Just When I Was Ready to Discuss What We Could Do to Encourage New Thinking Skills in a Seminar at Her Employer, I Get This Question about Believing in God

I am accustomed to being questioned by prospective business clients on all kinds of issues. What I’m not accustomed to is having them ask me, unexpectedly and point-blank, as happened over dinner not long ago, “Do you believe in God?”

But it happened, and I replied immediately, “I don’t believe in your God.”

I think that’s the right thing to do in such circumstances, and the right way to do it. I encourage such a response, instantly and emphatically, if you find yourself in similar circumstances. It is certainly a return volley across the net that keeps the discussion from degenerating quickly into strained politeness, vague assurances or simply plain silliness.

What you believe about this nettlesome, never-seemingly-laid-to-rest-in-human-affairs-and-discussions issue should never, in my opinion, hinge on what someone else thinks. So I’m never going to encourage anyone to base their conclusions on the issue on my opinions. Over the eons, there have been a thousand and one opinions, multiplied a thousand and one times, voiced on the subject. Mine is just one more (and, to paraphrase critic Kingsley Amis, "a person's view of what he is doing is no more valid than anyone else's.")

But this individual was put off only momentarily. After an instant, she said, “But are you a believer?”

“I don’t know about believing, “I replied. ”But I don’t believe in believers.”

“So you are a non-believer?” she inquired

“Let me tell you what I think I might be,” I offered as it became clearer that she was asking with a personal earnestness that seemed to have nothing to do with whether she was going to engage my services as a change agent and thinking skills authority.

“I think I might be an accepter.”

Blank stare. Good. A blank stare is usually a good place to begin when people are, even if not consciously, trying to see if they can categorize you and your slate of opinions using their own.

Then I told her what I was willing to accept:

• Most humans seem to be incorrigibly religious. Most want to believe in something “beyond” themselves. The search for “God”—or something out there or up there or in there—never ends. It has been that way from day one.

• What most humans think about God they’ve really never thought much about, if they’ve thought about it at all. What most humans think about God they’ve inherited. It’s a family matter or a neighborhood matter or a community matter. Saint Paul was absolutely right: raise a child in the family faith, and you’ve nearly always got them for that faith for life.

• The “theological history” that all faiths cite as their proofs for their view of God all eventually grows murky and, like the record of evolutionary biology, becomes riddled with gaps and uncertainties as the mists of time close in. There's no real, dependable footing for anyone's view of God. That’s why there is no one theology. It is always a Muslin theology or a Christian theology or a Methodist theology or a Christian Science theology. Really good, smart theologians understand this, which is why a Paul Tillich or a Pierre Teilhard de Chardin can be so maddeningly vague and full of double-speak so much of the time and, in the end, pretty much incomprehensible.

• Everything that has ever been said about religion or theology or God was generated by the same source: the human brain. There’s no getting around it. There is no other way to say anything. If God speaks in the forest and there is no brain, it’s pretty clear: there’s no sound—nothing said, nothing heard, nothing remembered, nothing recorded. So the brain first draws the outline and then colors in the spaces about everything, including all that has been said and thought about the issue of whether there's a God and whether we can know anything worth knowing about such a being, if there happens to be One.

• What the brain thinks and says about God is simply one more assignment for a brain seeking to understand how it has come to be plopped in the middle of, to use astrophysicist Freeman Dyson’s apt phrase, “infinity in all directions.” The thing about this assignment is that explaining ultimate causes in such an environment is proving to be enormously difficult, perhaps even—no, I'll say that stronger—probably even beyond our capabilities on many subjects, including this one. We simply don’t appear to have the brainpower to pull it off.

• So the issue of God has come to bore me. There are so many other interesting questions where I stand a chance of finding some answers. None of the answers offered up by any other brain that has ever spoken out or written something down on this particular issue that I've read—and believe me, I’ve read a ton of them—any longer interests me. I don’t mind people having strong spiritual beliefs if they will use them responsibly. I know from the research—brain research!—that having strong spiritual beliefs can be very healthy. The brain likes believing it can know. But then my brain knows it can believe almost anything about anything. And so can any other brain. So that makes my brain very leery of believing in believers.

“So this is what I accept, and why I think I may be an accepter,” I told my dinner guest.

“You’re right,” my guest replied. “I don’t believe you believe in my God.”

But I still got the job and, I think, made a new friend. And, she left the table looking very thoughtful.

