For those of you interested in the state of our public schools, especialy in our cities, I just posted a review of two books on education reform presenting very different pictures of the most recent reform movement in education.
Copyright @ 2011 Anthony F. Cottone.
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
The Newport Folk Festival at Fifty
The sun, brilliant all day, was setting behind us, bathing the Newport-Pell Bridge and the hundreds of sailboats between it and us in a decadent light, and the three-quarter moon looked three-dimensional above the stage as ninety-year-old Pete Seeger closed the Newport Folk Festival, fifty years after he and a few others had closed the first one - a year after I was born. Pete was surrounded by all those who had performed that day, including Tao Rodriguez Seeger, his thirty-seven year-old grandson, and I was surrounded by three of my four children.
The final set Saturday night began with Turn, Turn, Turn and ended with It Takes a Worried Man, a song which my youngest, who is eight, had heard in the car more times than he would have liked. For most of the festival, James and Sarah, sixteen year-old twins, had left Will and I together with our blanket and beach chairs and wormed their way up to the stage to see their beloved Decembrists or - on one of the smaller stages - Iron and Wine - up close, but Sarah decided to take Will with her up in front of the stage for the final song. As I heard Will's voice above the crowd jubilantly articulating each and every lyric of each and every verse of that final song, tears began to stream down my face, tears which I fought to hold back (again unsuccessfully) on Sunday, as Joan Baez sang Forever Young.
I didn't think the kids had noticed the tears, but on the way home I asked about favorite moments and James described that last set on Saturday night, slyly noting that I had been tearing underneath my sunglasses, which he questioned.
Just wait James.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
The final set Saturday night began with Turn, Turn, Turn and ended with It Takes a Worried Man, a song which my youngest, who is eight, had heard in the car more times than he would have liked. For most of the festival, James and Sarah, sixteen year-old twins, had left Will and I together with our blanket and beach chairs and wormed their way up to the stage to see their beloved Decembrists or - on one of the smaller stages - Iron and Wine - up close, but Sarah decided to take Will with her up in front of the stage for the final song. As I heard Will's voice above the crowd jubilantly articulating each and every lyric of each and every verse of that final song, tears began to stream down my face, tears which I fought to hold back (again unsuccessfully) on Sunday, as Joan Baez sang Forever Young.
I didn't think the kids had noticed the tears, but on the way home I asked about favorite moments and James described that last set on Saturday night, slyly noting that I had been tearing underneath my sunglasses, which he questioned.
Just wait James.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Saturday, March 21, 2009
"What? More gambling!"
Amidst all the boring, trivial news in the Times about our sinking economy and the skullduggery on Wall Street (“I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!”), there were two pieces of real import which I call to your collective attention. In one, it was reported that my brother Stephen’s good friend, filmmaker George Kalman, is, along with the ACLU, challenging Pennsylvania’s right to reject the name he chose for a new corporation: “I Choose Hell Productions, LLC,” on the ground that it violates an old Pennsylvania statute that prohibits “blasphemy” in corporate names. (As George explained, the name expressed his existentialism, i.e., “even if life was often hellish, it was better than suicide”). http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/us/21religion.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=George%20Kalman&st=cse And two, on a sadder note, Lionel Ziprin died. All I can say is: read the obit. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/21/arts/21ziprin.html?ref=obituaries
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Tuesday, March 17, 2009
David Brooks Calling It Like It Is
For the last six months, in column after painful column in The New York Times and in appearance after tedious appearance on PBS and NPR, David Brooks has undertaken the Sisyphean task of attempting to salvage some small piece of the “supply-side” ideology that he has spent his career promoting from the devastating empirical test provided by the Bush administration. For Brooks, the task has been made all the more daunting by present economic realities as well as by the relative intelligence of his audience, factors which need not concern fellow shills like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. Brooks, thus robbed of the usual right-wing over-reliance on jingoism, has struggled. He has hemmed and hawed, leavening every grudging concession to what previously had been considered liberal heresy with mild criticism. Watching his pained expression on the Lehrer News Hour or on Charlie Rose as the likes of Alan Greenspan and James Baker called for the nationalization of the country’s biggest banks, I got the impression that even he was tired of his own bullshit.
