The Rise and Fall of Donald Trump

I was very shocked by the outcome of the most recent U.S. presidential election.  And clearly I was not the only one.  I happened to be attending a conference in downtown Washington, D.C. the morning after the election, and, when it ended in the early afternoon, decided to walk back from the site of the conference, near Farragut Square, to my own office, which is across the street from the National Archives building: a distance of just a little over a mile.  The walk allowed me to pass through the heart of downtown D.C., and as I did so, it was with the eerie sense that I was walking through some science fiction movie.  The faces of the people that I passed were dazed and expressionless, and they all seemed to be walking in an uncharacteristically unhurried pace, as if they had no actual place to be.  I suspect that many of them were in this state because, like me, they had not had much sleep the night before, as they followed the election returns with a growing sense of disbelief, and angst.  I overheard a few people talking on their cell phones, and the common topic of conversation was speculation over how things would change around here – and in the country overall – in the months and years ahead.

As I described in my last blog entry (“The Folly of the Crowd”), this most recent election was unlike any that I have experienced in my entire life, due to the extreme revulsion felt by much of the electorate toward at least one – and in some cases, both – of the presidential candidates.  Candidate Trump, in particular, was excoriated in the popular media: as a cheat, huckster, incompetent businessman, narcissist, pathological liar, bigot, boor, and sexual predator of women.  Anyone following the major newspapers and other media outlets (with the exception of the ones with markedly conservative slants) might have been led to believe that Donald Trump would have found himself in a penitentiary next January, instead of the Oval Office.  (And of course, Trump and his supporters would have been inclined to say the same thing about his opponent, Hillary Clinton.)  I was not a supporter of Donald Trump in this election, and, like so many others in this country, am dismayed by his victory.  But it was not always the case with me.  There was a time when I was actually one of his admirers, and so in the following paragraphs I would like to chronicle the rise and fall of Donald Trump – that is, his rise and fall in my own personal estimation.

I became a fan of Donald Trump when his television show, The Apprentice, first aired in 2004.  I of course had known of him before then – known that several large hotels and casinos bore his last name, and that he had written a book called The Art of the Deal.  I knew, as well, that he had his detractors even then, but in spite of these he seemed to be the epitome of the consummate successful business mogul.

And this was really the allure of the The Apprentice to me:  Here was a program in which contestants would have to compete by demonstrating their business acumen to someone who had reached the pinnacle of business success, and in the process, learn from the master some of the critical attributes and strategies that contribute to that success. 

I knew that it was a “reality show”, made by the same producer, Mark Burnett, who had introduced Survivor to American audiences four years earlier, and that it would follow the same format:  The season would begin with multiple contestants who would need to successfully collaborate with each other in teams, but the catch, of course, was that there was ultimately only one winner, so that any collaborations or partnerships would eventually have to come to an end.  As a consequence, the successful contestant had to exercise a delicate balance between collaboration and competition, between trust and betrayal.  This game show format was most starkly illustrated in another popular program at that time, The Weakest Link, in which a circle of contestants had to answer quiz questions sequentially, and a “bank” of cash money was accumulated in proportion to the consecutive questions that were answered correctly.  If the circle was “broken” by an incorrect answer before a contestant shouted “bank”, then the accumulated money in that round was lost.  After each round the contestants voted on which among them should be eliminated.  The general strategy of the game entailed eliminating genuinely weak players early in the game, so that larger “banks” could be accumulated, but since there was only one winner at the end of the game, the focus eventually shifted to eliminating powerful rivals.  The winning player, then, was the one who had most successfully maneuvered that transition from casting out inferior teammates to backstabbing potentially superior ones.

Nevertheless, I trusted that The Apprentice would succeed in spite of this format, and in the earliest seasons, it did.  Each season would begin with two teams being formed, and the members of the team were assigned a competitive project on each episode that tested their relative business acumen.  Each team voted on a leader to shepherd them through the particular project of the week, and if that team lost, the project leader would have to provide an explanation for the failure of his or her team, and would be called upon to identify a specific number of teammates (usually two) who, in that leader’s opinion, had been particularly responsible for their failure.  Sitting in judgment of the team leader and the designated scapegoats was Donald Trump himself, straddled on either side by two fellow executives.  In the earliest seasons this was Carolyn Kepcher, a former Chief Operating Officer and General Manager for the Trump National Golf Club, and George H. Ross, Executive Vice President and Senior Counsel: both seasoned and talented executives.  After consulting with his fellow judges, Trump would make the final determination of who was most to blame for the team’s failure, say that person’s name, and follow it with his trademark phrase, “You’re fired.”