Posted on November 28, 2005

"Tableaus of Greatness" Department: Dr. Schweitzer's Sensitivity Toward the Living Extended to the Single, Solitary Ant

Like so much about the man, Dr. Albert Schweitze's fondness for animals was legendary. In his book, The Africa of Albert Schweitzer (Harper & Brothers, 1948), Charles Joy captures a moment of confirmation:

"I was sitting beside him on a wall one day, and noticed an ant on his collar. I started to brush it away, but he quickly protested. "No, no, leave it alone. It's my ant," he said.

And he would never burn a field because of the insects that would perish. The personal prohibition came from his reading of a Chinese work, Kan Ying Pien (Book of Rewards and Punishments), where hunters are forbidden to set fire to the fields for the same reason, the toll on insects. Schwietzer told Joy: "As I read the words of this venerable book, where pity for all living things is recognized for the first time as a human duty, I think of the days towards the end of dry season here in this country, when the natives burn vast areas of brush and forest, to make room for their plantations. Night after night I see the light of these great conflagrations all around the horizon, and my heart is filled with pity."

[I'd give you the page numbers for these quotes but there is not a single page number in this book!]

Posted on November 26, 2005

Topics and Attitudes—Not to Mention the Opening Event's Keynote Speaker—at This Year's Neuroscience Society Conference Suggest an Important Corner Has Been Turned on the Nature Versus Nurture Debate

A few days ago—in mid-November—the Society for Neuroscience met in Washington, DC, in an event that, if it had any message at all (and it had many), it was this: in terms of exploring and understanding how the brain works, times are a’changing. This was indicated from the opening moments because guess who was invited to open the SFN’s annual meeting?

The Dalai Lama.

Now this gent, an amazing fellow who is as savvy about the workings of postmodern media and politics as he is in the ministrations of ancient Buddhist regimens and practices, is usually a “natural” for most intellectually oriented Boomer, Gen X and Gen Y audiences. But his appearance before the neuroscientists carried double-meaning. There was his topic—the need to be vigilant about ethics and responsibility in scientific research. And there was the ancillary element—the role of meditation in changing the structure and activity of our brains.

The Dalai Lama was less interested in structural changes than in behavioral changes. He talked about training people to think compassionately. But researchers like Sara Lazar of MassGeneral Hospital in Charlestown presented evidence showing that regions like the prefrontal cortex and the insula (an area that integrates emotions, thoughts and sensor imput) in the right hemisphere are thicker in experienced meditators.

“It is a real effect to do with meditation experience,” says Lazar. And what are consequences of the effect? For one, an apparent reversal of the normal cortical dissipation that age brings on.

There were numerous such presentations at the SFN meeting. A significant corner has been turned, it would appear, in the nature versus nurture debate. In hindsight, the whole issue is probably going to seem silly and naïve in the ways it has been previously approached by thinkers in both camps. Of course both nature and nurture contribute vitally to how an organism works. Both are elemental. Both are synergistic. And both are unavoidable in explaining anything to do with life. Now, we are beginning to have the tools to confirm some of the nitty-gritty details. And now, thanks to the human genome project and the decade of the brain, to cite two huge impetuses, we are begining to have a sympathetic atmosphere in the scientific community to get on with the search and the research. Because henceforth, the interaction between genes and experiences is going to be considered a given. The big questions now have to do with how all this complexity works.

In our Brain Technologies seminars, we’ve talked for years about the importance of doing things that cause you to change how you describe yourself as being key to changing how you think.

That's because we've always thought experience interacting with genes changes experience. And that genes interacting with experience changes how genes work.

And we’ve always thought it was a no-brainer that everything you do has an impact on how the brain is wired and functions, and that everything the brain does has an impact on what you do. And think. And are. (And that includes spiritually.) Now, those of us who have so been arguing are starting to find ourselves in very good company.
___

NewScientist.com’s news service had an insight-filled article on the SFN meeting. Go to
“How life shapes your brainscape". (You will have to pay $4.95 to get a subscription to the news service to read the entire article but the opening paragraphs are free and, in themselves, quite interesting.)

Posted on November 25, 2005

More from Our Correspondent in the Middle East: Some NPR-Like Snippets About Bank Accounts, Apartment Hunting and Condoms in the Dust from the Front Lines of Daily Existence in the Deserts of the Gulf Region

I have a Brain Technologies associate now putting down roots in one of the more advanced of the Middle Eastern countries. From time to time, I want to share some of this person’s observations because they have a National Public Radio-like way of revealing more than the headlines often do.

