Author: bearcee

My degrees are in Journalism (M.A.,Andrews University) and Philosophy of Religion (M.A., Ph.D., Claremont Graduate University). I taught for 34 years at Columbia Union College in Takoma Park, MD—mostly religion, philosophy, communication and media studies, public relations and advertising. Then I was an adjunct professor in philosophy at Trinity Washington University (DC) and an adjunct in Business Communications at Stevenson University, MD. I love design, reading, writing, teaching, and learning. I'm married and have a son and a stepdaughter. I am a Christian with Taoist and Buddhist influences. I am now retired and writing full time. My first collection of essays, "Wandering, Not Lost," was published in November 2019 and is available from Wipf & Stock and Amazon.

Marching to a Different Drummer

 

“Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.” — Albert Camus, The Rebel

When we are young we cannot see the point in moderation. It strikes us as timid, cautious, perhaps toadying to the powers that be; in any case, if we pull back or withhold we risk the derision of the socially graceful, those young gods whose spectacular failures are even more to be envied than their modest and expected successes. Thus, if you grew up in the Sixties in an evangelical community you were bound to hear the thrilling stories of prodigality, the dissolute life in a far country, the moment of coming to oneself among the pigs, and then the trembling but resolute return to the family. 
 
Those of us who listened to these stories, who never left home, found ourselves split unequally in three ways: we were in part rejoicing with the father that the prodigal had returned, we were wistfully longing to be the prodigal himself, and we were, in some measure, the resentful older brother, dutiful and dull, in whose constricted craw the younger brother’s tempestuous travels stuck like a bone. 
 
It wasn’t so much—at least not in my case—that we wished to actually smoke the holy weed that breathless news stories assured us was being consumed all around us, but that we lacked the cojones to step off the well-lit path and into the shadows. I had no hunger for drugs or alcohol—a deficiency I am now grateful for—mostly because I believed I had no brain cells to waste. Sometimes, with a tinge of envy, I listened to friends describe their trips, but for the most part my adventures were of the literary sort. Albert Camus, George Orwell, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Thoreau—these were my mentors. I had a poster on my bedroom wall with a quote from Thoreau: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he marches to a different drummer.” I was pretty sure my drummer was different from the rest, although musically speaking he went by the names of Ringo or Ginger Baker or Crosby, Stills, and Nash, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Gordon Lightfoot and Carole King. 
 
But with the Sixties exploding all around us, and living almost within sight of San Francisco, Berkeley, and all things cool, I think those of us who had been raised Christians and at some point consciously chose to be Christians had to learn to listen to some drummers and not to others. I’ve always been grateful I grew up in the Sixties for it was one of those disjunctive moments in history that shakes everything up—art, music, politics, religion, mores, self-identity, national consciousness. Endless are the books on the impact of that era and fascinating the commentary on the persons who lived under the hot glare of the spotlights. Now, as many of those artists, musicians, and writers enter their 70s, we begin to understand their legacies. The body of work that many of them accomplished—those who did not burn themselves up in the process—now becomes visible. The pioneers of rock are now the old masters, even farther back in time than the Big Band era musicians were for those of us who came of age in the Sixties. 
 
Every generation has to leave home—sometimes in anger, sometimes with many a backward glance—but leave it must. It’s not for nothing that the central metaphor in most wisdom traditions is the Path or the Way; the idea of life as a journey is so self-evident as almost to be trite. Yet, in looking back we believe we see a pattern to our wanderings that gives us comfort while it still surprises us. “You can’t connect the dots looking forward;” said Steve Jobs in his now-famous commencement address at Stanford. “You can only connect them looking backward.” 
 
Can we choose our rebellions when we’re young? I’d like to think we have the perspicacity to sign up for the ones that have the longest half-life, but I doubt we can see that far. “It is perfectly true, as philosophers say” remarked Kierkegaard, “that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.” But while we may not have clearly seen the road ahead, there was still something that was drawing us on to take this path and not that one. Sometimes we acted with conviction and urgency, other times with a sense that we had no other choice but to follow this particular track. Only as we got far enough down the road that we could look back did we begin to make some sense of it. And by then, of course, it was too late. . . So while we’d like to be able to say to the young just starting out, “Try to live in such a way that you don’t have to lie about where you’ve been,” it’s probably not going to be heard. We learn best by doing, not by memorizing, which is why history is still an important subject because it’s a way to connect the dots for those who are busy leaning forward. 
 
