had almost kissed Death on the lips. From that experience he gradually migrated out of fear of dying to being engaged in living and learning how to live. 

Some of this came to mind today while I was immersed in thought at the funeral of a friend, a man well-respected in my community, who was Chair of the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian, author of over 125 scientific articles and books, and once voted by the Washington Post and Washingtonian Magazine as one of the 25 smartest people in Washington, DC. 

He had balanced a life as a scientist in constant discovery-mode with being a husband, a father, a member of a church, and chairman of the local school board. In his sudden death, we mourned the loss of a man who made life look effortless, achievement and highest honors a matter of diligence, whose passing left a body of work and a legacy to be admired. 

I remembered him as being kind, forthright, clear-eyed, and honest, a man who generously took the time to ask one questions of himself and to probe for answers together. 

Our friend understood, said the minister in his homily, that we do not travel this life alone. As a scientist, he worked with others, as a member of a faith community he struggled with matters of conviction and truth, as a man he knew that we do not grieve alone. Not a sentimentalist nor given to emotional displays, he made honesty and integrity his benchmarks for a life with others.

So little time in life. . . so much to live into! Montaigne turns from preparing for death to living a conscious life in a way that remarks upon itself. In the lens of his self-reflection he gives us a mirror for ourselves. In his boundless curiosity about life our friend, Don Ortner, rendered Death almost an afterthought. Be honest, live simply, trust fully, do good work: it’s essential, these men said, to stand for life in the midst of death. 

Just so, William Stafford, from the poem quoted above ends with this stanza:

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

Economethics or Can't Buy Me Love

“The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the expansion of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life where they don’t belong.” — Michael J. Sandel, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

Once in a while a book hits a resonant tone within one’s life, enough so that you want to exclaim, “Yes! This is what I’m saying.” Such a book is Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy, and the tone he hits is that we live with the assumption that everything has its price and there is nothing that money can’t buy. Examples abound: the Dallas school district that pays second graders $2 for every book they read; the practice of paying Indian surrogate mothers upwards of $6,250 to carry a pregnancy; the right to shoot an endangered black rhino on a game farm for $150,000, and on and on. 

Sandel’s argument, carefully considered and reasoned, is that utilitarian arguments for letting the market dictate the most efficient way to fulfill our wants lead to inequality and corruption. Inequality, because if everything is for sale, those without the means end up suffering even more. And corruption because pricing certain goods in life changes and distorts our perspective on the value of those goods.

If all he had done was to point out such instances, that would be interesting enough: there is apparently no limit to the imagination of people bent on making a buck, no matter the moral cost. But what Sandel has done is to question the assumption that powers the engine of capitalism and that shapes our culture to such an extent that we even subject our relationships with others to a cost-benefit analysis. Moreover, such an analysis is our unthinking default position. You know we’ve succumbed to a virulent ideology when we struggle to feel outrage at the fact that corporations pay to be allowed to continue polluting or that the unflinchingly arrogant can hire someone to do their apologizing for them. By the notions of today’s cultural values that’s known as a ‘win-win’ situation. You have a need and a fistful of cash; I have the answer and a need for your cash. We exchange—and everybody wins.

But in that transaction, so transparently justifiable these days, is a tiny pellet of cynicism about the moral meaning of values. To change the metaphor slightly, we drop our values into a volatile bath of corrosive chemicals that leave them leached and useless. 

“We corrupt a good, an activity, or a social practice,” says Sandel, “whenever we treat it according to a lower norm than is appropriate to it.” Thus an organization based in North Carolina, called Project Prevention, will pay $300 to drug-addicted women to be sterilized. The founder, Barbara Harris, says, “I’ll do anything I have to do to prevent babies from suffering. I don’t believe that anybody has the right to force their addiction on another human being.” 

According to market logic the transaction increases the social utility for all parties: the addict gets $300 for giving up her ability to have children, and the organization has the satisfaction that one more drug-addicted baby will not be born into the world. What’s not to like? 

Sandel points up two objections. The first is the criticism that this constitutes a form of coercion: offering $300 to a drug addict is an offer she can’t refuse and thus she is not acting freely. 

The other objection centers on this as a form of bribery. Public officials who accept bribes demean and degrade their office by applying a lower norm to it than is appropriate. 