The tight focus with which the news media cover “life as it is lived" in the deserts of the Gulf region usually edits out much of the flavor of these societies as they reach for—if they are seriously reaching for—modernity. When you have some understanding of the side scenes and the sideshows, it's easier to understand that even when modernity takes hold, living there never seems to be a picnic.

• The men wear long white robes (cool); the women wear long black robes and scarves (not cool). Also, the women have trouble with osteoporosis because they can’t get enough Vitamin D from the abundant sun here because they are so covered up.

• The women at work fight with the scarf. I wonder how much work efficiency is lost just with the time spent “fixing” the scarf?

• The jewelry is absolutely ostentatious. I swear I saw a woman wearing MILLIONS of diamonds the other day, eating at Chili’s in the mall. She had on one 30 carat (at least) ring and another band covered in diamonds. Then a wrist band covered in diamonds about 3 inches wide and then a whole arrangement that went down the sleeves of her black gown and over her front and back. Normally all the glitter on the gown is just crystal, but this was too glittery and ostentatious! All this just to go shopping?!

• Driving on the freeway through the desert is sometimes like driving in the prairies in the winter in a wind. Except, instead of snaking snow, it’s snaking red sand. You wash your car and then it’s dirty again the next day from the blowing sand. You definitely want a LIGHT colored car.

• I got an apartment! YEA!!! After looking at many, after getting lost trying to find them, I was getting discouraged. Some were decent sizes but were old and smelly. I kept debating about whether I would go out towards the newer parts of the city (but construction and traffic is crazy) or more in the older city center (but traffic is also crazy). I looked at lots of ones in the older part and some were decent and I got on their waiting lists, but when I walked back to the hotel through the prostitutes and dog messes and used condoms on the street, I decided I really didn’t want to be downtown anywhere.

• You pay all your rent up front at the beginning of your year long contract. Big hit at the beginning, but then you don’t have to worry about it in the monthly expenses. And talk about pre-sales – if you want to buy a one bedroom apartment, you have to buy now for ones that won’t be finished until mid-2008 AND they want 80% of the money by 15 months in advance and are surprised when you ask about mortgages.

• Did finally get to a Rotary meeting. There were more visiting Rotarians and guests than there were club members. Lots of folks from all over – a deputy governor from Tunisia, folks from several European countries, New Zealand, U.S. and myself. Most people are in construction but made a few contacts. Like everything here, the president, a Sheik, sits and the secretary (another Sheik but obviously lower level) runs the meeting. Much of the meeting was in French because of the Tunisian DG and the visiting opera stars from the Paris Opera.

• I waited for one and a half hours [at a government office] to get my certificate to take to the bank to APPLY for a bank account. Honestly, it was a real study in process engineering! People spent most of their time walking around with pieces of paper, getting several folks to sign for them. The certificate paper is kept by one woman and the customer service reps have to sign their life away to get one and then have to create the certificate in English and Arabic. My guess is that they don’t have it in a template as long as it took for someone to type the 3 paragraphs. Then, I had to sign my life away that I had received it. I headed straight to the bank to set up the account. I had to fill out about 6 pages of forms and then they will decide if they will accept me or not

Of course, you can have similar kinds of experiences in many cities and countries, modern or not, Western, Eastern or Middle Eastern. And much of what this person is reporting is culture shock, pure and simple. But I've received eight dispatches so far. And the assault of antiquated, inefficient ways of thinking on this person's world-traveled sensibilities seems unrelentling.

One thought among many as I reflected on the above: if America's top government officials thought they were going to wage a quick war and establish a viable new democratic government before the first major sandstorms in a region often struggling with near-medieval institutional rigidities, it was obviously because they’d never spent much time at all in these places. At least, much time outside their wide-bodied aircraft, limousines, plush hotel lobbies and pampered sleeping, meeting and banquet rooms.

Second thought among many: Those near-medieval institutional rigidities are eventually going to yield. Such is the nature of a nonzero-sum game, and, no matter how stuttering its pace seems to be at certain times and in certain places, this appears to be the game we are all involved in on this particular G star.

Posted on November 22, 2005

And In These Times of Great Changes, Chaos and Conflict, A Little Levity for Our Souls' Sake

My favorite limerick:

There was a young fellow from Trinity
Who took the square root of infinity
But the number of digits
Gave him the fidgets;
He dropped Math and took up Divinity.