In 1956 Albert Camus published his seminal essay, The Rebel. Reviewers called it a “piece of reasoning in the great tradition of French logic,” and noted that, “here is the voice of a man of unshakable decency.” In a shattered Europe after WW II Camus had the courage to ask, “What is a rebel? A man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. He is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion.” The dilemma I saw was twofold: unthinkingly joining up in a mass movement can lead to tragic results, while refusing to extend oneself can lead to moral and creative paralysis. But on the other hand, the only way we come to know who we truly are is to put ourselves in situations where we are tested. Some tests we will fail, and we can only hope that we will fail upwards and not fall by the way in the process. 
 
We may not, with clarity, be able to choose our rebellions, but we can choose to rebel—against injustice, despair, fear. In the closing pages of The Rebel Camus’ voice rises in eloquence, leaving behind the cool cadences of his logic and sounding a note prophetic and courageous. 
 
“For twenty centuries the sum total of evil has not diminished in the world,” he says. We might be tempted to turn away then and cultivate our narcissism. There are plenty who stand ready to help us indulge ourselves for a price. But rebellion, says Camus, can’t exist without “a strange form of love.” It is a love that does not calculate and is prodigal in its gifts to those yet to come. “Real generosity toward the future,” says Camus, “lies in giving all to the present.”
 
There is no future in the politics of resentment or retribution; to put aside the murderous impulses of power and history, he says, “a new rebellion is consecrated in the name of moderation and of life.” Camus could not believe in the Church’s kingdom to come nor could he devote himself to a secular utopia purchased through the blood of millions. “It is time to forsake our age and its adolescent furies,” he said.
 
As a Christian, I couldn’t agree more. This is a rebellion wide enough to embrace this Earth, our home, while choosing to rebel, in a thousand ways each day, against injustice in the name of courage and decency. “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,” said St. Paul, a rebel drummer worth marching with. 
 

Eric Hoffer, Talent Scout

“What we know with certainty is not that talent and genius are rare exceptions but that all through history talent and genius have gone to waste on a vast scale.” — Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time

Eric Hoffer was a San Francisco longshoreman and something of a social commentator and philosopher. In 1961 he wrote a book, The True Believer, which became a bestseller. In his rough-hewn political sensibility and solid, linear style he was a folk-hero to many.

I was in my teens when I first came across The True Believer, a book on fanaticism and mass movements. The fact that Hoffer was working down on the docks in San Francisco, only 75 miles from where I grew up, and writing books like that and The Temper of Our Time gave him a credibility that could only be matched in my lights by C. S. Lewis, Tolkien, and Edith Hamilton. I wasn’t all that discriminating in my reading, being subject to a syndrome that compelled my eyes to stray to print when not otherwise occupied. But Hoffer’s words rang true to me and he hit home with many a sentence laid down with deliberate care and an icy honesty. 

His personal history was the stuff of a Dickens novel. Born in 1902 in Brooklyn, he suffered blindness from the age of seven, two years after he and his mother fell down a flight of stairs. She never recovered and died the same year he lost his sight. Mysteriously, his vision returned when he was fifteen and he began reading voraciously, afraid that his blindness might return. By the time he was a young man his father, a cabinetmaker, had died also. With the $300 the cabinetmaker’s union gave him after his father’s funeral, Hoffer took a bus to Los Angeles, where he kicked around on Skid Row for ten years, failed at a suicide attempt, and became a migrant worker up and down California and other Western states. 

Trapped in the Sierra Nevada Mountains for a winter season, he read a book he’d picked up by impulse before making the trek into mining country. Montaigne’s Essays opened his eyes to the possibilities of writing and learning. Over the course of a long and vigorous life as a longshoreman on The Embarcadero in San Francisco, he wrote 11 books, was the subject of a 12-part interview with radio station KQED in San Francisco, was interviewed twice by Eric Sevareid, and in 1983, four months before he died, was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan. He never attended college or received any formal education beyond high school: he was a self-taught, self-made man through the acts of reading and writing.