The Apprentice succeeded, at first, because it seemed to genuinely extol the virtues of business acumen, including creativity, boldness, teamwork, and careful planning followed by disciplined execution.  In every episode, Donald Trump (or “the Donald”, as promotional advertisements for the show referred to him) would share some pearl of wisdom about what it takes to excel in the business world.  And unlike many of the other reality television shows (such as The Weakest Link), the competition did not simply continue in the same manner until there was one man or woman left standing, but instead, when a final handful of contestants remained, their relative merits were assessed in a more conventional fashion – through interviews with executives – and the two finalists that were judged to be most qualified would each lead a team in a final competition.  I still remember the winner of the very first season – Bill Rancic, an internet entrepreneur – and exulting in what I felt was a hard fought and well-deserved victory on his part.

But after the first few seasons, the show – and Donald Trump himself – began to lose its luster for me.  The “pearls of wisdom” on how to succeed in business which Trump continued to share in each episode began to sound more and more clichéd: the kind of stuff that one would find in any of the myriad run-of-the-mill books on success that populate airport bookstores.  (And even the players themselves, when discussing their individual strategies, sounded more and more clichéd.  I grew very tired of hearing, for example, the oft-repeated phrases: “thinking outside of the box” and “stepping up to the plate”.)  I remember one of Trump’s platitudes in particular, on the value of loyalty, which went something like this: “One of the most important traits that you can exhibit to your employer is loyalty – if you’re not completely loyal, then you’re worthless.”  It is ironic, as will be seen, that this is the only “Trumpism” that I remembered, because it was loyalty that played a role in the critical event on the show that resulted in my eventual abandonment of it.

Other factors also contributed to the loss of luster of The Apprentice.  One of the regular judges, Carolyn, disappeared from the tribunal, and the other, George Ross, began to make only sporadic appearances.  But what was more disturbing is that they were replaced by Donald Trump’s children.  It seemed hardly fitting to have the work of aspiring young executives judged by persons who themselves had just recently gotten out of business school.  And worse, what once appeared to be a meritocracy now had all of the trappings of a blatant aristocracy, or at least a subtle endorsement of nepotism: it seemed that blood was thicker than talent and experience when it came to holding important positions in the Trump hierarchy.

But the final turning point came for me in an episode in which two teams were competing in the composition of an advertising “jingle” to promote a particular product.  The final musical commercials produced by each team were both quite good and, at least in my opinion, very comparable in quality.  It took a genuine judgment call to decide which was superior to the other.  (And, if I recall, I might have actually disagreed with the final choice of the better musical composition.)  The leader of the “losing” team had to face Trump and his two judges in the boardroom, and, as was customary, Trump demanded that he recommend two scapegoats to be considered for elimination. 

What played out next, however, was a boardroom scene unlike any I had witnessed before on the series.  Rather than cravenly engage in finger-pointing to save himself, the team leader refused to name any scapegoats.  But he did more than this.  He said that regardless of what the judges had determined to be the superior commercial, he was proud of what his team had produced, and stood by it.  He refused to assign blame to anyone, he said, because there was no blame to assign.  They had collectively performed in an exemplary manner.  Donald Trump seemed to be genuinely taken aback by this behavior – by a leader showing at least as much loyalty to his team as he had received from them – and was clearly not pleased by it.  He continued pressuring the team leader to assign blame to somebody, and grew increasingly irritated as the team leader refused to acquiesce to his demands.  Finally, in exasperation, he said to the young man, “You’re fired.”  As I sat there, watching this play out on my television screen, I had the sickening sense that this was no demonstration of how business was supposed to work.  The superior leader, in my opinion, was not the one who was sitting in judgment, but the one who had stood up to him, and stood by his own teammates.  Were I looking to hire someone who would inspire my confidence in him and his work, it would have been that team leader, not Trump.

Here ended my interest in and loyalty to The Apprentice.  I would occasionally tune in afterwards, particularly when a new variant of the program called The Celebrity Apprentice aired, but only to take in the spectacle of it all.  I never really took it seriously after witnessing that team leader getting fired, and certainly never again regarded the program as providing illustrative examples of successful business practices.