—with thanks to the late George Gamow, the physicist, who used the doggerel on the frontispiece of his One two three … infinity, Viking Press.

Posted on November 20, 2005

We Just Keep Making the Same Old Mistakes and Using the Same Old Arguments—As One of Mark Twain's Most Brilliant Stories Warns Us

As hard as I try, I can’t keep Mark Twain’s posthumously published story, The Mysterious Stranger, off my mind for very long these days. That’s because I keep reading the daily newspaper.

Twain’s story was published posthumously because he thought it might get him hung from the nearest tree if he were alive when it appeared. As you'll see shortly, he did have reason to be concerned about self-preservation.

Set in a sleepy Austrian village in 1590, it starred three boys and a handsome, young, mysterious stranger who said his name was Philip Traum. He claimed to be a magician. The boys wanted tricks, and Traum did some impressive ones. But none so impressive as making the boys invisible and showing them interesting sights. By now, the visitor had the boys’ confidence, and he told them he was really an angel, and his real name was Satan.

This is where the story of Philip Traum and the daily headlines in my newspaper keep coinciding.

For example, the headline for today’s lead story on the front page of The New York Times read, “Torture Alleged at Ministry Site Outside Baghdad.” The story alleges a litany of gruesome sins against humanity.

In Twain’s story, Traum took his invisible boys to visit a ghastly torture chamber. The story’s narrator couldn’t stand it for long. “It was a brutal thing,” he told Satan on the way home.

“No,” Satan replied. “It was a human thing….No brute ever does a cruel thing. When a brute inflicts pain, he does it innocently; he does not inflict pain for the pleasure of inflicting it—only man does that.”

Next, Satan takes his young charges to the stoning and hanging of a nice old woman, believed to be a witch. The boys are horrified but do nothing. Satan reads their mind and laughs. He observed that there were 68 people looking on as the woman was killed, and 62 of them “had no more desire to throw a stone than you had.”

The problem, said Satan, is that people are really sheep. He continued:

“Look at you in war—what muttons you are, and how ridiculous! There has never been a just one, never an honorable one—on the part of the instigator of the war. The loud little handful as usual will shout for the war….Next, the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them, and thus, he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.”

No need, I’m sure, to point out what headlines this quote calls to mind.

And then there was this observation by Twain’s Philip Traum (nee Satan) about the standard God of Christendom:

“A God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones, who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body ….”

Well, you know Mark Twain. There’s a lot more. But if you ever accuse my mind of immediately thinking of the inventors of the intelligent design idea when I read the quote immediately above, I’ll immediately suggest that you’ve lost yours.

Because I’m not running a posthumous blog here!

Posted on November 16, 2005

If You Think Jacob Marley's Ghost Was on a Mission, Then Get the Ghost of Peter Drucker on Your Case

All weekend long, the ghost of Peter Drucker perched just behind my right shoulder, talking to me all the way. In the end, it got to be a little much. But I knew how to get rid of the apparition. “Now, look, Dr. Drucker…” I said. And the ghost was gone.

Drucker had a doctorate in international law, but he disdained being called “Dr.” He described himself as a newspaperman, which he was at one time. The fact that he chose to devote his writing skills to more than three dozen books and literally thousands of articles was a profound loss to some newspaper’s readership. Because had he stayed in that profession, he’d have made one of the century’s great columnists or editorial writers.

“Peter could look around corners,” philanthropist Eli Broad told The Los Angeles Times. Another admirer, Michael Useem, management professor at the Wharton School at the U. of Pennsylvania, said he “was like the exceptionally insightful anthropologist who visits remote tribe and understands things about the tribe that the tribe itself doesn’t understand.”

As you most probably have heard, management guru Peter Drucker died last Friday at 95.

That gave people like ex-General Electric CEO Jack Welch a chance to recount how they had been influenced by Drucker’s laser-like gifts of attention and aimsmanship. Welch said all he needed to understand how to restructure GE’s unwieldy, often unworkable corporate empire were two questions from Drucker:

“If you weren’t already in this business, would you enter it today? And if not, what are you going to do about it?”

Welch soon decided, he said, that if GE couldn’t be No. 1 or No. 2 in an industry, it would get out of the field.

I couldn’t get Drucker out of my mind. Or his ghost from behind my shoulder.

