Rational Philosophy

In the wake of the departure of E. Stanley O’Neal from Merrill Lynch and the possible departure of Richard D. Parsons (of Time Warner), the NY Times has compiled a piece about the opportunities for black executives at the heads of large corporations.  Interviewed for the piece, the chief executive of StarCom, Renatta McCann, said “we have yet to reach a tipping point where the pipeline organically regenerates. We have to achieve momentum and velocity, and it has to achieve scale to make it sustainable.”

Another Times story presents a collection of new data about sexual stereotypes in the workplace. One of the researchers, Professor Glick, found that a female job applicant in a revealing blouse and tight skirt is less likely to be considered appropriate for an executive job than a woman who is conservatively dressed. The story quotes Professor Glick as commenting: “Sexy men don’t have that disconnect. While they might lose respect for wearing tight pants and unbuttoned shirts to the office, the attributes considered most sexy in men — power, status, salary — are in keeping with an executive image at work.”

And in a speech to the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think tank) today, George W. Bush declared: “We are at war. And we cannot win this war by wishing it away or pretending it does not exist.”

As I chomped down these three stories, I found something sticking in my gullet. In each one, what people have to say and the way that they say it seems to create a mask, or to continue to hold up a mask, that obscures the real questions at hand, or, perhaps, obscures whether there are really questions at hand.

Renatta McCann managed to string together an impressive array of buzzcepts in making her point about the relative dearth of black executives in corporate America. If we try to read through her words to find the meaning behind the ideas of “tipping point,” “organic regeneration,” “achieving momentum and velocity,” and “sustainable scale,” I think she’s saying that only by having more up and coming black executives will we end up with more black executives in the boardroom. This seems logical, but hardly profound. Surely the issue is much broader and much more complex than the actions or inactions of corporations. Corporations comprise people and exist within and in service of society. And executives come and go all the time. It’s the nature of the beast. That we’re talking about the race of the two departing executives seems to be a problem in itself.

The article about sexual stereotypes left me with a nagging feeling that all of this research was kind of screwy. If you ask people about stereotypes with stereotypes in mind, and devise a study to present those stereotypes, doesn’t that to some extent throw doubt on the results of the study? Glick’s presumption that a woman revealing cleavage is sexier than a woman conservatively dressed introduces bias into his analysis. He then compounds this bias with his assertion that the attributes considered most sexy in men are power, status and salary. But surely sexual stereotypes vary according to the context and according to the details? Inappropriateness, for instance, can be for some a very unsexy characteristic. What’s to say that the people in the study weren’t reacting to the inappropriateness of the sexy attire rather than the sexy attire itself?

The words of the piece express a logic and a rational set of conclusions that draws me in and I feel that I have to agree with them, but stepping back I reflect on my personal experience in the workforce and find that the logic weakens and begins to disintegrate. I’m left only with suspicion about the arguments presented rather than a newfound insight into the particular problems faced by women in the workforce.

And our old favorite George W. Bush, who uses words with such audacious disregard for their meaning that one almost feels awed by it, accomplishes several feats of extreme sophistry today for no other reason, one feels, than that he’s begun to have some fun now that he’s a lame duck. He scorns the democrats for not taking seriously a war that he once declared we’d won; he further lambasts them for holding up the nomination of Mukasey at a time when the country needs such high profile positions filled, when, as was reported recently, he himself has left unfilled many such top positions for weeks and months; and he criticizes them for attaching “wasteful Washington spending” to another multibillion dollar war spending bill. Hmmm.

Bush uses an athletic analogy as he closes his speech his most dazzling verbal salvo of all; “I’m looking forward to working with you for the next 14 months,” he says, “but you better put on your running shoes, because my spirits are high and my energy level is good and I’m sprinting to the finish line.” I’m sure he didn’t mean it this way, or at least not consciously, but I’m relieved that he’s in such a hurry to get out of office.

President Bush warned yesterday of the dangers of a nuclear-armed Iran. He spoke of his pressure tactics, including economic sanctions, by which he intends to encourage the people of Iran to find new leadership. I’m not the only one to experience deja vue and to read into this that if the sanctions and pressure fail, Bush would consider that we should do with Iran what we have done with Iraq, use force.