 My disillusion with Donald Trump took another pronounced downward turn in late 2006 when he entered into a very public feud with comedian Rosie O’Donnell.  It began when Rosie O’Donnell publicly criticized him on a television talk show, The View (where she was currently one of the regular panelists), because he did not fire the winner of the Miss USA pageant (a franchise which he owned) after it was revealed that the winner had a checkered past, involving underage drinking, drug use, and illicit sexual activities.  Trump responded by saying that he believed “in second chances”, which was fair enough, but O’Donnell would not let the matter rest there.  She then attacked him in a very unprofessional manner on her program, calling him a “snake-oil salesman”, alluding to his multiple marriages, and adding, for good measure, that he had committed marital infidelity.  None of this had anything to do with the issue at hand, of course, and if anything, it only served to reveal an ugly side to O’Donnell’s own character.  Here is where Donald Trump could have taken the high road: calling her out on her own bad behavior, while refusing to dignify it with a reply, and in so doing demonstrating that he was the more mature and honorable of the disputants.  It would have certainly been a more fitting response for somebody who is now our President.  But instead he resorted to a behavior that later became all too common in the presidential primary debates: he demonstrated that he could be even more crass and undignified than she had been – calling her “a real loser”, “a woman out of control”, and “my nice fat little Rosie”.  When he went on to claim that her fellow panelist, and his friend, Barbara Walters, had confided to him that he “should never get in the mud with pigs”, Walters was finally compelled to show her solidarity with O’Donnell on the air, calling Trump “that poor, pathetic man.”  The feud didn’t end there, as more public skirmishes between Trump and O’Donnell occurred, for example when he called her a “true loser” in December 2011 (she immediately responded by calling him “an ass”), and “an average talent who is out of touch with reality” in May 2012.  The net result of this whole ugly affair, of course, is that both Trump and O’Donnell looked foolish and immature.

And as if this was not enough to tarnish his public image, Trump took another plunge into absurdity when he joined the gaggle of kooks who insisted that Barack Obama was not born in the U.S.  The controversy had begun in 2008, when Obama was still just a candidate, and was seemingly put to rest that same year when he produced a birth certificate, but Trump entered the fray three years later, claiming that investigators he had hired were finding things that supported doubts about Obama’s birth in the U.S., and he even went so far as to suggest that Obama was hiding the fact that he was a Muslim.  President Obama now produced a long-form birth certificate which established beyond all doubt that he was born in the U.S.   And while Trump tried to tout this as a personal victory, President Obama held him up to well-deserved ridicule, when he said of Trump, at the White House Correspondents’ dinner that they both attended later that year, “Now he can get back to focusing on the things that matter.  Like, did we fake the moon landing?  What really happened at Roswell?  And where are Biggie and Tupac?”  Trump still would not let the controversy rest, however, resurrecting it during President Obama’s reelection campaign, when he declared that the birth certificate which had been produced by President Obama was a fraud.  Only during his own campaign, earlier this year, did Trump finally concede – and without apology – that Barack Obama had been born in the United States.

I will not even bother to recount the train of bad behaviors engaged in by Donald Trump during the Republican primaries, or the string of revelations that came to light during that time about his past unsavory business practices and behaviors with women.  I had lost all respect for him long before he ever declared himself a candidate.  I only took some consolation in believing that the rest of the country – if not the world – would arrive at the same judgment I had, if they had not done so already, perhaps even long before I had.

And so we come back to the shocking election result.  Clearly the Democrats have to shoulder much of the blame for this – because if nothing else, Hillary Clinton’s defeat illustrated that the Democratic Party has developed an incredible tin ear when it comes to hearing and respecting the cares and concerns of much of working and middle class America.  To label many of these – which Hillary did during the campaign – as “deplorables” only highlights her fundamental lack of understanding of what is behind much of the anger and frustration of mainstream America.  In spite of the repeated promises of the Democrats – including Hillary – to focus on programs that will benefit the middle class at the expense of the upper class, there was always an air of cronyism and elitism that seemed to hover about them, like a sickening aura.  Their liberalism was the sort of vapid, arm’s length variety that smacked of somebody who loves the human race but can’t stand people – especially the very sort of people for whom they professed their greatest concern and empathy: the type of people that they generally avoid socializing with in their personal lives and in their workplaces, if they can manage it.

Consequently, we have Trump as our next President, though all of his shortcomings and past improprieties have been brought into sharp and universal focus.  If this were a Hollywood mystery or action movie, we would be at that part in the film where the bad guy is exposed and his complicity in all of the film’s earlier crimes is fully explained: the “Big Reveal”.  But as anyone who has seen more than one or two of these movies knows, this is never the actual ending.  At this point, the bad guy produces a gun, or a bomb, or a secret weapon, and declares, “If I’m going down, then I’m taking him (or her, or them, or us) with me”.  What follows is at least another half an hour of drama as the heroes in the film engage in a desperate chase and/or struggle to finally bring the bad guy to justice.  And, in most of these films, this final denouement does not occur without sacrifice: there are a lot of car crashes, explosions, and mass destruction of property.  Generally, too, one or more beloved characters lose their lives – often in order to make the final capture of the bad guy possible.

Trump has been fully exposed, but his secret weapon was that mass of the American populace disenchanted with the hollow, recurring promises made by the liberal establishment which seemed unwilling or incapable of connecting with them at a meaningful and fundamental level.  That they actually voted for Donald Trump, in spite of all of his blatant shortcomings, merely shows how extreme their level of disenchantment was.  But now we move into the final act of the drama – the one involving destruction and sacrifice – which must play itself out before things are finally set aright.  Let us hope and pray that this final act is not too long, and not too catastrophic.  And – Heaven forbid! – let us hope that there will not be a sequel.  