Out for a drive, my wife, Sherry, and I happened on a restaurant we’d not seen before. Two steps inside the front door and it was obvious to us that it was brand, spankin’ new. It is a cavernous place, with two huge seating areas, one side a gargantuan sports bar, the other a massive dining room, both ultra-modern in decor—sleek, minimalist, spotless, scratchless. Numerous large flat-panel TV sets hover like flying billboards around the room. In addition, there are giant, multi-paneled LCD displays. Everything is automated in the restrooms. Reach for the water faucet and water gushes out. Reach for a paper towel and out it spools. Get up or walk away from the other fixtures, and good bathroom etiquette is performed for you without the need to push any handle.

At our booth, the staff clustered around us like we were royalty despite the factor that there was nothing on the menu priced higher than $11.95.

For a time I forgot Drucker’s ghost. But then the food was delivered, and all the restaurant’s pretensions evaporated in a miasma of mediocrity. We weren't expecting haute cuisine. But my brunch-time platter of eggs, sausage, biscuits and gravy looked like a first-week-of-school project in a junior high Home Ec class. Sherry’s concoction of “pulled pork and eggs” drew this comment from a woman who would walk around the block to avoid hurting your feelings: “This is very close to being bad.”

Looking back over my shoulder, I didn't even wait for Peter Drucker’s ghost to speak. “It’s the kitchen," I said to the Drucker apparition. "They’ve spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on design and décor and staff training, and haven't given a thought to the impression they want the food to make.”

The ghost just nodded.

And suddenly I understood what Drucker really was. Just to make sure of the nuances, I came home and looked the word up.

My dictionary said it meant “one who forms and expresses judgments of the merits, faults, value, or truth of a matter.”

Bingo.

At heart, Peter Drucker was a critic, one of the best the world of management may see for a long time.

Posted on November 14, 2005

Hark! Is It the Voices of Sinclair Lewis and H.L. Mencken We Are Beginning to Hear Again After Years of 1920s-Like Self-Delusion?

As I read The New York Times each morning, I sometimes feel like we have returned to a more (much more) complex version of the 1920s.

Wal-Mart is plotting to force older employees to quit because they’ll use more health care. Gillette is alleged to be allowing its packaging contractors to treat temporary workers like Nike and other have been alleged to treat workers in Southeast Asia. The earning power of the middle class and below is steadily eroding, and almost no one who might effectively intervene seems to be paying attention. From city hall to the highest halls of government, politicians seem never to have been more dissembling and inept, more self-serving and incompetent.

But why the 1920s? Probably because one of the streaks I shelter in my heart of hearts is a romantic streak.

I’m hungry for a 21st Century Sinclair Lewis or a Henry Louis Mencken to take today's stage. But if they did, what would they do, what would they say, where would they say it?

We may have clues in what they did do and what they did say, back then. Robert Morss Lovett offered this assessment in an essay in The Dial, in June, 1925:

“A leading trait of the American people is a youthful self-consciousness amounting to an inferiority complex, which makes us impatient of criticism. Everything which we have done is right because we did it. All our wars were just; all our statesmen are pure; all our business is honest. Ours is the land of liberty, of tolerance, of opportunity, of righteousness.

“Our favorite prophets are the sayers of smooth things in Zion, those who speak comfortably to Jerusalem of her ideals and performances—Wilson, Harding, Coolidge. And yet by some sort of saving grace, in the midst of this complacency appear Mr. Lewis and Mr. Mencken, to tear the hoods and sheets off our moral and civic Ku Klux Klan, to show the cringing forms and the false, cowardly, cruel faces beneath the mask—and Mr. Mencken and Mr. Lewis as critic and novelist are, in this day and generation, the most read and considered interpreters of American life.

“They are constantly telling truths about their country for which less fortunate devils are being hounded out of pulpits and college chairs, losing business and social standing, and occasionally suffering physical punishments at the hands of court or clan, and yet they flourish like two green bay trees.”*

It may be that we have our Lewises and Menckens at work even yet, but they come with different kinds of voices, to be heard in different kinds of mediums. Some of the truths are now beginning to be learned about how America went to war without thinking, how our hallowed ideals have been trampled in vacuums of moral authority, how vast is the waste of our health care system (and how unfair its rules and regulations of access are), how low our standing as a nation has fallen in the world community of nations and so forth.