Whether or not this deal is coercive, say critics, it is corrupt because both the seller (the addict) and the buyer (Harris) “value the good being sold (the childbearing capacity of the seller) in the wrong way.” Sandel continues: “Harris treats drug-addicted and HIV-positive women as damaged baby-making machines that can be switched off for a fee. Those who accept her offer acquiesce in this degrading view of themselves. This is the moral force of the bribery charge.”

Behind these examples lies the real heart of Sandel’s argument with economists: that their claim they only explain behavior but don’t judge it simply cannot be supported. Whether they like it or not they are entangled in moral decisions constantly. The market is not value-neutral but is shaped and influenced by cultural norms. If that were not the case we’d still be buying and selling slaves, since on a purely utilitarian basis it increases efficiency for both the buyer and seller. But for the slave it is a horrible and undeserved punishment because it deprives that person of the respect and freedom due to human beings. If the utilitarian approach works for the greatest good for the greatest number, then it hits a wall on this one and many others like it.

In considering this I’d like to coin a new word: economethics—the discipline that studies the ethical implications of economic theories. If ours is a market-driven culture, as Sandel and many others claim, then such a study would be essential. It might keep us questioning whether we really want to gauge the worth of actions and relations and people solely by their pecuniary value (from Latin, pecu, which meant ‘flock or herd or cattle). 

But we don’t have to wait for the formal recognition of this field. We can begin the resistance to the reigning ideology by simply practicing the Golden Rule, a form of which has been around in all the major religious faiths since the Axial Age began circa 500 BCE. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Priceless!

Seeing the Whole Together

“Teaching is an art, and an art, though it has a variety of practical devices to choose from, cannot be reduced to a science.” — Jacques Barzun, Begin Here: The Forgotten Conditions of Teaching and Learning

“On the face of things, there is no art of teaching. Teaching is, rather, an aspect of all arts; as a division of each art, it cannot be considered an art itself.” — Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation

This is the season when alumni from all walks of life wend their ways back to campuses around the country. They will be variously shocked, discouraged, amused, and maybe intrigued by the changes they see in the old school. 

One thing has not changed, however, and that is the constant question about the value of education in America. Alumni, students, parents, legislators, and teachers ask the question, over and over again in a myriad of ways. The anxiety betrayed by the asking suggests that we have no clear idea what we want out of education. The fact that American students consistently do not place in the top ten worldwide in any subject category is a cause for consternation.

Meanwhile, according to the New York Times, Finland’s students continue to place near the top in international tests of math, science, and reading while the US ranks 27th in science, 19th in math, and 15th in reading. Handwringing and derision are indulged in and delegations of American educationistas make the trek to Finnish schools to learn their secrets. Finland has fewer students nationwide than New York City has — 600,000 to New York’s 1.1 million — much more homogeneity, far less poverty, and the average resident checks out 17 books a year from the library. These are disparate facts; jumbled together they create a somewhat misleading portrait of both countries. 

To read educational surveys and official reports—and they are Legion — is to enter Alice’s Wonderland, minus the humor and heavy on the politicization. To recall the basics about teaching and learning I often read Jacques Barzun and Robert Grudin, those quoted above. These particular sentences, plucked from their context, make it seem that agreement cannot be found among teachers, especially about the nature of teaching. 

But while they may differ on the details they are both, I believe, honing in on a key point: that teaching in its most fundamental and noblest form is about confronting students with what lies outside their narrow concerns. Grudin says, “To learn is not merely to accumulate data; it is to rebuild one’s world,” and Barzun, whose contempt for the latest methods in teaching is unreserved, speaks of the “difficulties,” not the “problems” of teaching. “It will always be difficult to teach well, to learn accurately; to read, write, and count readily and competently; to acquire a sense of history and develop a taste for literature and the arts—in short, to instruct and start one’s education or another’s.” 

Grudin adds a nuance to this by noting that teaching is intended, when done well, to shock the learner with a sudden juxtaposition of the new alongside the familiar. “True teachers,” he says, “all seem to practice, in many ways and under many guises, this form of shock. . . .  Good teaching develops students’ creative abilities by unlocking their sense of wonder. Students learn creativity not directly from the teacher but from the cathartic self-revelation that the teacher inspires.”