The Folly of the Crowd

On the eve of America’s next Presidential election, it is astonishing to witness the general mood of the voters.  Never, in my entire life, have I experienced such a sense of revulsion among my friends, coworkers, and relatives towards at least one – and in some cases, both – of the major candidates.  While it seems to be a perennial feature of Presidential elections for many citizens to ask, in amazement, “Is this the best that we could come up with?” the reaction to our choices this time goes far, far beyond that.  Many Americans – and many in the rest of the world, as well – are questioning the general intelligence of the voters in this country.  And, on a deeper level, many are probably questioning whether the present debacle is a damning indictment against the system of democracy itself.

I am often tempted to condemn the competency of the average voter, but when I do, I catch myself, for two reasons.  First, when I base my condemnation on lack of intelligence, I have to face the simple fact that we are not a country of stupid people.  I can attest to this personally, in my daily encounters with individuals from all walks of life.  But demographic statistics support this as well.  While the U.S. no longer ranks near the top of educational attainment in comparison with the other developed nations of the world, it is still comfortably in the middle.  And according to a recent study of 60 countries, the U.S. ranks 7^th in literacy: ahead of other countries such as Germany, France, and the United Kingdom.  Accepting this fact, my second recourse is to condemn the American voter as simply lazy: unwilling to fulfill the basic civic responsibility of investigating candidates – doing the necessary homework to make informed voting choices.  There is much more substance to this charge, but whenever I begin to slip into a fit of self-righteous anger, I am forced to acknowledge that I am as great an offender as my average fellow citizen.  I am embarrassed when I think of the many, many times that I have been in a polling booth, choosing among a slate of candidates for many different offices – judges, school board members, local representatives – and realizing that I haven’t got a clue what distinguishes one candidate from another.  I am particularly ashamed to remember the methods I sometimes used to make these choices.  And it is no consolation to know that many if not most of my fellow voters were resorting to similar methods.

I’ve gotten better over the years, perhaps due to more maturity, but also with help from the internet.  One type of internet service that I have come across in recent years offers a series of questions about where I stand on certain issues, such as the national debt, birth control, immigration, climate change, etc., and when I submit my answers to these, the various candidates are scored and ranked based upon how closely their own positions are correlated with my own.  And several years ago I learned that I could get help with one of my most difficult voting choices – choosing judges – from a performance rating that was offered online by the American Bar Association.  And, of course, when there is simply no basis available for making an informed choice, one option is not to vote at all.  This option does present a great risk, because if it is widely adopted, then it undermines the very basis of electoral democracy.  On the other hand, if those who know that they can’t make an informed choice do not vote, then it allows those who are making an informed choice to have more of a relative say in the election.  I belong to a number of professional associations, and rarely vote in the election of officers, both because I generally have no idea what the relative merits of the candidates are, but also because I doubt that there is much at stake in the outcome of the elections: the professional associations will continue to hold their conferences and publish their journals regardless of who is at the helm.  Interestingly, my reaction is apparently not an uncommon one among members of such organizations, because I get a sense, as I receive repeated appeals to vote – sometimes with an ill-disguised air of desperation – that the number of votes received is very, very low.

When it comes right down to it, this seems to be a very precarious way to live our lives: letting so many important decisions that affect our wellbeing be made by a group of people who are selected by ignorant and/or lazy voters.  And not just our political institutions, but our most powerful corporations are set up the same way, with its leaders selected by the votes of shareholders – many if not most of whom never actually vote.  But this is a feature of civilization itself.  Call it “proxyism”: the need to rely upon others to do certain things – including some of our thinking – for us.  It probably goes all the way back to the days when our ancestors were hunter-gatherers, foraging about as a group for food.  Such tribes probably realized that their livelihood could potentially be improved – significantly – if they allowed one or more of their members to refrain from the usual daily drudgery of cooking, making shelters, or picking fruits and vegetables and instead wander about far and wide in the forests and the plains, looking for herds of prey to hunt or new areas of vegetation to forage.  These wanderers or scouts were given a share of the foodstuffs collected by the rest of the tribe to sustain them while they went off on their daily searches.  When such a system worked, the gains from new discoveries outweighed the losses incurred by having one or more fewer bodies to do the regular daily chores.  But there were many risks inherent in the system, as well.  The scouts might prove to be incompetent at their task.  Or worse, they might not do the task at all, and simply remove themselves to some secluded spot where they did nothing, and returned each day to the tribe and pretended that an exhaustive search had come up with no rewards.  And, worst of all, if they did actually encounter new sources of food, they might be tempted to engorge themselves on it, and not even tell the rest of the tribe about it.  These, then, have always been the risks of “proxyism”, and to mitigate these risks, one has to try to choose the most competent – and ideally most honorable – proxies, and then have at least some rudimentary way to make sure that they are doing what one wants them to do.