Probably the narrative themes of Babbitt and Arrowsmith and of the newspaper articles, books reviews and political commentaries of the son of the owner of Baltimore's Mencken Cigar Company are even yet making their way semi-sub rosa through the utter glut of cable news reports and commentary, blogs (like this one), mass-copied e-mails and all the other contemporary channels over which and through which Lewis and Mencken were never conveyed.

The romantic in me was in both of these gents, too—especially Mencken. He once summed up America this way:

“We live in a land of abounding quackeries, and if we do not learn how to laugh we succumb to the melancholy disease which afflicts the race of viewers-with-alarm... In no other country known to me is life as safe and agreeable, taking one day with another, as it is in These States. Even in a great Depression few if any starve, and even in a great war the number who suffer by it is vastly surpassed by the number who fatten on it and enjoy it. Thus my view of my country is predominantly tolerant and amiable. I do not believe in democracy, but I am perfectly willing to admit that it provides the only really amusing form of government ever endured by mankind.”*

My own amusement at the oh-so-public-events-of-the-day these days has its limits, and probably they are closer in than HLM’s. But I still believe that this country harbors an amazing self-correcting resiliency in his political systems and collective self-will. I think some of Tuesday’s election results indicated that this always-caught-slumbering force is stirring again, about to awaken from its hibernation, like green bay trees.

___

The Lovett quote comes from Twentieth Century Interpretations of Arrowsmith (Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 103. The Mencken quote is found here: Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

Posted on November 09, 2005

Turn With Me Now to the Mind of a Great Philosopher as He Muses on the Issue of the Political Religion

What follows is a very long quote by the standards of length I intend for quotes in this space. My rules are violated in this instance because of my intense interest in the troubling issues produced by the increased commingling of church and state in America today.

The speaker is the philosopher George Santayana. The passage is from his essay, “The Ultimate Aim of Politics,” and appears in Physical Order and Moral Liberty: Previously Unpublished Essays (1969, Vanderbilt University Press):

“Religion, in a stable and harmonious civilization, must either cease to be political at all or else must catch the political inspiration of the house and drape it in some half traditional poetic vesture.

“I am afraid that the images in which nations traditionally Christian can clothe their inspiration will not soon be fresh or poetical.

“A deadly positivism and a gross vaniety possesses them; and people who have any taste or any spiritual sensitiveness will simply sit silent and shudder. This may help traditional Christianity to survive or even to revive as a private or mystical solace: the believer, when he enters a church or turns his thoughts to religion, will simply feel that he passes into another world, leads a separate parallel life, as if he were already half dead, and half risen again. Yet this would itself be an unstable and local state of things.

“Politics, like physics, is a compulsory pursuit. You cannot live or act without virtually making assumptions and taking sides in those matters. But spiritual religion is not compulsory. It visits a few souls in the beginning. It suggests hidden harmonies or invisible powers; and reverence for these imagined presences gradually establishes certain pauses and certain causes or ceremonies in performing daily actions.

“These habits, without the original visitations of the spirit, are imitated by the vulgar. They seem to presuppose complexities in nature and in morals which remain mysterious; and a vast net of superstitious practices and mythical notions may come to entangle the practice of life. When the incubus becomes unbearable, or too obviously absurd, scoffers will ridicule the whole thing, and bold men will defy pious opinion in their actions. Such rebellion is restringent; it tightens and dries up the soul that is compelled to reject and criticize and condemn everything beautiful. A long winter may intervene before the mind can awake again in its vernal innocence, exercise its originality without fear, and fashion its poetic world while keeping its foothold sure and free upon terra firma.

“Perhaps political religion has been a mistake biologically. Like an amphibious animal, it is reptilian, ugly, misbegotten. It had better divide into its two potentialities, and limit itself in each to a special function; then both halves of its soul may create perfect bodies and live happy lives. If politics and morals and hygiene understood their natural principle, they might take classical naked forms, humble in their perfection. And if religion understood its poetic and passionate essence, it might expand through the heavens and in the heart, without deceiving the natural man about his natural status or his political good.”

There endeth the reading this day.

Posted on November 06, 2005

In My Next Life, I Want to Be Able to Watch Newshounds Interview CEOs and Then Write Things Like, "What By Being Not Is—Is Not By Being."*

In my next life, I want to return as the poet Robert Creeley. (Of course, it would be more convenient if he first departs this life. He’s now 86.) Blinded in one eye (left) at age 5, he seems to have compensated for a lack of complete eyesight with an amazingly sharp verbal acuity. One critic has described him as having a “unique brand of vigilant minimalism.”