When was the last time you felt the ‘shock of the new,’ that bolt of excitement when you realized you understood something that had seemed impenetrable only moments before? Did that happen in a classroom? If so, you are blessed with a rare experience. 

Both Grudin and Barzun recognize that teachers of this sort are few. It is a convenient truth that many students come to college woefully unprepared, some without any apparent study skills and most without any curiosity about the way the world works. But that alone is not reason enough for mediocrity in teaching. 

There are other reasons for why teachers might not give their best day after day in the classroom. One is the sheer size of some classes, when sections of a single course can number 500 or more. Another is the fact that over 60 percent of college teachers these days are adjuncts, a peculiar existence in which one dashes from campus to campus for classes, has no office, and is paid a fraction of what full-time teachers make without any benefits. Still another reason is that studying is just one of many activities in a student’s life. Most of them work, some full-time, and squeeze classes in around their work schedules. A good number are student athletes, another form of work which requires long hours of practice, road trips during the semester, and days missed for injuries. 

Yet another reason is that most students equate a college education as the means to a job, the collecting of ‘skill sets’ which will fit them nicely to step into harness at a variety of locations throughout a lifetime of work. Education, then, is a series of hoops to hop through, obstacles to avoid, and a system to game with the least amount of mental effort. They have been encouraged in this by business leaders, by family members, and by educational administrators who regard  them as ‘customers.’

The natural alternative to this way of thinking is to see education as an end in itself, something done without any regard for practicalities. This viewpoint rightly draws heavy fire from almost everyone who has ever paid bills, managed a household, and held a job. But if formal learning is more than training for a job or personal indulgence then what is it?

Robert Grudin draws the contrast between the Sophists and the Socratics. The Sophists disdained any learning that did not lead to the specific and the practical. They would have felt right at home with students who are training to hold a specific occupation. The Socratics, on the other hand, believed in a liberal education that could transcend the specific and the merely practical. Only by gaining a wider and broader perspective, they argued, could a person become truly practical. Life demands of us the ability to see the forest and the trees, indeed, the tree and the leaf. A liberal education gives us the ability, they thought, to understand why the big picture is made up of many pixels, to use a contemporary metaphor. It is an interdisciplinary body with curiosity at its heart and enthusiasm right out to its fingertips. It is literally a vision or visualization (the Greek word is ‘synoptic,’ meaning ‘to see the whole together’) of the world from diverse points of view. 

“Forget Education,” says Barzun, ironically and good-naturedly. “Education is a result, a slow growth, and hard to judge. Let us talk rather about Teaching and Learning, a joint activity that can be provided for, though as a nation we have lost the knack of it.” 

Wise words for those who would cast themselves as life-long learners. In this season of alumni reunions find a teacher who opened the world to you and thank him or her.

That’s the kind of teacher I've yearned to be. After three decades of teaching, I’m still learning. To lift a phrase from St. Paul, “”It is not to be thought that I have already achieved all this . . . . but I press towards the goal.”

A Day Without Mammon

Now I have reached the age of judgment giving sorrow that many men have come to, the verdict of regret, remembering the world once better than it is, my old walkways beneath the vanished trees, and friends lost now in loss of trust.

And I recall myself more innocent than I am, gone past coming back in the history of flaw, except Christ dead and risen in my own flesh shall judge, condemn, and then forgive. — Wendell Berry, from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

T. S. Eliot said that April was “the cruellest month, breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land/Mixing memory and desire. . . .” April in Maryland comes with the shyness of spring amidst the last blows of winter and before the blast furnace of summer’s heat and humidity. It’s a narrow sliver of chance that could fall, from day to day, any number of ways of weather, rising 30 degrees in a matter of hours or dropping wearily into thunderstorms at the end of a serene day. One never knows.

Somewhere in there is Easter, a mixed blessing of a holy day if there ever was one. Over the years I’ve come to a restless peace with it, but not without a struggle. For a Christian, Easter is both despair and hope, a spiritual slingshot into faith’s parallel universe. In a matter of hours, remembering and following the broken trail of Christ, we stagger under the brute fact of political and spiritual hegemonies crushing the life from the One among the many, bringing darkness—and then unbearable light. 