And clearly, simply relying on a vote for choosing someone to take on important responsibilities does not guarantee that the most capable will be selected for those positions.  As Winston Churchill put it, “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.”  When voters make choices with little or no information, or out of complete ignorance, the results can be devastating.  Imagine an American voter, for example, choosing among a list of candidates of whom he or she has absolutely no knowledge, whatsoever.  Basing the choice only on the names, the voter might decide that candidates with more “mainstream” names like Smith or Jones are “safer” choices than candidates with names like Rodriguez or Alvarez.  They could convince themselves that this choice was not based on any bigotry whatsoever against persons of Hispanic ancestry, but rather on a simple, dispassionate, probabilistic calculation that in America persons with Hispanic-sounding names have a higher probability of being immigrants, and therefore are more likely to have a lower level of formal education than a Smith or a Jones.  Something like this apparently happened in the Democrat primary elections in Illinois in 1986, when Janice Hart and Mark Fairchild were chosen by popular vote as the candidates for that party of Secretary of State and Lieutenant Governor, respectively.  It was only after they had won the primary that it became widely known that they were followers of Lyndon LaRouche, a conservative political extremist.  The establishment Democrat party candidate for governor, Adlai Stevenson III, was then compelled to start a third party so that he would not have to run on the same ticket as Hart and Fairchild, and eventually lost the election.  Here, then, was a case where two people who didn’t even espouse the platforms of the party that they claimed to be affiliated with won that party’s primary election, because voters, failing to do even a cursory investigation of their political beliefs, were satisfied that the names of these two candidates were sufficiently “mainstream” to warrant supporting them.  This of course, is only a particularly egregious example of a voting behavior that is all too common in democracies.

And the popular vote seems to be at least as ineffective in rooting incompetent and/or unethical politicians out of office.  A notorious case of this occurred in the city of Bell, California, from 2005 to 2010, where city officials were being paid exorbitantly high salaries (some of the highest in the nation), in a small town where the average income per person in 2009 was less than $25,000 per year.  The most conspicuous offender was city administrator Robert Rizzo, who was making an annual salary of $1.5 million a year when the scandal was brought to light in 2010 by investigative journalists working for the Los Angeles Times.  It was not the actions of angry voters – at least not initially – but rather the criminal investigations and hearings prompted by the revelations in the Los Angeles Times articles that led to the conviction and ouster of Rizzo, along with the mayor, the assistant city administrator, and four city council members.  Had it not been for the diligence of the press and actions of law enforcement agencies, Rizzo and his cronies would have probably continued to bilk the poor citizens of Bell for years.  This is a pattern that is all too common in American politics, where it is the vigilance of state or federal enforcement agencies, rather than that of voters, which is the primary deterrent to blatantly self-aggrandizing and corrupt behavior on the part of elected officials. 

And if voters are ineffective in reigning in abuses involving political offices, they are much more so when it comes to keeping the behavior of big businesses in check.  In theory, large corporations are beholden to the owners of the common shares of their stock, and these shareholders have the power to exercise their votes (in proportion to the shares that they hold) to guide the policies of the corporations, including the selection of corporate officers and the determination of how much they will be compensated, and in what manner.  In practice, of course, shareholders rarely exercise this privilege, and even the large, institutional owners of shares, who have significant voting power, rarely exercise this power in order to rein in the behavior of those at the helm of the corporations ostensibly under their control.  As a consequence, it is all too common to read about corporations engaging in unethical behavior, including activities that endanger the lives of their employees and the communities where their factories are located.  The compensation of corporate CEOs and other top tier executives continues to spiral upwards, and again it is not uncommon to read about CEOs leaving corporations with hefty cash rewards after grossly mismanaging them.  Such was the case, for example, with Bob Gannon, who had been CEO of the Montana Power Company, a venerable electric utility that had served Montana customers for 90 years.  Gannon oversaw the sale of that company’s generating assets and used the money to invest in a high risk scheme to build a 26,000-mile fiber optic network.  The venture failed, electricity prices soared, utility employees were laid off, and the price of Montana Power Company (or rather, Touch America, which was the name of the restructured “telecommunications” company) stock plummeted to less than 30 cents a share by the time the company filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003, which in turn decimated the retirement savings of employees and others who had invested in what they thought would always be a stable and secure income-generating asset.  But Bob Gannon and three of his fellow executives left the company with a $5.4 million dollar payout, and Gannon retired into a $3 million dollar home.