But at long last, Brooks has come clean. In his column in today’s Times, he stripped bare the pretense and unwittingly exposed the ideology of Ronald Reagan and progeny as the romantic, anti-intellectual drivel that it always has been. Thus, with the global economy in free-fall, unemployment at near-record levels and with millions of our fellow citizens without homes or health insurance, Brooks uses his precious space on the op ed page to publish a nostalgia piece for the Town and Country set that would have made Herbert Hoover blush. With characteristically keen cultural insight, Brooks reflects that:
“It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success, as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around.”
Huh!? Is this the op ed page of The New York Times or The Onion? It’s the Times, and the very same issue that is reporting that our nation’s largest insurer had been paying someone $1 million a month to invest in worthless securities and had used (or was about to use) taxpayer bailout money to fund $220 million in bonuses to executives in this very same, spectacularly unsuccessful, investment unit.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Brooks notices that the background music he finds so soothing is missing. Benjamin Barber, the author of “Consumed,” an insightful critique of American consumerism and capitalism, makes the point that if one were to be bombarded by messages from morning to night - on radios and television, on billboards and on the internet, etc… - and the messages were of a political nature, most Americans would rightly equate that with totalitarianism. However, when the messages are commercial, rather than political, in nature, the same Americans call it freedom.
But who these days other than Brooks can spend their days “taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs,” and who but the likes of Brooks would respond to the breathtaking level of corporate skullduggery afoot by bemoaning the fact that there are a lot of “lawyers and academics, but almost no businesspeople” in the Obama administration? Considering the state of the country, even the dumbest kid in the class should have learned something from the past administration.
In the course of his eulogy for the loss of the “maniacal appetite for wealth” that is so part of “our cultural DNA,” Brooks illustrates that his literary insights are on a par with his cultural ones. Brooks’ slavish devotion aside, works such as Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” sermons, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” are bad literature and examples of social Darwinism which deserve to be read as cautionary tales rather than sacred texts. (Surprisingly, Ayn Rand - whose awful novels most outgrow by high school but which are currently enjoying a mild uptick in sales - didn’t make Brooks’ parade of horribles).
Brooks illustrates the peculiar form of economic “elitism” hatched by the Dr. Frankenstein (Karl Rove) who mixed “The Gipper” with Jerry Falwell. The resultant monster has the intelligence to seize upon every tax loophole and market trend while at the same time opining over cocktails that we would be better off if Donald Trump and Jim Cramer could take over for socialists Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. And who but this peculiar type of “elitist” would suggest that Walt Whitman - that bi-sexual, humanist, pacifist, poet of the common man who never had two cents to rub together - would share a nostalgia for the good old days when the rich were rich and getting richer and the poor were supporting the very economic policies that would guarantee they would get even poorer.
In fact, not surprisingly, Brooks has completely misread Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” which was published in 1871 - 18 years prior to Dale Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” Whitman, bitterly disappointed by his country and particularly horrified by the gross materialism that had dominated the post Civil War years, made the following observation in “Democratic Vistas” which suggest that he had little in common with the depressing world view espoused by Brooks:
“In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field.”
Thanks for being so honest, David, albeit unwittingly.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
But at long last, Brooks has come clean. In his column in today’s Times, he stripped bare the pretense and unwittingly exposed the ideology of Ronald Reagan and progeny as the romantic, anti-intellectual drivel that it always has been. Thus, with the global economy in free-fall, unemployment at near-record levels and with millions of our fellow citizens without homes or health insurance, Brooks uses his precious space on the op ed page to publish a nostalgia piece for the Town and Country set that would have made Herbert Hoover blush. With characteristically keen cultural insight, Brooks reflects that:
“It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success, as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around.”
Huh!? Is this the op ed page of The New York Times or The Onion? It’s the Times, and the very same issue that is reporting that our nation’s largest insurer had been paying someone $1 million a month to invest in worthless securities and had used (or was about to use) taxpayer bailout money to fund $220 million in bonuses to executives in this very same, spectacularly unsuccessful, investment unit.
Of course, it’s not surprising that Brooks notices that the background music he finds so soothing is missing. Benjamin Barber, the author of “Consumed,” an insightful critique of American consumerism and capitalism, makes the point that if one were to be bombarded by messages from morning to night - on radios and television, on billboards and on the internet, etc… - and the messages were of a political nature, most Americans would rightly equate that with totalitarianism. However, when the messages are commercial, rather than political, in nature, the same Americans call it freedom.