Easter is prime time for many preachers, a kind of telethon of emotional chaos intended to wring the last drop of guilt out of compassion-fatigued parishioners. A few years ago Mel Gibson’s masochistic Passion of the Christ was playing to full houses in churches and sanctuaries, as well as theaters. This year we face only the usual seasonal froth of bunnies, Easter eggs, cards, and sales on spring outfits. 

I’m not complaining that commercial interests have rendered Easter just another benchmark for profit or loss. That’s a given. Nor would I want a state-sponsored day of fasting and prayer imposed on all. Under the principle of the separation of church and state we’ve gained considerable freedom from the kinds of sanctimonious peril visited upon Europe for centuries. Instead, I’d cherish a neutral day, as transparent as water, in which it was understood that Easter was a time when one could reflect on one’s past, feel a just measure of shame for having broken promises and adding to the pain of the world, and experience a sense of wonder at forgiveness and the chance to begin anew. It is a day and an occasion when anyone can find the courage to go on. If nothing else, it’s a celebration of another chance, the earth rising from the depths of winter, stretching and yawning in the early light. 

By now Christianity has tangled itself so inextricably with power and pain that such a day can only be experienced quietly within oneself—or in the company of a few friends. There’s nothing stopping this from happening, of course, for all who wish to worship and reflect. What am I really asking for then? I suppose it comes down to this: I long for an Easter that is simply there for the taking, with no taint of commercialism or profiteering. A holiday from Mammon, if you like; one day out of the year that is voluntarily cordoned off from exploitation. This would mean that we would not be bludgeoned with direct mail offers in February about Easter sales nor would we be exhorted to whip ourselves into shape for the beach season. We could let the rabbits get on with getting it on, let the eggs remain in the nest, and leave the baby chicks in their natural state, unsullied by dyes of purple, red, green, and blue. 

It’s too much to ask, I know, and besides how would such a day come about? It would have to be legislated, thus defeating the purpose or bubble up from below as corporations, media, sports franchises, and the whole vast Difference Engine of calculated profit simply paused. And in that stillness, without the bullying shouts of the traders or the frantic piping of the media or the inexorable pressure of the invisible hand between our shoulder blades we could hear our hearts beating and take a breath. 

For some it would be a day to allow oneself to smile in amazement at the fecundity of the earth, for others a day of reflection and meditation, a renewed commitment, perhaps, to accepting grace and extending forgiveness. For nations it could be a day of atonement, asking forgiveness for the wrongs done in the name of ideologies and self-interest. And for this beautiful, wondrous, and besieged Earth it could be a day when our presence upon it as a species brought more good than harm. 

As for myself, I shall read the Gospel stories once again, read T. S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday as I have for some years, and carry within me that stillness, if only for a few hours, that is so vital to the spirit. 

Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood 
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks,
Our peace in His will
And even among these rocks
Sister, mother
And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,
Suffer me not to be separated
And let my cry come unto Thee (Eliot, Ash Wednesday).

The Filings of Faith

“We know that the salvation of man is perhaps impossible. But that, we insist, that is no reason to stop seeking it . . . . There is only one thing left to try: the simple, modest path of honesty without illusion, of wise loyalty, of tenacity, which strengthens only human dignity. We believe that idealism is in vain.” — Albert Camus, 4 November 1944 in Combat, a journal of resistance in occupied France

When I was nineteen I met a man who seemed to know everything about his job. I was going to college in England that year, and was traveling on the Continent during the winter break. It was in Rome, at the central Termini train station, close to midnight when the shifts changed, that I saw him take his place.  He walked in from the back of the ticket facility, sat down, and with nothing in front of him began to answer questions, now in Italian, now in German, now in French, Spanish, and English. His left arm rested on the desk in front of him, his gaze shifted only from one face to another in the line of waiting customers. He was not selling train tickets, he was simply answering questions. He spoke rapidly, with a slight frown on his face, as if these were matters of such little consequence that people could figure them out on their own if only they had the patience. He was directing travelers to many different platforms, for trains leaving at this time, arriving at that time, with stops here and here, with luggage restrictions, passes to the hospitality car, and whether one could sleep on the train; all were answered coolly, without moving a muscle. 