The Great Recession was brought on in large part as the result of reckless lending practices engaged in by some of the largest financial institutions in the world.  None of the leaders of these institutions were ever held accountable for their actions, and even those who led institutions that were particularly culpable in contributing to the meltdown, such as AIG Financial Products (which sold credit default swaps, one of the risky investments that ultimately unraveled), did not suffer repercussions from their actions.  Joseph Cassano, one of the executives in charge of that organization, received a bonus of $34 million in 2008, the year that AIGFG incurred enormous losses from the credit default swaps – an event that played a pivotal role in the recession that ensued.

As voters, then, we often do an abysmal job both in selecting those who make important decisions that will affect our lives, and in retaining or ousting them.  We rely heavily on other third parties to monitor them for us, such as auditors and police organizations.  But in some of the most egregious cases of malfeasance, many of the agencies entrusted with guarding our interests have been compromised by the very organizations that they were supposed to be watching.  Enron succeeded in doing this with its auditors, as did the crooked politicians at the center of the Bell, California scandal.  And while the FBI has had a generally exemplary record in catching politicians and businesses who have betrayed the trust of their voters and shareholders, it has not always been above suspicion in falling sway to the special interests of politicians.  In the current Presidential campaign, both candidates have accused the FBI of doing exactly that.  In extreme cases, such as in Russia and China today, the machinery of government, including that of policing and oversight, has been totally compromised by an elite caste of politically connected plutocrats, and there is little if any recourse for the common citizen to seek out for protection and justice.

On a more optimistic note, there is a growing body of scientific literature that suggests that there really is a “wisdom of the crowd”, in that several people making a decision collectively often tend to make better judgments than any of the individuals that make up the group.  This is particularly true when diversity exists among the individuals who are involved in making the decision – in expertise, educational backgrounds, and outlooks.

I had a personal experience of this about a decade ago, when I was called upon to serve on a jury trial.  The case involved a Hispanic man in Chicago who had been accused of the attempted murder of several police officers with a handgun.  When the trial began, I was immediately impressed by the dedication of nearly all of the members of my jury in getting to the facts of the case.  (There was one exception: an elderly man who slept through most of the trial.)  But when the deliberations began, I noticed that there was a distinct difference in how the jurors had viewed the case.  We were evenly divided between white jurors and black jurors, and while the white jurors (including me) tended to believe the police officers’ account of what happened uncritically, the black jurors were deeply suspicious of their testimony.  And when it came time to make the first vote on the innocence or guilt of the suspect, the voting fell along racial lines, with the white jurors (again, myself included) voting the man guilty, and the black jurors voting him not guilty.  In the intense discussion that ensued, the black jurors pointed out some troubling facts about the evidence that had been presented to us which undermined the police officers’ version of the events.  In the end, we all became convinced that these discrepancies were sufficiently significant to provide a reasonable doubt against the defendant’s guilt, and we voted unanimously to acquit him.  I feel satisfied that we made the right decision on that day; and since then I continue to be a little less uncritical about the behavior and testimony of police officers.  The recent spate of high profile killings of unarmed black persons by police officers in the U.S. only highlights to me why the cynicism of my fellow black jurors toward the testimony of the police officers may have been warranted by their collective experience. 

Of course, for every example of a group making a wise collective decision, history provides plenty of counterexamples where voters, or committees, or mobs, made terrible choices.  It just seems that using the vote to choose others who will make very important decisions affecting one’s livelihood seems to be a very precarious and risky venture.  When making such a choice, I as a voter am actually hoping to accomplish two things.  First, I want to select someone who is capable – ideally most capable – of making the decisions that I am entrusting to them.  And second, I want that person to make those decisions in a manner that serves my interests, or, when this is not the case, serves the community (or the long-term interests of the company, in the case of shareholders) in a way that I consider to be just and fair to all stakeholders.  (While I would love to have said that I am solely looking for representatives who are capable and just, I would have been dishonest if I pretended that I did not also consider how well they would represent or serve my personal interests - at least with respect to certain matters.  I think that all voters would have to admit the same.  The American philosopher John Rawls famously argued, in A Theory of Justice, that the most just set of laws and regulations for a society would be those that were designed by its future occupants behind “a veil of ignorance”, i.e., in a condition where each of them had no idea of whether they were going to be rich or poor, male or female, white or black, etc.  Hence, each occupant would want to design a system in which nobody was unfairly advantaged or disadvantaged for arbitrary reasons.  It would be difficult if not impossible to design such an impartial system, Rawls contended, if each of the architects knew what their particular personal stake would be in the outcome.)  This is a tall set of expectations, and for that reason it seems that the popular vote is a very wobbly tent pole to prop up the canopy of civilization.