But who these days other than Brooks can spend their days “taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs,” and who but the likes of Brooks would respond to the breathtaking level of corporate skullduggery afoot by bemoaning the fact that there are a lot of “lawyers and academics, but almost no businesspeople” in the Obama administration? Considering the state of the country, even the dumbest kid in the class should have learned something from the past administration.
In the course of his eulogy for the loss of the “maniacal appetite for wealth” that is so part of “our cultural DNA,” Brooks illustrates that his literary insights are on a par with his cultural ones. Brooks’ slavish devotion aside, works such as Andrew Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth,” Elbert Hubbard’s “A Message to Garcia,” Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” sermons, Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” are bad literature and examples of social Darwinism which deserve to be read as cautionary tales rather than sacred texts. (Surprisingly, Ayn Rand - whose awful novels most outgrow by high school but which are currently enjoying a mild uptick in sales - didn’t make Brooks’ parade of horribles).
Brooks illustrates the peculiar form of economic “elitism” hatched by the Dr. Frankenstein (Karl Rove) who mixed “The Gipper” with Jerry Falwell. The resultant monster has the intelligence to seize upon every tax loophole and market trend while at the same time opining over cocktails that we would be better off if Donald Trump and Jim Cramer could take over for socialists Tim Geithner and Larry Summers. And who but this peculiar type of “elitist” would suggest that Walt Whitman - that bi-sexual, humanist, pacifist, poet of the common man who never had two cents to rub together - would share a nostalgia for the good old days when the rich were rich and getting richer and the poor were supporting the very economic policies that would guarantee they would get even poorer.
In fact, not surprisingly, Brooks has completely misread Whitman’s “Democratic Vistas,” which was published in 1871 - 18 years prior to Dale Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth.” Whitman, bitterly disappointed by his country and particularly horrified by the gross materialism that had dominated the post Civil War years, made the following observation in “Democratic Vistas” which suggest that he had little in common with the depressing world view espoused by Brooks:
“In business (this all-devouring modern word, business), the one sole object is, by any means, pecuniary gain. The magician’s serpent in the fable ate up all the other serpents; and money-making is our magician’s serpent, remaining today sole master of the field.”
Thanks for being so honest, David, albeit unwittingly.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Our Loss of Vocation
I recently agreed to give a talk about professional ethics, or rather more generally, the intersection of spirituality and work, at my church. I was to be the representative of the legal profession. A doctor, teacher, and a financial advisor also had been scheduled to give similar talks.
As I reflected upon the topic, I must admit I began to feel a little queasy. Perhaps this was because of the way the topic had been approached by some born-again evangelicals I have come across. You know the type. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finally caved in to a persistent co-worker’s lunch invitation and ended up at a “Christian” gathering, standing in a Holiday Inn buffet line with an excessively chipper group of salesman. In my case, after the obligatory prayer or three, I was treated to an address from a newly-minted PhD from Rice University who had been enlisted to explain how mainstream academia had been snookered by Darwin. Subsequently, I was surprised to read that even though the Northeast
The point was made by Michael Blanding in a June, 2005 piece in Boston Magazine. And as Blanding noted, the parking lots outside of Marketplace Network events typically are “crammed with Lexuses and Mercedeses,” and at one such event he spied “Boston anchorwoman turned minister Liz Walker . . . Brad Warner – the former head of Bank America’s small business division – as well as the former chief operating officer of the New England Patriots, several Harvard professors, and the former head of Raytheon.”
Yet, as depressing as all this may be, after some more reflection I concluded that my unease with the topic stemmed less from its association with a personally distasteful brand of evangelical Christianity than from the subtle feelings of guilt which accompanied my dawning recognition that I had never given the subject much serious thought and had absolutely no idea how to approach the topic, especially with an audience of non-lawyers, i.e., I couldn’t do the usual and avoid the topic by focusing on legal arcania.
As I prepared for that little talk I was to give at my church I came upon an article - The Meaning of Vocation, by A.J. Conyers, published in 2004 by The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University - which discussed what Christians have historically meant by the term “vocation,” which is rooted in the Latin vocati, meaning a “call,” a “summons,” or “invitation.” The Greek word is klesis, the root of our words “cleric” and “ecclestical.”