One doesn’t have to agree with Hoffer’s sometimes stringent opinions to relish the way he can reframe an entire intellectual perspective. In a section of The True Believer he notes that, “The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness.” In a section on the poor as particularly susceptible to mass movements, Hoffer says, “Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some.”

Somebody once said, Nietzsche probably, that all philosophy is autobiography and in Hoffer’s case that certainly seems to be true. Having brought himself up by his own bootstraps and working with calloused hands and a bent back most of his life, Hoffer had an abiding contempt for “intellectuals” and a stalwart admiration for “the masses.” He considered intellectuals effete, useless, and power-hungry. Most of them, in his view, were foreign; it was almost unAmerican to be an intellectual.  

He despaired that the age of men of action was fading as around the world intellectuals prized the power away from them. “By intellectual I mean a literate person who feels himself a member of the educated minority. It is not actual intellectual superiority which makes the intellectual but the feeling of belonging to an intellectual elite,” he said.

“One cannot escape the impression that the intellectual’s most fundamental incompatibility is with the masses,” he says. “In every age since the invention of writing he has given words to his loathing of the common man.” For Hoffer, the foreign intellectual is simply stymied at American resourcefulness. It’s not the intellectuals who built the dams, highways, skyscrapers, factories, cars, and airplanes in America. It was the solid, down-to-earth masses who showed what they could do without masters to shove them around. They built this country but somewhere along the way they lost it.

Hoffer was writing in the early 60s for Harper’s, The New York Times Magazine, Holiday, The Saturday Review, and Cavalier. Perhaps in those days when students were occupying the president’s office at Columbia, striking classes at Berkeley and demanding curricular changes at other campuses, he was understood as an oracle of freedom, a working-class hero who championed freedom of thought over against intellectuals who would stifle creativity. 

Elsewhere in the world Hoffer saw the intelligentsia in Communist countries, as well as Asian and African nations, as the new colonialists. Having jettisoned Western masters, these new countries now found themselves ruled by native intellectuals, people trained in Western ways of thinking, who bent the thin reed of nascent freedom to their own advantage at the expense of their own people.  

Oddly, for someone firmly planted in the working class, Hoffer believed automation would free up the masses for more erudite pursuits. He also believed that intellectuals, with their heads in the clouds and their hands in the till, didn’t want working people to become affluent. Perhaps tongue in cheek, he envisioned a time when most manual labor had been turned over to machines and the people could finally educate themselves. 

Reading him today is a lesson in cultural metamorphosis and historical interpretation. Automation has accelerated production and trade, driven thousands out of work, and given millions access to devices Hoffer could not have foreseen. The intellectual elite, such as they are, now gamble with other people’s money on Wall Street, decide which new reality shows will draw the most eyeballs and occasionally figure out ways to make the world a better place for the masses. 

In today’s milieu much of what Hoffer said would gladden the hearts of Tea Partiers, deeply suspicious as they are of the liberal Eastern establishment. They might bristle, though, at his statement that “where a mass movement can either persuade or coerce, it usually chooses the latter.” 

But Hoffer’s enduring theme—and his signature contribution to American social and political thought—is his steadfast belief that ordinary Americans are capable of producing great things. “The American intellectual rejects the idea that our ability to do things with little tutelage and leadership is a mark of social vigor. He would gauge the vigor of a society by its ability to produce great leaders,” he says at the end of The Temper of Our Time. “Yet it is precisely an America that in normal times can function well without outstanding leaders that so readily throws up outstanding individuals.” 

He may be right, but the great conundrum facing us these days is those who desperately want to be our leaders probably shouldn’t be there, while the ones who could do the job aren’t electable under the current system. 

My guess is that the country will be alright. No one is counted a great leader until after they’re dead. In the meantime, we’ll make do with people who have enough hope to try for the ideal and the courage it takes to achieve the possible. 