Churchill also famously said: “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise.  Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”  He is right, of course.  And I am confident that America will survive beyond this next electoral cycle.  But the abuses of large corporations, such as those which contributed to the massive economic downturn of the Great Recession, and the apparent growing inability of our national government to solve its most fundamental problems, tempts me to continue the search for something better than what we have.  Perhaps, in the end, we will discover, as people did in crises of comparable magnitude in earlier times, that it is not an overhaul of the institutions that will save us, but the arrival of one or more special individuals who truly are worthy of the offices they attain, who rise above the institutional infirmities that they are saddled with and help their constituents draw upon the latent greatness that always lies within all of us, waiting to be tapped by a leader with courage, character, and vision.

Postscript to Larger than Life

For the past sixteen months, I have been posting, sequentially, the transcripts to the episodes of a radio documentary that I prepared for airing back in 2004, which I had titled Larger than Life.  It was a series that attempted to show how our collective beliefs about ourselves and our places in the universe actually shape the evolution and major events of our society.

The precipitating cause of this project was actually my visit to an Irish Pub in Chesterton, Indiana called Wingfield’s on its weekly “all-you-can-eat ribs” night.  That was back in 1995.  A friend and coworker had invited me to join him there, and it just so happened that this was also “poetry slam” night at the same establishment, where patrons were invited to step up to a microphone and share their inspired verbal compositions with everyone else.  After a suitable indulgence in ribs and beer, I was sufficiently inspired (and inebriated) to go to the stage myself, and recite a poem that my friend and I had scrawled on the back of my menu.  To the surprise of my friend, and probably myself as well, the poem got a large round of applause from the audience.  The manager was also suitably impressed, and after the event ended, she stopped by our table and invited me to return on some future poetry slam night with more compositions.  I protested, however, that I wasn’t really a poet, and that I was actually more of a history buff, and offered instead to step up to the microphone some night and give a talk on some historical subject.  Surprisingly, she agreed to this, and offered to devote an entire evening to my presentation.

The talk that I gave was called “Homer’s Greece”, and I spent most of it retelling Homer’s tales of the Trojan War and Odysseus’s voyage back to Ithaca.  The presentation was well received by the patrons, and the manager invited me back for an “encore” on a future night.  I intended to continue along the same vein, by talking about the history of ancient Greece in its Classical era, covering its battle with the Persians, and the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta.  On the scheduled night of my return, I was overjoyed to find that the pub area was packed with hundreds of patrons.  Extra tables had even been brought in to accommodate them.  “I’m a hit!” I thought to myself, exuberantly, and couldn’t understand why the manager looked so nervous upon my arrival.  And then one of her associates explained to me that the large crowd was actually a retirement party for a steelworker at a local mill.  The manager offered to reschedule me to another night.

But I was undaunted.  I got onto the stage and started my presentation, confident that the audience would soon be enthralled by my recounting of ancient Greek history.  As I began, the patrons actually did fall silent, and I could see the manager and her associates looking at each other with hopeful smiles.  But as I continued, a din began to arise, as conversations resumed among the patrons, and it finally became so loud that I couldn’t even hear myself speak.  I left the stage, and as I walked away from it, I saw that one of the retiree’s companions had leapt onto it and taken the microphone.  I heard him make a joke about my failed presentation, and heard him say that now it was time for some genuine entertainment. 

Fortunately, the manager was able to salvage the evening for me by moving my presentation into a side room and, much to my relief, I discovered that some people – about two dozen – had actually come that evening to hear it.  I was of course a little shaken by the whole experience, but managed to get through my entire talk, and sensed once again that it was well-received.

Thus began what would turn out to be a recurring speaking engagement, and for all of my future presentations, the manager made sure that there were no competing parties or events that would put me at risk of enduring the same humiliating spectacle as on that second night.  Those first two talks comprised a good part of what would eventually become Episode 4 (“Troy”) of the Larger than Life series.  Over the course of the next two years or so, I gave “live” performances which included material that would also find its way into that series, including “Arthurian Legends” (Episode 7), “Mass Hysteria” (“The Secret Doctrine”, Episode 8), “Machiavelli” (Episode 10),  “Washington and Napoleon” (Episode 11), and “Great Discoveries” (“The Lost World”, Episode 12).

That final presentation at Wingfield’s, “Great Discoveries”, was a very special one for me, because it was actually videotaped by a local cable channel, and was then showed several times on that station.  This had become an emerging ambition of mine, to somehow turn these talks into an actual series: a documentary not unlike those that are shown on public television stations or, these days, on the History Channel.  Sadly for me, however, this would not come to pass.  For a while, it seemed that whenever a new manager or producer got a job at that local station, and came across the single presentation of mine that had been recorded, they would contact me, and enthusiastically raise the prospect of doing just that.  But inevitably, they found that their limited resources meant that they had promised more than they could deliver.  My hopes were raised and then dashed more than once, until finally, mercifully, the enthusiastic calls stopped coming, and I resigned myself to the fact that nothing more would come of this avenue.