Professor Conyers noted that Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, among other things, before he was hung by the Nazis - made the point that after the Protestant Reformation the notion of “vocation” had come to have a secular as well as a sacred meaning. In fact, Bonhoeffer thought it had become too secular in meaning. As he saw it, the New Testament sense of vocation was “never a sanctioning of worldly institutions as such; its ‘yes’ to them always includes at the same time an extremely emphatic ‘no,’ an extremely sharp protest against the world.”
Professor Conyers made several points about the traditional meaning of vocation which present a striking contrast to my state of mind when choosing a career. First, he noted that vocation traditionally implied a call from an agent outside of the one who is subject to the call, and he went on to describe the various types of external calls recited in the Bible – from Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah to the baptism of Jesus, etc…
Compare this notion of an external call to what one learns or intuits about vocation at many liberal arts colleges. At Columbia College, for instance, they were always telling us how great we were. I remember during Freshman orientation sitting in the very impressive rotunda of Low Library as some dean or famous alumnus explained that I should look to my left and right and then quoted some specific odds that one of the people I had just looked at would end up making a significant contribution to the country - as an author, or a senator or some such thing. By the way, I have no idea where he got those odds or what he meant by “significant contribution” and the guy sitting next to me looked like he was going to end up in jail (and I was not sitting next to Barack Obama, who graduated three years after me). The point is they were always doing that sort of self-congratulatory thing. I guess if you were destined to be a master of the universe you were more than qualified to decide on a career without benefit of some external "call."
Professor Conyers put the point in historical context when he noted that “the specific way the Enlightenment used reason was as a replacement for the idea of vocation. One could make reasoned choices. The true locus of personal decisions was to be found in the individual who ‘thinks for himself,’ as Kant would put it, and who declines to depend upon the guidance of another.’ While vocation contradicts the will of the person being called, reason is the instrument by which the modern person thought his will could be enforced.”
Second, Professor Conyers noted that the summons of a true vocation is often against the will of the one who is called into service and typically involves a path of extreme hardship. This is precisely the opposite of what my generation’s parents told their kids, either explicitly or more often, implicitly. The American Dream was and is in one sense all about avoiding hardship. The immigrant experience hard-wired into our culture is in this respect bourgeois to the core. We sacrifice now so our children can eat bon bons later, not be crucified or persecuted, or even have too much credit card debt for that matter.
And finally, Professor Conyers noted that the danger of ignoring a vocational summons posed a threat not primarily to the individual, but more importantly to the achievement of a greater communal purpose. As he noted, the biblical concern with the call of God was always bound up in the needs of the community rather than the individual.
Novelist Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead, among others, wrote an essay a decade ago suggesting that we have been the victims of a profound cultural shift and have literally sold our souls without knowing it. (The essay was entitled The Way We Work, The Way We Live and was published in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Houghton Mifflin 1998). Robinson makes the point that after enacting progressive labor laws to protect the vulnerable we have become slaves to consumerism and all work longer hours than we did 25 years ago. As a result, there is no time for family or for the maintenance of cultural institutions which preserve cultural identity, which historically has been the role of the extended family and organized religion. Robinson claims that the breakdown of the extended family has been especially poignant because:
She went on to note that:
Interestingly, although lawyers have written endlessly about professional ethics, hardly any of the literature deals with whether or not the choice of which legal career to pursue is itself subject to ethical scrutiny, or considers the relative powerlessness of many young lawyers (or for that matter, bankers or financial analysts) via a vis their bosses and/or the odious clients of the firms they work for. This myopia is itself the result of professional indoctrination. After three years of learning how to think within a very particular box, we shouldn’t be surprised when our brightest lawyers and financial gurus actually do so. That is why the decision to attend professional school, or later, the career decision that takes one to either Wall Street or to say the public defender’s office, is so significant. A surprising amount of what follows will be beyond your control.
The point was made in a 2001 paper by Professor Andrew M. Perlman of Suffolk University Law School entitled A Career Choice Critique of Legal Ethics Theory. To over-simplify Professor Perlman, although the tobacco industry or the handgun industry or any number or other odious industries is entitled to your zealous advocacy once you are their attorney, is the decision to take them on as a client ethically proper in the first place? And as a practical matter, doesn’t the first year associate at the big firm have to do exactly what he or she is told (within, of course, certain very limited parameters)?