In a different story, but with a similar underlying theme, the head of the Federal Communications Commission has a plan to relax decades-old restrictions and again allow media companies to own a newspaper as well as a radio or television company in the same city.

Whether it’s apochryphal or not seems unlcear (although likely,) that the determination of a web-spinning spider inspired Robert I of Scotland to come out of hiding and return North to inflict a series of defeats on the English, thus originating the sentiment that if at first one doesn’t succeed, one should try, try again. (Perhaps Bush has heard of that legend.)

My connecting thought today has landed vaguely on the principle of determination, of trying again. Why do we try again? What conceptual basis causes us to respond to failure with another attempt at the same thing?

It occurs to me that there may be several reasons why one would try again: Because one believes that the circumstances have changed in one’s favor. Because one feels that one can try harder. Because one feels that the only choice one has is to keep trying, that it is the right thing to do. Or because one lacks the imagination or insight to do anything else.

In the legend of the spider, Robert I of Scotland took from the spider’s efforts a sense that defeat should not be accepted. That the right thing to do was to go back and try again. The current head of the FCC seems to feel that circumstances have changed that the communcations landscape no longer calls for the same restrictions on media ownership.

But what of Bush and Iran?

Of course, I realize now that I am following a completely erroneous path of reasoning. Bush believes that he has not failed in Iraq. He acknowledges that there have been problems. But he believes still that the approach he took was not just right, but also effective. With Iran, in his mind, he is not reapplying a failed strategy, but a winning strategy.

At which point the question becomes one of why the president doesn’t perceive his Iraq policy and his foreign policy generally as a failed policy. Why, in the face of contrary evidence, does Bush cling to the idea that he is right, that he has made good choices not poor ones?

Self-insight requires courage. We all make mistakes. We all fail. Every day I do things I shouldn’t do, say things I regret, avoid doing things that I know I should be doing. Occasionally I manage to overcome my failures, to make good on something, to follow through when I’ve procrastinated, to apologize when I’ve insulted. It’s in those moments that I feel a glimmer of courage. That I realize how much I lack by way of courage. That glimmer however slight permits me some self insight.

Bush then must lack courage. Thinking back over this administration’s failures, Bush’s lack of courage has perhaps been the single biggest impediment to his success as a leader. His lack of sharpness hasn’t helped. One wants a leader who can understand the complexities of the challenges at hand. His laziness has been a problem from time to time. But without courage he has been doomed to fail and to continue to fail, to never be able to recognize his failure for what it is, and to address his mistakes.

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‘They just shoot at anything and everybody,’ says one of the interviewees in a CNN story today on chronic youth violence in parts of Philadelphia.

Responding to Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize, Rob Edwards of Woodbridge, Connecticut is reported as saying: “It is a sad world in which we live when bad science (and even a lack of any data at all on many points) leads to so much hype or accolades, especially the award of the Nobel Peace Prize. The IPCC is a farce. View the CBC documentary from 2005, which is backed up by clear and reproducible science, to understand how wrong the IPCC and Al Gore actually are.” (Which prompted me to go look up the CBC documentary.)

And on logic matters today (a philosophy blog,) a post questioning whether there “isn’t something inelegant about stocking up on assignments of objects to variables only not to use infinitely many of them?” I couldn’t understand a word of it. I don’t mean to pick on this post; I wouldn’t understand most of them, I’m sure.

Which brings me to the question of what is reality, and whether philosophy can help us answer it. If we live in a world where kids shoot each other mindlessly, what use is the study of model theory? And if Al Gore’s receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize raises a scornful response from many quarters, some of them apparently well meant and well informed, are we to trust our understanding of the world around us, or the understanding of others?

Our perception of reality itself of course is somewhat of an illusion. We see and feel and hear things because we have evolved to see and hear and feel them in that way. Our eyes respond to a thin slice of the electromagnetic spectrum, our ears to a narrow portion of the frequency spectrum. Things are solid for us because we perceive them at as solid, but at the smallest perspective, subatomic particles are smears of energy spread out relatively huge distances. Smaller particles can just go whizzing through us.