Skill Sets for Hire

“In a culture of disrespect, education suffers the worst possible fate—it becomes banal. When nothing is sacred, deemed worthy of respect, banality is the best we can do.” — Parker Palmer, The Courage to Teach

I stumbled across a blog this week by an investment advisor, Mike Shedlock, entitled “Mish’s Global Economic Trend Analysis.” He had written a post which revealed that for the first time ever a majority of the unemployed have some college education. Shedlock called the price of an education preposterous and gave us five solutions to dramatically lower the cost. These included killing the student loan program, cutting all state aid to colleges, increasing competition by accrediting more online universities, and busting the teachers union once for all. But the one that really caught my eye was this:

“High school counselors and parents must educate kids that there simply are no realistic chances for those graduating with degrees in political science, history, English, art, and literally dozens of other useless or nearly-useless majors.”

After I stopped fuming and running through a long list of ad hominem arguments against this blinkered Philistine, I tried soberly, reflectively, and sympathetically to think like him. I didn’t get very far. As far as I can see he believes in education solely for its instrumental value in getting a job. After that. . . .what? But education and learning are as different as a job and a vocation. 

I’ll give him this: the cost of education is scandalous, no question about it. The value of a college education these days is certainly disputable, and the efficacy of four to six years of the college experience toward getting a job is harder and harder to justify. But I balk at eliminating most majors in the humanities and social sciences. Simply because they may not score a direct line between subject and object is no reason to dump them. More often than not they become portals to many other opportunities.

I’ve often told my students that the grand purpose of college is to learn how to learn. Content and subject matter is certainly important, but what matters more is the ability to take in new information and make something of it. That’s what we should be teaching as students are learning English, history, art, political science, biology, accounting, and philosophy. Any of those subjects affords us the possibility of learning what it means to be human, how to adapt to changing circumstances and what to live for. Do they lead to jobs? Of course they do. Nothing we learn is wasted if we know how to use what we’ve learned. 

But people like Shedlock are hammers looking for nails; they seem to believe that if you’re not supplying then the only alternative is to demand. And the Demanders, as we’ve so clearly seen recently, are the losers, the muppets, the dimwits who deserve to be ripped off by the smartest guys in the room.

Trying to imagine a curriculum built around Shedlock’s restrictions all I could come up with was math, science, and business. Those would be the majors that would lead to jobs in health care, industry, investment banking, and insurance. Since there would be no community colleges there wouldn’t be computer technicians, security or law enforcement, paramedics, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, nurses or cyber-security. State universities, many of them major research centers, would wither away, taking with them a plethora of important and necessary disciplines. And of course, there would be no designers, advertisers, or journalists. 

But there could be doctors trained online by the University of Phoenix or physicists with certificates from one of the many Massive Online Open Courses (MOOCs) recently touted by Thomas Friedman in The New York TImes, a scenario in which 100,000 students take a course from, say, Stanford or an accredited for-profit university based in the Cayman Islands. Multiple-choice software-graded exams do the heavy lifting and students around the world can help each other when the teacher is asleep. 

I’m still trying to figure all this out. I have no doubt that online universities will continue to have an important place in the education of millions. They may even come to be the norm. And the industry that is Higher Education will need to re-vision its mission for learning instead of trying to become the Disneyland of Skill-Set Training. Above all, we need to remember that the unexamined life, as Socrates said, is not worth living. According to some, those who examine life are not worth hiring.

Are We Evolving Yet?

“All kinds of images forever float  
About us everywhere, and some are born
Of their own generation in the air

And some have more substantial origin
And some are compounds of two things or more . . . .” 
— Lucretius, The Way Things Are (trans. by Rolfe Humphries)

Lucretius was marveling, in the context surrounding the passage above, at the many inventions of the mind—Centaurs, Scyllas, hounds of Hell—and reminding us, rather archly, that these things don’t exist except in our minds. And the mind is, in his words, “very delicate and sensitive.”

Lucretius was referring to illusions and our endless capacity to make bogeymen out of a few threads of this and that, sewn together with fear and animated out of dreams when reason sleeps. 

Such has been the bogeyman of same-sex marriage for politicians who, putting reason aside, must accede to what their loudest constituents denounce. And then there’s Joe Biden. 

In a move which must have shaken the White House and its staffers, Biden said on ‘Meet the Press’ that he was “absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties.” That’s not an outright endorsement of gay marriage: instead, it’s an absolutely clear statement that the real issue is over denying a group of people their civil rights. 