I’m not sure when we lost this more meaningful concept of vocation, or whether it ever was ours to lose in the first place. Today’s consumer culture is in many respects the result of a general loss of meaning and individual autonomy which has been grist for the mill of sociologists since at least the fifties, whether it be David Reisman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny in The Lonely Crowd (Doubleday Anchor 1950) or Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself (New American Library 1953). No doubt the loss has been gradual but I do not think it would be overstating the case to say that our recent economic disasters - from the savings and loan scandals to the Enron debacle to the current subprime morass - can be traced to this loss. We have seen our brightest minds siphoned off by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Arnold & Porter to do what exactly? And to what end, to show-off their amazingly extravagant lifestyles?
Unfortunately, it will be much easier to stimulate the economy and to regulate the financial sector than it will be to reverse the more serious consequences of the “cerebral whiteout” brought about by the ascendancy of our consumer culture and its thirty-year infatuation with free market fundamentalism (which may give new meaning to President Obama’s recent crack about Nancy Reagan’s White House seances). However, I fear that without addressing these more serious consequences, the effect of any fiscal stimulus or regulatory effort will be fleeting.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
As I reflected upon the topic, I must admit I began to feel a little queasy. Perhaps this was because of the way the topic had been approached by some born-again evangelicals I have come across. You know the type. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finally caved in to a persistent co-worker’s lunch invitation and ended up at a “Christian” gathering, standing in a Holiday Inn buffet line with an excessively chipper group of salesman. In my case, after the obligatory prayer or three, I was treated to an address from a newly-minted PhD from Rice University who had been enlisted to explain how mainstream academia had been snookered by Darwin. Subsequently, I was surprised to read that even though the Northeast
“has the lowest church attendance of any region in the country, the Boston-based Marketplace Network is one of the first and most influential groups in the movement to bring Christ to a cubicle near you. The group’s thesis is simple: Jesus was a carpenter, his disciples fisherman and a tax collector; they clearly had some experience with the working life. Between them, they built the biggest corporation in the ancient world. So why not use the Bible as a manual for business success? In the eyes of these true believers, asking ‘What would Jesus do at work?’ is the best way to bring ethics back to the boardroom.”
The point was made by Michael Blanding in a June, 2005 piece in Boston Magazine. And as Blanding noted, the parking lots outside of Marketplace Network events typically are “crammed with Lexuses and Mercedeses,” and at one such event he spied “Boston anchorwoman turned minister Liz Walker . . . Brad Warner – the former head of Bank America’s small business division – as well as the former chief operating officer of the New England Patriots, several Harvard professors, and the former head of Raytheon.”
Yet, as depressing as all this may be, after some more reflection I concluded that my unease with the topic stemmed less from its association with a personally distasteful brand of evangelical Christianity than from the subtle feelings of guilt which accompanied my dawning recognition that I had never given the subject much serious thought and had absolutely no idea how to approach the topic, especially with an audience of non-lawyers, i.e., I couldn’t do the usual and avoid the topic by focusing on legal arcania.
As I prepared for that little talk I was to give at my church I came upon an article - The Meaning of Vocation, by A.J. Conyers, published in 2004 by The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University - which discussed what Christians have historically meant by the term “vocation,” which is rooted in the Latin vocati, meaning a “call,” a “summons,” or “invitation.” The Greek word is klesis, the root of our words “cleric” and “ecclestical.”
Professor Conyers noted that Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, among other things, before he was hung by the Nazis - made the point that after the Protestant Reformation the notion of “vocation” had come to have a secular as well as a sacred meaning. In fact, Bonhoeffer thought it had become too secular in meaning. As he saw it, the New Testament sense of vocation was “never a sanctioning of worldly institutions as such; its ‘yes’ to them always includes at the same time an extremely emphatic ‘no,’ an extremely sharp protest against the world.”