He was not one to consult tables, schedules, maps, or memos. And while he did not raise his voice nor act as if the burden of saving such benighted souls was too much to bear, neither did he lack authority. These days a man in his position would have three screens, a database or two, a printed edition of that month’s schedules, and a map of the walking tours of Roma. His authority came from his knowledge, gathered in experience, offered up without charge. 

I was vastly impressed. I wanted to be that knowledgeable about something—anything! An innocent abroad, I was receptive to anything that moved. Constantly observing the particulars of the countries I was traveling through, I sought for the generalities that would allow for pronouncements: “Italians do this, Germans do that. . . . a French person would never be caught dead doing this. . . .” And so on. 

I was also breathing in a volatile mix of the Gospels, Albert Camus, Henry David Thoreau, and the poets of the Romantic period. From the Gospels there gradually rose to light, like a photo print wavering into solidity under the chemical baths of the darkroom, the figure of Jesus. In my reading he was compassionate but tough, a man accustomed to sorrow and not afraid to die. I loved him and fancied that we might be friends. He seemed to me solid at the core, a man whose truth was won through experience and whose silence spoke of strength. 

Camus, like Jesus, offered a clear-eyed vision of the world, but with considerably less comfort. If Jesus spoke of love, Camus hinted at compassion. Of the two virtues love was the  ideal always out of reach, compassion closer to hand. Camus was a realist, skeptical of certainty, feet on the ground, a heart throbbing with intensity, holding suicide at arms’ length while he soberly examined it. In my exalted romanticism I could not foresee life past 30. There were no words for that kind of sanguine capitulation to the commonplace and so I bravely bore myself along in the present, marching to Thoreau’s ‘different drummer’ and reveling in the ‘buzzing, blooming confusion of life.’

I had no certainty about anything, no real knowledge, no convictions that could bear the scrutiny of hard questioning. What I had were longings dressed as hopes and the assurance that comes from innocence. I knew that my Redeemer lived, and if I was not willing to answer the street preachers in Berkeley who asked if I was saved, it was not for lack of faith but rather from a stubborn trust that honesty was the best policy. Who could know for sure, for absolute certain? My best bet was to reveal all—doubts, fears, hopes—but to Jesus alone, not to my community, so that my life would be authentic if nothing else. 

I can see now that my fascination with the answer man in the  Termini central train station in Rome was a mix of envy, longing, and doubt. Envy at the vast amount of information he had mastered, longing to have mastered something, and doubt as to the possibility of mastering anything. ‘Be ye therefore perfect, as your Father in heaven is perfect’ hummed like an electrical charge through the wires that fenced me off from the wide world. An impossible command, like asking donkeys to fly. Better by far, I thought, was Camus’ quiet challenge: ‘This is a question of serving the dignity of man by methods that remain dignified in the midst of a history that is not.’ 

But the recognition that pursuing perfection in the spiritual life just as soon leads to perdition does not mean one escapes the anxiety of falling short in all the other areas of life. How can I claim to be a ‘professor’ when I do not know or have forgotten much of what I profess? How to explain the contradictions in one’s life that fracture our reflections like broken mirrors? Do we ever act from motives untainted by self-interest? Am I making a difference in this world? 

I was moved by Camus because he refused to buy cheap grace nor was he willing to give in to a self-indulgent despair. He had, in Jacques Barzun’s phrase, a ‘cheerful pessimism’ that was unyielding in its hope for humankind. He was a philosopher of the street, keeping his senses alive, rejoicing in life and the struggle for honesty. He shared with another of my philosopher ancestors, Gabriel Marcel, the ability to learn at each bend of the path through life. Marcel, in a passage that has become something of a sacred mantra in my life, speaks in quiet exaltation when he prays:

“O spirit of metamorphosis! When we try to obliterate the frontier of clouds which separates us from the other world guide our unpracticed movements! And, when the given hour shall strike, arouse us, eager as the traveller who straps on his rucksack while beyond the misty windowpane the earliest rays of dawn are faintly visible!"

Marcel, like Camus, was writing in Paris in 1944. Both had lived through the occupation and liberation and both were sifting for hope amidst the confusion and bitterness of post-war France. Marcel, the Christian, found it in a personal vision of Jesus and the community as the body of Christ. Camus, the reluctant atheist, found it in a refusal to capitulate to evil and in solidarity with others. We do not have to be perfect nor can we know everything. But I find myself—truly I find myself—in the company of those whose doubt and uncertainties attract, like a magnet, the filings of faith. 