And how!

Here’s part of his poem, “The Friends”:

I want to help you
by understanding what
you want me to
understand by saying so.

I listen. I had
an ego once upon
a time—I do still
for you listen to me.

Let’s be very still.
Do you hear? Hear
what, I will say when-
ever you ask me to listen.

I thought of Creeley, and that poem, which appears in Pieces (Scribner’s, 1969, pp. 44-41), not long ago while listening to Wolf Blitzer, the CNN anchorman on his show, “The Situation Room.” He was interviewing the CEO of the New Orleans hospital where the nearly four dozen bodies of patients were found after Hurricane Katrina.

Blitzer, veteran big-league TV newshound that he is, immediately sought to bore into his interviewee with a pointed opening question about what news reports were saying went on at that hospital in the aftermath of the hurricane.

And for more than a minute, the CEO ignored the question while he delivered a paean to his hospital staff and company and the hospital chain’s post-hurricane performance and so on. Not until his closing words did he return to Blitzer’s question by noting that all he knew was what he was also hearing from news reports.

It was a skilled performance. Had I been grading him as I have others in years past as I joined my own CEO clients in Edwin Newman’s New York mock TV studio to teach them how to handle media interviews, I would have given him an “A.” It was a boffo performance. When it was over, he did not have to say, as John Spencer’s Leo McGarry had to admit on The West Wing the other night, “I accepted his premise, didn’t I?”

But when I finished watching it, I felt used. By the CEO. By Blitzer who, after all, let the executive equivocate long past the point when he should have interrupted. By today’s Orewellian doublespeak world of professional non-communication.

Back when I was training executives to perform well in such a world, I justified—rationalized?—my involvement by arguing that there’s nothing amiss in helping people who must swim with the sharks avoid taking the bait.

But that’s hindsight, And poet Creeley has something to say about hindsight, too, as he closes “The Friends”:

The “breathtaking banalities”
one only accomplishes in
retrospect. Hindsight—

they call it—like the
backend of a horse. Horse’s
ass, would be the way.

So don’t apply to be Robert Creeley in the next life. I’ve already signed up.

(For more about Creeley, go here: Robert Creeley (1926- )

*From Creeley’s “Zero,” Pieces, p. 33-34.

Posted on November 05, 2005

I Have Been to the Mountaintop (Actually It's a Small Rise in the Texas Prairie Just Down the Street), and Seen the Future of Education: a Medievalist Who Wants All Our Kids to Be Translators

Not long ago, I spent a couple of hours chewing the fat with the bouncy, bubbly dean of the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas, located about a mile from my home and offices.

Dean Dennis Kratz is trained (Darmouth, Harvard, Ph.D., Magna Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa) as a medievalist, but he’s anything but.

Well, he’s that, too, for sure. Translates books from medieval Latin, is co-editor of Translation Review. Passionately believes that, as he put it, “I can’t think of a better training for what’s going on in the 21st Century than to be a medievalist because I learned that you don’t understand anything in isolation. You can't understand the literature without the theology. You can't understand the theology without the cathedrals—to me everything links together.”

So the brainy Dr. Kratz is, at heart, a “linkist.” He connects things. And what interested me was the way he has linked digital technology, the creative arts and the humanities.

The day of my visit he had a stack of six or seven newly published books sitting on his desk, waiting to be read. In one way or another, they all had to do with the impact of computer games on how children’s brains develop. Never far from Dean Kratz's eclectic mind is the world of iPods and iTunes, video games and all the other electronic stuff that has quickly come to dominate the toy stores, music stores, electronic stores and the other places where today’s youths go in their ceaseless quest for access to the electron’s latest accomplishments.

“I think deans of education need to be developing modes of creating learning environments that will take advantage of it [the new electronic playworld of the young] instead of decrying it,” he told me. "There is growing evidence that the interaction of young people with creative electronic media is changing the synapses."

So working with UTD’s Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science, he’s organized the Institute for Interactive Arts and Engineering. Officially, IIAR’s goal is to expose its students to “interactive advancements in the fields of communication, entertainment, digital arts, education and training, as well as in scientific and medical applications.” Unofficially, in the view of the dean, the world is its oyster.

Kratz recalls the circa 1970’s book, The Game of the Impossible, in which William Robert Irwin talked about things that are not going to follow the rules of this world—things like fantasy literature and jazz and, today, our children.