The President’s people were quick to put some air between Biden’s remarks and the President’s ‘evolving’ position, but by the middle of the week the President had declared himself supportive of same-sex marriages. Was it a historic announcement, akin to FDR signing the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and Lyndon Johnson clearing the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

It’s too soon to tell, but some public policy experts and presidential historians are hailing it as a major step in civil rights. 

Peter Dreier, E. P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics at Occidental College, believes that such changes are inevitable. In a blog to the Huffington Post , Dreier cites poll after poll that show increasing support for gay rights, among them the right to marriage. We’ve come a long way, says Dreier, in overcoming prejudice and fear in this area. 

According to surveys conducted by the Washington Post and ABC News, a majority of Americans, 52 percent, now say marriage should be legal for gay and lesbian couples. For those born between 1965 and 1980, 50 percent believe gay marriages should be legal. For Americans born after 1981, fully 63 percent support the legalization of gay marriage.

Was the President courageous in taking such a stand? Most of the reaction, it seems, was about the effect his statement would make on his chances of reelection. Whether he boldly went where no president had gone before or whether he prudently stated the obvious, the fact is that he jerked the Romney camp—and Republicans in general—on the defensive. By recognizing it as a moral decision, not just a political calculation, Obama put the issue on firmer ground than mere ideology. In admitting his own gradual process he gave Americans a reasoned model for a significant change in one’s thinking. 

There are at least two ways to regard this as more than a political IED. One is to claim it as an abomination from a religious perspective, a view based on a handful of texts in the Old and New Testaments. From this point of view the issue of gay marriage isn’t the problem, homosexuality is. The argument wouldn’t even get as far as civil rights denied. Since homosexuals have given over their humanity by committing such unnatural acts, the question of human rights is a moot point. Such ‘people’ do not qualify for equal protection under the law. 

Another perspective is to separate it from its religious bindings and to regard it in a civil and secular light. If looked at in this way it is a moral issue, the denial of significant civil rights to a segment of the population that has been demonized and derided for decades. 

For many thoughtful Christians this might appear as an ethical dilemma, a troubling choice between two apparent goods: the authority of the Bible vs fairness and justice for all. While this is not the venue for a Biblical exegesis on the subject, it is clear that theologians and Biblical scholars do not have a consensus on the Bible’s teaching about homosexuality. The word never appears in the Bible, for one thing, but more significantly, where the practice is condemned it’s usually in the context either of God’s command to populate the land the Hebrews had taken from the inhabitants or it’s a reaction to the degrading practice of pederasty in Greek and Roman cultures. Nowhere in the Bible is a monogamous, committed, and loving relationship between two people of the same gender ever portrayed. There are a number of reasons for this, first among them that the cultures would not have permitted it, and they did not permit it because it had no utility for the propagation of the species and the life of the community. Where survival and cultural identity are threatened such relationships are viewed with suspicion and fear. 

But morality and ethics are fluid elements in human history. Once it was considered right and proper to stone people to death for religious infractions; now most cultures find that repugnant. There was a time when white Christians found Biblical support for owning slaves. That support was refuted and the larger issue of the dignity of persons and love for other persons won the day. 

When religions clash with the historical evolution toward fuller and deeper human rights we should err on the side of human rights. I say this because I believe that true religion is, as the BIble puts it, ‘to care for the widows and orphans.’ That’s not all religion is good for by any means, but it’s certainly the point at which all of us could do better. 

In the late 1970s, when I was in graduate school at the School of Theology at Claremont, a question about gay marriage was put to our teacher during class. The professor, the son of Methodist missionaries to China, a man who was a minister and a theologian through and through, a philosopher who was a leading exponent of process theology, an activist who was a pioneer in a biblically-based environmentalism, thought for a moment and then said words to the effect that, “I believe God wants us to experience the joy of a deep, committed relationship within marriage. Why should gay or lesbian couples be denied that kind of relationship?”

The question startled me then for I could see no argument against it. All these years later, having known and admired such couples, having seen their struggles and their triumphs in married life, I still can’t. There is beauty and strength in the quiet return to each other at end of day.

Miracle doesn’t lie only in the amazing
living through and defeat of danger;
miracles become miracles in the clear
achievement that is earned. 
— Rainer Rilke, from Just as the Winged Energy of Delight

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

WilsonOldSprinter

“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.