Professor Conyers made several points about the traditional meaning of vocation which present a striking contrast to my state of mind when choosing a career. First, he noted that vocation traditionally implied a call from an agent outside of the one who is subject to the call, and he went on to describe the various types of external calls recited in the Bible – from Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah to the baptism of Jesus, etc…
Compare this notion of an external call to what one learns or intuits about vocation at many liberal arts colleges. At Columbia College, for instance, they were always telling us how great we were. I remember during Freshman orientation sitting in the very impressive rotunda of Low Library as some dean or famous alumnus explained that I should look to my left and right and then quoted some specific odds that one of the people I had just looked at would end up making a significant contribution to the country - as an author, or a senator or some such thing. By the way, I have no idea where he got those odds or what he meant by “significant contribution” and the guy sitting next to me looked like he was going to end up in jail (and I was not sitting next to Barack Obama, who graduated three years after me). The point is they were always doing that sort of self-congratulatory thing. I guess if you were destined to be a master of the universe you were more than qualified to decide on a career without benefit of some external "call."
Professor Conyers put the point in historical context when he noted that “the specific way the Enlightenment used reason was as a replacement for the idea of vocation. One could make reasoned choices. The true locus of personal decisions was to be found in the individual who ‘thinks for himself,’ as Kant would put it, and who declines to depend upon the guidance of another.’ While vocation contradicts the will of the person being called, reason is the instrument by which the modern person thought his will could be enforced.”
Second, Professor Conyers noted that the summons of a true vocation is often against the will of the one who is called into service and typically involves a path of extreme hardship. This is precisely the opposite of what my generation’s parents told their kids, either explicitly or more often, implicitly. The American Dream was and is in one sense all about avoiding hardship. The immigrant experience hard-wired into our culture is in this respect bourgeois to the core. We sacrifice now so our children can eat bon bons later, not be crucified or persecuted, or even have too much credit card debt for that matter.
And finally, Professor Conyers noted that the danger of ignoring a vocational summons posed a threat not primarily to the individual, but more importantly to the achievement of a greater communal purpose. As he noted, the biblical concern with the call of God was always bound up in the needs of the community rather than the individual.
Novelist Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead, among others, wrote an essay a decade ago suggesting that we have been the victims of a profound cultural shift and have literally sold our souls without knowing it. (The essay was entitled The Way We Work, The Way We Live and was published in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Houghton Mifflin 1998). Robinson makes the point that after enacting progressive labor laws to protect the vulnerable we have become slaves to consumerism and all work longer hours than we did 25 years ago. As a result, there is no time for family or for the maintenance of cultural institutions which preserve cultural identity, which historically has been the role of the extended family and organized religion. Robinson claims that the breakdown of the extended family has been especially poignant because:
“the biological family is especially compelling to us because it is, in fact, very arbitrary in its composition. I would never suggest so rude an experiment as calculating the percentage of one's relatives one would actually choose as friends, the percentage of one's relatives who would choose one as their friend. And that is the charm and the genius of the institution. It implies that help and kindness and loyalty are owed where they are perhaps by no means merited. Owed, that is, even to ourselves. It implies that we are in some few circumstances excused from the degrading need to judge others' claims on us, excused from the struggle to keep our thumb off the scales of reciprocity.”
She went on to note that:
“we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us [like the Communist systems we have so ardently opposed]. It is an American style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one's doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among people chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.
This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition--let us say, of Jesus and Jefferson--as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout.”
Interestingly, although lawyers have written endlessly about professional ethics, hardly any of the literature deals with whether or not the choice of which legal career to pursue is itself subject to ethical scrutiny, or considers the relative powerlessness of many young lawyers (or for that matter, bankers or financial analysts) via a vis their bosses and/or the odious clients of the firms they work for. This myopia is itself the result of professional indoctrination. After three years of learning how to think within a very particular box, we shouldn’t be surprised when our brightest lawyers and financial gurus actually do so. That is why the decision to attend professional school, or later, the career decision that takes one to either Wall Street or to say the public defender’s office, is so significant. A surprising amount of what follows will be beyond your control.
The point was made in a 2001 paper by Professor Andrew M. Perlman of Suffolk University Law School entitled A Career Choice Critique of Legal Ethics Theory. To over-simplify Professor Perlman, although the tobacco industry or the handgun industry or any number or other odious industries is entitled to your zealous advocacy once you are their attorney, is the decision to take them on as a client ethically proper in the first place? And as a practical matter, doesn’t the first year associate at the big firm have to do exactly what he or she is told (within, of course, certain very limited parameters)?