Reality is perception. Consistency in that perception can reassure us of consistency in the world around us. Logic can help us build models that may or may not prove reliable. And progress can only be measured with hindsight.

Where does that leave us?

President Bush today in referring to his desire to meet with the Dalai Lama says that he hopes that China will one day see the Dalai Lama as a spiritual leader and someone who wants peace.

I guess that could just about sum up the mind-boggling futility in seeking out logical consistency in the world around us… But then I think about Plato. Plato said: “It is only the dead who have seen the end of war.” And this kind of philosophy seems to give us courage and a reason to continue to think.

Lou Dobbs’ strongly worded commentary on CNN.com today begins with the words “lunacy among our public figures.” He’s referring to the likes of Katie Couric, Barak Obama, and Bill Moyers who have all expressed discomfort with the prevailing symbolism of the American flag.

Barack Obama has stopped wearing his American flag lapel pin, for instance.

Lou’s thoughts on the subject (if you can call them that) are so coarsely grained that I would have been inclined to shake my head and move on, but his knee jerk patriotism must be widely felt, and that makes it worthy of some analysis. After all, which of us hasn’t felt the tug of a strong, arbitrary allegiance at some point in our lives?

Patriotism reflects an identification with the nation of one’s birth or adoption. The idea of patriotism expresses the impulse or feeling that our nation should prevail over or is better than others. By saying: “I am American” or “I am Iranian” or “I am [fill in the blank]” we are also saying: “I am not anything else.” It seems simple enough, but the feeling of patriotism emerges from a complex and overlapping set of responses:

Fear of other people and other cultures, fear of the unknown, fear of threats to the nation real or imagined. Pride in one’s nation, its culture, habits, principles, laws, history. Familiarity with one’s surroundings — the weather, the habitat, the geography.

If we parse out these various complexities we start to see a pattern. Some of the impulses for our sense of patriotism are completely arbitrary and subjective such that arguing about it becomes a ridiculous matter (weather or geography or success at a particular kind of sport, for instance). And some we may logically defend — the extent to which a country upholds basic human freedoms, for instance, is not a subjective matter, and has led more than one person to change his or her nationality.

So, patriotism can be divided into two distinct concepts — an identification with the idea of one’s nation, or an identification with the ideals of one’s nation.

Dobbs clearly argues for the idea of America, regardless of its record on matters of such grave importance as human rights, war-waging, and international diplomacy. Couric, Obama, and Moyers on the other hand clearly want to make a point about the ideals of the nation, and the degree to which they support the way that those ideals are being upheld by the current administration, or not.

Two New York Times stories today got me thinking again about the immaturity of nations.Monks March in Protest in Myanmar - “On Tuesday, when 1,000 monks demonstrated in several cities, security officials reportedly used tear gas and fired warning shots to disperse monks in Sittwe, west of Yangon. According to reports received by exile groups in Thailand, some monks were beaten and arrested.”

Calls for Belgium Break-up - “We are two different nations, an artificial state created as a buffer between big powers, and we have nothing in common except a king, chocolate and beer.” - FILIP DEWINTER, the leader of a right-wing Flemish party, on Belgium’s ethnic tensions.

My son just started pre-school. He’s in the threes program but his classroom also has four and five year olds. As the classroom teacher explained it, this helps the children learn to care about and take care of the younger children in the class. By the time the threes become fours and fives they’ve learned how to care for their classmates.

By contrast then the government of nations must be in its infancy. Governments act so frequently liked petulant, misbehaving children. To what end do the misdeeds of the military junta in Myanmar serve the people of Myanmar? When party leaders fuel ethnic divisiveneness in Belgium does it really serve the people of Belgium and the region? And, closer to home, the present administration’s habit of lying to and concealing from the American people its true objectives, motives and methods has surely set back faith in this country and the American democtratic system by many years.

I’m wondering why, philosophically, it would be that elected leaders collectively and regularly act with such immaturity. It would be good for us to figure this out and start moving toward a better place. If countries could learn to act more maturely how much suffering could be avoided?