Making Waves for Fun and Profit

“When the technology of a time is powerfully thrusting in one direction, wisdom may well call for a countervailing thrust.” — Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media

I read somewhere that pilots about to break the sound barrier can see the wave building around their wings before they burst through to the other side. Sound as light and matter. 

It’s a metaphor that came to mind as the stories of the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the Etch-A-Sketch slip of the tongue from the Romney camp built, crested, and broke in a matter of hours. It’s almost wrong to mention these events in the same sentence: the shooting of a young, unarmed black male teenager by a “neighborhood watch” vigilante takes one’s breath away. The Etch-A-Sketch fracas is high comedy—and the fact that sales—and stock value—of the beloved childhood toy shot up in the wake of the gaffe is simple proof that there is nothing that cannot be turned to commercial purposes. No doubt hoodie sales will increase because Trayvon Martin was wearing one when he was shot. Someone somewhere will come out with a commemorative one emblazoned with his portrait and a slogan. 

And therein lies the agony and the ecstasy of our current media. Personal pain becomes public property. What is done in darkness is shouted from the rooftops. Justice ignored becomes justice exposed. All to the good, but at what cost?

The shooting story built for nearly a month before it went viral. As near as I can tell, ABC News was the first to break the story of questionable police conduct in the investigation of the shooting, and after that the wave of public interest crested. A website gathered a quarter of a million signatures in a matter of days. At one point they were pouring at the rate of 10,000 an hour. The parents asked the Justice Department and the FBI to get involved in the case because the local sheriff had bungled the handling of it. A march was organized in New York and, inevitably, the Reverend Al Sharpton could be found organizing another in the Florida town where the tragedy occurred. Celebrities like Justin Bieber and Spike Lee tweeted about it and President Obama pledged in a press conference to get to the bottom of the case. Newt Gingrich, trailing badly in the Republican primaries, took the time to criticize the president for his ‘divisive’ remarks. In Gingrich’s view this is not a racial issue but an American issue. This from a man who unified his party through the art of divisiveness while Speaker of the House. 

I happened to be reading Marshall McLuhan, that media oracle of the 60s, this week. Reading McLuhan is both exhilarating and tiring because his writing style mimics the ripple effect from throwing a rock into a pool of water. Several of them. All at once. Here comes a ripple from a center point and—oh, there’s another—and look!, here comes another one! The cumulative effect is like hearing French horns in a fog: It’s lovely and mysterious, but you can’t tell which direction the sound is coming from. 

Nevertheless, several passages seemed to cast some light upon the way media attention to events convey, shape, and accelerate responses. “Myth,” says McLuhan, “is the instant vision of a complete process that ordinarily extends over a long period. Myth is contraction or implosion of any process, and the instant speed of electricity confers the mythic dimension on ordinary industrial and social action today. We live mythically but continue to think fragmentarily and on single planes.” *

A local incident, one family’s unspeakable horror, becomes a national and even international event through two factors. The first is the mythic nature of the story, all too familiar in our society. A young black man is killed because he neatly fit into a matrix constructed through fear and ignorance. The fact that young black men are killed in disproportionate numbers in America is part of our “American Skin,” as Bruce Springsteen famously sang. The second thing is that this mythic story, easily reduced to a couple of lines and endlessly amplified and recycled through the global village, is transformed through a complex of media into a commodity which can be repackaged and resold. The shelf life is short, but that simply drives up the value of the product. 

It’s a Faustian bargain we make. If you’ve got a cause worth shouting about can you afford not to run it through the media mill? Recently, one organization’s cause went viral with the result that millions heard the story and were moved to action of some kind. 

The Invisible Children organization put up a 30-minute documentary about Joseph Kony and his notorious Lord’s Resistance Army. Within days millions saw it, wrote petitions, and influenced policy makers to redouble efforts to hunt down Kony for crimes against humanity. 

Naturally, one of the effects of this public relations coup was that the social media industry tried to capture and bottle the essence of the campaign. If only every cause could learn to go viral like that! they were saying. There is almost unlimited power to reach and influence the world through Vimeo, YouTube, and other media. But it’s not clear why one effort is a hit while another just tanks. Whatever the reasons, it’s not magic nor can it be reduced to a formula. 