I’m not sure when we lost this more meaningful concept of vocation, or whether it ever was ours to lose in the first place. Today’s consumer culture is in many respects the result of a general loss of meaning and individual autonomy which has been grist for the mill of sociologists since at least the fifties, whether it be David Reisman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny in The Lonely Crowd (Doubleday Anchor 1950) or Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself (New American Library 1953). No doubt the loss has been gradual but I do not think it would be overstating the case to say that our recent economic disasters - from the savings and loan scandals to the Enron debacle to the current subprime morass - can be traced to this loss. We have seen our brightest minds siphoned off by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Arnold & Porter to do what exactly? And to what end, to show-off their amazingly extravagant lifestyles?
Unfortunately, it will be much easier to stimulate the economy and to regulate the financial sector than it will be to reverse the more serious consequences of the “cerebral whiteout” brought about by the ascendancy of our consumer culture and its thirty-year infatuation with free market fundamentalism (which may give new meaning to President Obama’s recent crack about Nancy Reagan’s White House seances). However, I fear that without addressing these more serious consequences, the effect of any fiscal stimulus or regulatory effort will be fleeting.
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thank you Mr. Updike
I distinctly remember when I first read John Updike. Intrigued by what I had read of the scandal that had greeted his publication of Couples a few years earlier, I pulled Rabbit, Run - a novel that had been published when I was two - down from my father's bookshelves when I was thirteen or so, much as my youngest son was in the habit when five or six of pulling down Villages from my bookshelves to stare at the illustration of naked women on its cover.
Since that time 37 years ago when I joined Rabbit Angstrom in an alley in Mt. Judge, Pennslyvania - that "unlikely rabbit...twenty-six and six three," as he put down his business suit and joined "boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it," and I saw the legs, and heard the shouts and the "scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles" which seemed to "catapult the [boys'] voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires" - I have rarely opened a New Yorker magazine, or perused an issue of the New York Times Book Review without looking first to see if Updike had written anything. He was stupendously prolific and it was part of the magic of his writing that I became fascinated by any topic he touched upon, and he wrote as an expert on an impressivley broad spectrum of topics - most memorably on literature, the visual arts, and theology, but also on golf and baseball, to name just a few. Yet, he seemed so unassuming and unpretentious when interviewed, displaying only the barest hint of genius in the knowing twinkle in his eye when he smiled, which he was quick to do.
Updike's magic also included an ability - especially in his early short stories and in the Rabbit series - to pierce the layers of self-protective armor which I already had felt growing around me, armadillo like, when I first read him, at the tender age of thirteen. Later in life, it was a chance reading of one of his greatest short stories - Separating - which unleashed my floodgates in the wake of my first divorce.
And now he's gone and I feel like I did just after finishing Rabbit, Run - crying and dumbstruck - then, at the power of words, and now at the intense feelings of loss I have for a man I have never even met. I always thought I would meet him one day. Maybe at some suburban Christmas party north of Boston, with scotch in hand and snow falling. And we would drift from the crowd and talk. And he of all people would understand that reading alone can be enough. There was plenty of time. But then again, I didn't go to many suburban Christmas parties north of Boston and neither, I expect, did he.
A few of his words in memory:
"Even toward myself, as my own life's careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefullness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.
In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science ('Water is the great solvent') and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like 'savages' - that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled, within human institutions-churches, banks, madrigal groups-but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self's responsibility, then is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let's say, the walk from the mailbox."
Self-Consciousness (Fawcett Crest 1989).
"'Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!' the kid is yelling, or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one eyebrow, as they grow up against the grain.
* * *
From his expression and the itch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. 'Don't die, Dad, don't!' he cries, then sits back with the question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.
'Well, Nelson,' he says, 'all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.' Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough."
Rabbit at Rest (Knopf 1990).
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Since that time 37 years ago when I joined Rabbit Angstrom in an alley in Mt. Judge, Pennslyvania - that "unlikely rabbit...twenty-six and six three," as he put down his business suit and joined "boys playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it," and I saw the legs, and heard the shouts and the "scrape and snap of Keds on loose alley pebbles" which seemed to "catapult the [boys'] voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires" - I have rarely opened a New Yorker magazine, or perused an issue of the New York Times Book Review without looking first to see if Updike had written anything. He was stupendously prolific and it was part of the magic of his writing that I became fascinated by any topic he touched upon, and he wrote as an expert on an impressivley broad spectrum of topics - most memorably on literature, the visual arts, and theology, but also on golf and baseball, to name just a few. Yet, he seemed so unassuming and unpretentious when interviewed, displaying only the barest hint of genius in the knowing twinkle in his eye when he smiled, which he was quick to do.