The dean isn’t an anarchist, far from it. Once and for all, he’s a translator at heart. But not just the middle age’s Waltharius and Ruodlieb. He notes that companies that do high tech things are now calling themselves translators. And why not? “Translation equals innovation within rules, within a context,” he argues. “UTD is really a center of translator creativity.” His goal is to teach his students a form—almost any form, traditional or digital, yesterday’s or tomorrow’s—and then teach them how to turn it into something, new, cutting-edge, unprecedented.

It’s the dean’s goal to surpass MIT’s famed Media Lab in influence and audacity (he says he taught the associate director of MIT’s famous technological think tank in the ninth grade; Kratz was only 23). Speaking of his school’s arts and technology research lab, he says, “It’s like the Media Lab, only we’re the future.”

I thought of Dean Kratz and his ambitions this morning as I read a Dallas Morning News story about how teens are using new technologies. Nearly one-fifth of the online teenager population now blogs, using sites like Xanga, MySpace and Facebook—and another one-fifth reads blogs. They are sharing content of their own creation: photos, poems and drawings. And, of course, copyright laws or not, they share their music preferences over the Internet with a vengeance.

The article quotes Gigi Sohn, founder of Public Knowledge, a consumer advocacy group, as saying that teens are in the vanguard of a “significant segment of the population that doesn’t like the precooked and precanned products that come out of the big companies.” And so, to use Dean Kratz's favorite concept, they've become translators. She adds, “I can’t wait till they grow up and become members of Congress.”

I’d predict that some of them are going to grow up to be a lot like the dean. A guy who sees boundaries as merely places where somebody decided to stop.

Posted on November 03, 2005

Like the Story of the Headless Horseman, the Story of the Man With a Hole in His Skull Never Ceases to Intrigue Us. And It Illuminates a Lot about How We Think.

If you need a crash course in how the brain functions, if you need it to take no more than 30 to 45 minutes and if you want it to be entertaining, even captivating, I have the answer.

It’s a book written for children, ages 9 to 12. It’s called Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science. For 75 riveting pages, it uses a tale that continues to fascinated brain researchers as a narrative skeleton on which to hang the story of 150 years of inquiry into how the brain works. Or doesn’t work.

Phineas Gage’s brain seemed to work just fine up until the moment that forever changed the 26-year-old railroad track construction gang foreman’s life—and perhaps the course of brain research itself. A powder charge planted in granite detonated prematurely. The blast drove a 13-1/2-pound, three-foot-seven-inch tamping rod up through the left side of his mouth, under his left cheekbone, behind his left eye, through the front of his brain and out the middle of his forehead just above the hairline.

If you haven’t heard the story, you probably assume that Gage died on the spot. But he didn’t. He lived for another eleven years, six months and nineteen days. Kept walking around, kept working, kept talking. In other words, continued as a half-way passable human being in many ways until his brain finally succumbed to seizures probably brought on by his injury.

What happened in between, and afterwards, gets very able telling by science writer Fleischman, even if he is writing with adolescents in mind. As you read about what happens to Phineas Gage, and then to Phineas Gage’s skull and then to Phineas Gage’s probable injury patterns when placed in the electrons of a contemporary computer program called Brainvox at the University of Iowa Hospitals & Clincs in Iowa City, you suddenly realize you’ve been exposed almost effortlessly to a seminar on how our knowledge of brain functioning developed in the past century and a half.

Gage’s skull now resides (unless it’s been moved again recently) in the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. That lethal tamping iron is there, too.

The Brainvox program used by renowed brain researchers Antonio and Hanna Damasio at the University of Iowa suggests that the tamping iron missed Broca’s area in Gage’s left temple and two key sections of the cortex responsible for helping a person keep his balance, focus his attention and remember old and new events. In that respect, he was very fortunate.

But as the iron passed through the middle of his frontal lobes where the two hemispheres meet, it devastated the area—more on the left side that the right, more on the top of the frontal cortex than the back, more on the underside than the top—that enables us to be sociable. That was why, says Fleischman, his closest companion thereafter was that iron rod, which he carried with him to his dying day.

As of this writing, Amazon.com has several dozen previously owned copies of Phineas Gage for sale beginning at $3.24 plus shipping. Go here: Phineas Gage: A Gruesome but True Story About Brain Science

I think it’s a book you’ll not want the 9-to-12-year-old in you to miss.

Posted on November 01, 2005