Sadly, the attention generated by the cause was almost rivaled by the very public psychological breakdown of the director and narrator of the film, Jason Russell. Russell was found, naked and agitated, pacing back and forth outside his headquarters in San Diego—all of it captured on video and seen, no doubt, by millions.  

But there are too many variables in the success of the “Kony 2012” campaign, and even the “Million Hoodie March” campaign on behalf of Trayvon Martin, for anyone to draw firm conclusions on the method at this point. The most we can say, it seems to me, is that the tools of social media can have extraordinary reach. That’s a result, not a cause. 

McLuhan dropped another pebble in the water for me when he said in Understanding Media, “Concern with effect rather than meaning is a basic change of our electric time, for effect involves the total situation, and not a single level of information movement.” When almost any incident, from the shooting of a teenager to a gaffe by a campaign advisor to a call for a global hunt for a criminal to the latest wardrobe malfunction of some celebrity can get its 15 minutes or more on the world’s stage we lose the ability to differentiate between acts. For people constantly locked on to changes in each ring of the media circus McLuhan sardonically notes, “The price of eternal vigilance is indifference.” 

 “There’s something happenin’ here/What it is ain’t exactly clear,” sang Buffalo Springfield back in the day. Is it good? Is it bad? Some of each, most likely. One thing is sure, according to Marshall McLuhan: No medium is neutral, it's goodness or evil determined by the ones who pull the trigger and the use to which they put it. The medium is the message.

Goldman Sachs and the Two Smiths

“If the moral sense is the result of nothing more significant than a cultural or historical throw of the dice, then it will occur to some people who by reason of temperament or circumstances are weakly attached to their own moral senses that they are free to do whatever they can get away with by practicing indulgent self-absorption or embracing an angry ideology.” — James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense

 This week, close on the Ides of March, saw Greg Smith, an executive director at Goldman Sachs of London, resign in disgust at the moral degeneracy he saw up close for 12 years. In an articulate and scathing op-ed piece in The New York Times, Smith recounted how the culture that had sustained the trust of clients for 143 years has disappeared. “The firm has veered so far from the place I joined right out of college that I can no longer in good conscience say that I identify with what it stands for,” said Smith. “It astounds me,” he went on, “how little senior management gets a basic truth: If clients don’t trust you they will eventually stop doing business with you. It doesn’t matter how smart you are.”

Smith recounted how he had recruited and managed the 80 student interns who had survived the process that winnowed out thousands.  “I knew it was time to leave,” he says, “when I realized I could no longer look students in the eye and tell them what a great place this was to work.”

He signed off with a plea to the board of directors to “get the culture right again, so people want to work here for the right reasons. People who care only about making money will not sustain this firm—or the trust of its clients—for very much longer.” 

The next day Goldman Sachs stock dropped by $2.7 billion, a fact that some market analysts rushed to explain as just the daily vicissitudes of the market. 

Smith’s op-ed piece went viral, Goldman Sachs’ PR machine responded aggressively, and the thundering herd of pundits, Wall Street wonks, and competitors formed up for the ritual denunciations, analyses, and prognostications. Mayor Bloomberg even took time out of his busy schedule to go down to Goldman Sachs and offer his condolences on such a public drubbing. 

There were a variety of responses to Smith’s cri de coeur. Many, like Bloomberg, took it personally and saw it as a betrayal of corporate loyalty. Others, like The Daily Beast’s Tunku Varadarajan, couldn’t resist going for Smith’s jugular and heaping scorn on his shock. Zachary Karabell, also writing for The Beast, likewise took Smith to task for naiveté. “What profession did he think he was entering?” he asked, “Social work?” Karabell called for us all to lay off Goldman Sachs, to realize that people can be greedy anywhere, and that Wall Street should not be held to a higher standard than other professions. 

A common assumption running through much of the commentary is that this is the way things are and there’s nothing to be done about it. Everybody looks out for Number #1, everybody gets ahead by any means necessary, and everybody’s Greedometer is bending the needle. Much of the huffing and puffing over Greg Smith’s op-ed was of this defensive tone, evidence, it seems to me, of the elite closing ranks to justify their actions. 