It would be easy to say that things have improved over time, that there is more global leadership maturity now than there was a hundred or a thousand years ago, and this may be true, but it isn’t dramatically and emphatically true. Today’s governments and the countries they represent have it in their power (and do) inflict far greater harm on one another than was inflicted hundreds of years ago.

My theory is this: Nations, the people in them and those who lead them, don’t agree in themselves nor between themselves on their goals, their intentions and their perspective on global society. We have no conceptual grounding for good government and international relations.

Society is immature because the foundational principles of society aren’t understood and converted into best practices. As societies we act emotionally, irrationally, out of fear and pride and avarice. A sovereign nation is the three year old who holds onto a toy because letting another child play with it, even for a moment, even when it belongs to her, is inconceivable.

On a smaller more intimate scale societies can often function well. Codes of practice are well understood and can be easily reinforced, but more importantly the codes of practice can be clearly tied back to what is rationally in the best interests of the group. The same applies to the better organized, more rational governments of the world, where there has been a great effort to balance the good of all with the good of the individual.

A society that does not seek to balance the good of the individual with the good of the group, a society that permits discrimination, or that allows its government to pursue nationalistic or selfish ends, is illfounded and irrational. Human existence can only persist if we recognize that we all belong to human society, and that ultimately we must work to contribute positively to human society, putting aside our apparent differences.

Plato proposed “philosophers [must] become kings…or those now called kings [must]…genuinely and adequately philosophize” (The Republic, 473c). And when one looks at the numbskulls and charlatans running many of the world’s nations, it seems self-evident that a good dose of reflection and philosophy would serve society well. Or perhaps a few days in a threes program…

Postscript (September 23, 2007):

Since writing this post I’ve tried to imagine George W. Bush engaging in serious self-reflection and philosophical study. Not an easy picture to conjure up. For our leaders to be capable of the serious application of rational principles, we need to reflect upon, consider and apply the same rational principles when we elect them.

A “Teen Magazine” quote from Vanessa Hudgens before her nude photo scandal:

“I’m a good kid,” Hudgens said. “I’ve been brought up with very good morals, and I’m not going to go out and do something I don’t want other kids to do.”

“I love being a role model because, in Hollywood, there aren’t a lot of role models to look up to. The fact that there’s a whole bunch of good kids coming out who are now stepping into the limelight, I’m very proud of that.”

On the face of it, reading this, one could criticize Vanessa Hudgens for being deceitful. But one could also argue that her comments were intended “in character” that she was maintaining a public image as a projection of her clean cut character on a clean cut show. The point here is that her intent makes a difference, philosophically, because intent and perspective shape our moral perspective.

To take a more important example, the current administration, it seems clear, deceived the public about the imminent threat posed by Iraq. The aim of this deception was to follow through on a plan to attack Iraq and displace Saddam Hussein. Further discussion of motive becomes a little more murky. Did the administration believe that Saddam, WMD’s aside, posed the kind of threat that demanded invasion? Did the administration have a “gut” desire to invade Iraq and use various justifications to themselves or others in order to support this “gut” desire?

An accurate moral judgment of duplicity requires a sense of the intent. Does this mean that no act or action is inherently immoral?

If we were to accept this perspective we would throw the moral compass of most people into a frenzy of confusion. Most religions, for instance, identify prohibited or immoral acts or practices.

And if morality requires subtle assessment of intent or perspective, how are we to find a new compass? A rational compass?

But, if we are pragmatic and rational, we cannot hold onto the concept of “immoral acts.” Nothing is inherently immoral. Morality flexes and adapts, it bends to the tide.

We can find a pragmatic and rational basis for morality, a basis that adheres to Plato’s strict indictment:

“Unless someone can distinguish in an account the form of the good from everything else, can survive all refutation, as if in a battle, striving to judge all things not in accordance with opinion but in accordance with being, and can come through all this with his account still intact, you’ll say he doesn’t know the good itself or any other good.” – Plato’s Republic VII

And concurs with his incisive statement:

“The bad is what destroys and corrupts, and the good is what preserves and benefits.” – Republic X

(More on this to come in future postings and in my book…)