Updike's magic also included an ability - especially in his early short stories and in the Rabbit series - to pierce the layers of self-protective armor which I already had felt growing around me, armadillo like, when I first read him, at the tender age of thirteen. Later in life, it was a chance reading of one of his greatest short stories - Separating - which unleashed my floodgates in the wake of my first divorce.
And now he's gone and I feel like I did just after finishing Rabbit, Run - crying and dumbstruck - then, at the power of words, and now at the intense feelings of loss I have for a man I have never even met. I always thought I would meet him one day. Maybe at some suburban Christmas party north of Boston, with scotch in hand and snow falling. And we would drift from the crowd and talk. And he of all people would understand that reading alone can be enough. There was plenty of time. But then again, I didn't go to many suburban Christmas parties north of Boston and neither, I expect, did he.
A few of his words in memory:
"Even toward myself, as my own life's careful manager and promoter, I feel a touch of disdain. Precociously conscious of the precious, inexplicable burden of selfhood, I have steered my unique little craft carefully, at the same time doubting that carefullness is the most sublime virtue. He that gains his life shall lose it.
In this interim of gaining and losing, it clears the air to disbelieve in death and to believe that the world was created to be praised. But I inherited a skeptical temperament. My father believed in science ('Water is the great solvent') and my mother in nature. She looked and still looks to the plants and the animals for orientation, and I have absorbed the belief that when in doubt we should behave, if not like monkeys, like 'savages' - that our instincts and appetites are better guides, for a healthy life, than the advice of other human beings. People are fun, but not quite serious or trustworthy in the way that nature is. We feel safe, huddled, within human institutions-churches, banks, madrigal groups-but these concoctions melt away at the basic moments. The self's responsibility, then is to achieve rapport if not rapture with the giant, cosmic other: to appreciate, let's say, the walk from the mailbox."
Self-Consciousness (Fawcett Crest 1989).
"'Can't you say anything? Talk to me, Dad!' the kid is yelling, or trying not to yell, his face white in the gills with the strain of it, and some unaskable question tweaking the hairs of one eyebrow, as they grow up against the grain.
* * *
From his expression and the itch of his voice, the boy is shouting into a fierce wind blowing from his father's direction. 'Don't die, Dad, don't!' he cries, then sits back with the question still on his face, and his dark wet eyes shining like stars of a sort. Harry shouldn't leave the question hanging like that, the boy depends on him.
'Well, Nelson,' he says, 'all I can tell you is, it isn't so bad.' Rabbit thinks he should maybe say more, the kid looks wildly expectant, but enough. Maybe. Enough."
Rabbit at Rest (Knopf 1990).
Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
Writing to Feel
Darryl Pinckney discusses the recently-published early journals of the late Susan Sontag ("Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Farrar,Straus & Giroux)) in the December 22 & 29 issue of The New Yorker and notes:
"For Sontag, prose was not a vehicle for expressing what she thought; it was itself a form of thinking, and, perhpas more exactingly, of feeling as well.
'I don't know what my real feelings are,' she wrote in 1960. 'That's why I'm so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal exactly?'
Pinckney concludes his piece by suggesting that:
"The realm of literature, to her, was a universal community, a brotherhood of the subversive and the good. 'Reborn' traces that evolving, innocent faith. An entry from 1961: 'Writing is a beautiful act. It is making something that will give pleasure to others later.'"
"For Sontag, prose was not a vehicle for expressing what she thought; it was itself a form of thinking, and, perhpas more exactingly, of feeling as well.
'I don't know what my real feelings are,' she wrote in 1960. 'That's why I'm so interested in moral philosophy, which tells me (or at least turns me toward) what my feelings ought to be. Why worry about analyzing the crude ore, I reason, if you know how to produce the refined metal exactly?'
Pinckney concludes his piece by suggesting that:
"The realm of literature, to her, was a universal community, a brotherhood of the subversive and the good. 'Reborn' traces that evolving, innocent faith. An entry from 1961: 'Writing is a beautiful act. It is making something that will give pleasure to others later.'"
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