This is an assumption that should be scrutinized. The implication is that this is how successful business is conducted; those who would win—or just break even—have to be willing to cut ethical corners and kill when necessary. This is turning an “is” into an “ought,” or at the very least turning ‘the way things are’ into de facto rules of the universe. It takes utilitarian ethics (the greatest good for the greatest number of people) and turns it into ‘the end justifies the means and we’ll get there by any means necessary.’

There are those who seem to actually believe this, and a few of them are now in jail—Jeffrey Skilling of Enron, Bernie Ebbers of WorldCom, and Bernie Madoff come to mind. But there are many more who accept this passively and live as if this were Reality. 

James Q. Wilson, whom I’ve quoted at the top of this essay, was probably the leading social scientist of his generation. In his book, The Moral Sense, he cautioned that we must resist the temptation to chalk up all the problems in our society to moral failure. Nevertheless, he makes the case that there is a moral sense in people which guides them in making decisions everyday. If it is not relativized away or simply ignored because ‘everyone else is doing it,’ this moral sense generally guides us to do the right thing. 

Like Wilson, “I am interested in why people act as they do, but I am more interested in why people judge actions as they do.” The outrage at Greg Smith’s dramatic exit from Goldman Sachs reveals a bedrock belief that free market capitalism is as cutthroat and duplicitous as it needs to be. But Wilson argues that a social order that shifts individual responsibility to expedient cultural norms will not question such unethical means because 1) they work in the short term, and 2) we lack the ability to speak and to reason of moral matters anyway. We have a moral sense, Wilson asserts, “but it is not always and in every aspect of life strong enough to withstand a pervasive and sustained attack.”

Greg Smith’s op-ed piece came at a time when people are fed up with the callousness of Wall Street and bankers in general, and are realizing that no amount of cajoling on the part of government or occupying of property will change the ingrained habits of a relatively few powerful and morally twisted people. I don’t believe—and neither does Smith apparently—that everyone who works at Goldman Sachs buys into the toxic culture he described. But enough of the leadership seems to practice it that many of the employees feel it’s in their best interest to comply. It’s that shrug of the shoulders, the non-verbal equivalent of our ubiquitous dismissal of things difficult to think through with the blasé ‘Whatever’, which reveals the herd mentality. 

Before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations, the Bible of free market capitalism, he wrote The Theory of Moral Sentiments, a work of social and ethical philosophy that is stunning in its psychological insights into our motives. 

He begins by describing sympathy and the natural human capacity to imagine the pain that others must feel as the result of injustice. For Smith, sympathy is the source of human moral sentiments, indeed, of ethics. A society made up of people with the capacity to put themselves in another person’s place will likely be more just than one where people don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves. The one virtue that a society most certainly cannot live without is justice. “The violation of justice is injury: it does real and positive hurt to some particular persons, from motives which are naturally disapproved of.” It was Adam Smith’s firm conviction that kindness and beneficence could not be coerced by force. If a society that is unjust is to change it could only happen if those whose actions hurt people receive widespread condemnation. The ‘invisible hand’ of public morality would drive people away from corrupt markets and would reward the honest ones. 

This may be the only thing that finally brings about change on Wall Street and in the banking industry. Since the language they understand is only that of profit and loss, investors and customers should learn to speak it fluently. Those with money to invest should look for the firms whose ethics are proven by their actions, not by their public relations statements.  There must be some out there who can do right by their clients and the country and still make a profit. Adam Smith believed that all people desire “not only to be loved, but to be lovely.” He thought that those who were condemned would eventually come to judge themselves and thus would undergo a transformation. Wilson, commenting on this, says “At first we judge others; we then begin to judge ourselves as we think others judge us; finally we judge ourselves as an impartial, disinterested third party might . . . . We can fool our friends, but not ourselves.” 

Well, there’s some hope. If losing profit results in some soul-searching among bankers and traders there may be a gradual detoxifying of their poisonous culture. And if Greg Smith’s brave act makes us question unfettered greed as the engine of capitalism, then we may have reached a tipping point.  

On a more personal note, this entry marks a year of weekly posting to Wretched Success. I've learned a lot in the process—and I've signed up for another round. I hope you'll join me!