Just when I was about to abandon hope of doing anything more with this project, a new opportunity came from an unexpected quarter.  A friend and former boss of mine, Cathy Hodges, got involved with a group of people who were planning to start a new public radio station in Valparaiso, Indiana.  She had taken on the task of searching for programming ideas, and, having attended one of my presentations at Wingfield’s, solicited me for some proposals of my own.  Naturally, the idea of doing a documentary based on my presentations again came to mind.

But I needed a central theme to organize these around.  Had there been a common thread of ideas running through the various topics that I had chosen to speak on – something that had motivated me to choose them?  I sensed that there was.  As a very young man, I had developed an interest in philosophy, and in particular became fascinated with the ideas of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant.  In his day, back in the eighteenth century, a debate had been raging between the schools of idealism and materialism: whether the ultimate basis of reality lay in the mind, with the apparent universe around us being merely a mental construct; or in matter, with consciousness being only a sort of accidental result of the chain of causes and effects between material things.  Kant’s insight was that both of these schools were right: there really is something “out there”, independent of the mind, but we can never know exactly what that is, because our minds play an active role in shaping what we perceive and conceive.  In that sense, we create our own reality.

As a simple analogy, consider your computer.  In the room surrounding it, there is a multitude of sights, sounds, and smells.  And yet, all that your computer is capable of “perceiving” is what is transmitted to it through your keyboard.  And then, all that can be done with the electrical impulses passed through to it this way is what the computer is programmed or “hard-wired” to do with them: it can only “comprehend” them in pre-determined ways, structured by the computer’s design and programming.  Similarly, even our own multi-faceted perceptions – sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch – can only take in a fraction of our surroundings, and what we do with these perceptions, including how we organize them and take them in to begin with, is governed by our own “programming” and “hard-wiring”.  Now it is true that, as living, organic beings, we are more than simple machines: we have found ways to expand the capabilities of our perception, with such things as microscopes and telescopes, and we have at least some ability to “modify” our internal programming, but in spite of this, our reality is still profoundly limited and arbitrarily structured by us.  It is, predominantly, a product of our own creation.

Around the same time that I had discovered Kant, I had also come across a book entitled The Social Construction of Reality, by Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, written in the 1960s, and which had clearly been inspired by Kant’s ideas.  In fact, it took these ideas to another level, arguing that not just individual beings but human societies create their own realities, by collectively developing ways of looking at the world and making sense of it.  People living in a certain society are conditioned to viewing and interpreting their surroundings in particular ways, and this conditioning is so fundamental that their entire reality is essentially a social construct.  It affects not just their way of looking at the world around them, but also the way that they perceive members within their community, people who are not part of their community, and even the way that they perceive themselves and their role in the universe.

This idea affected me profoundly, and as I thought about the subject matter of my history presentations, I realized that this book, along with Kant’s earlier ideas, had been a fundamental inspiration for them.  The topics of interest to me had been the lives of great persons – both real and legendary – and the momentous events of civilizations, but also how these interacted.  Because as a part of creating their own realities, people also create their own personal legends, and in the case of some people, these personal legends eventually affect, in profound ways, the lives of others in their society.  In the most extreme cases, they actually remold that entire society’s view of itself and its place in the universe.  And the process works both ways, because in the collective development of their myths and legends, societies create historical figures of great importance who are either entirely fictional, or, if they actually existed, have lives that are now remembered in embellished and exaggerated terms: that have become “larger than life”. 

Of course, generally the personal legend that each of us manufactures is “larger than life” as well, in that they include beliefs about oneself and about one’s destiny that are not entirely grounded in reality (and many if not most of which were molded in turn by the beliefs about reality that our society has imposed on us).  But it is precisely those people who have had a profound sense of personal destiny, and who have acted upon this, who have often made the most significant impacts on history, either in positive ways (George Washington), negative ways (Adolf Hitler), or with both positive and negative consequences (Christopher Columbus and Napoleon Bonaparte).  Even those who have merely contributed world-changing ideas or inventions, such as Darwin, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Marx, Freud, and Edison, were generally motivated by a personal sense of mission, and a faith in their own capacity to discover new truths and ideas.  Individually and collectively, then, we are authors of our own reality, and even if this reality is merely an illusion, it is an illusion that sustains us and impels us forward.

The first half of what became a sixteen-part series dealt with the role that mythology, religion, and occultism played in our early civilization.  The second half, which began with historical events surrounding the discovery of America, shifted to an analysis of the impacts of more contemporary beliefs – the “isms” that have arisen in modern times: Scientism, Darwinism, Capitalism, Marxism, Freudianism, and Nationalism, among others. 

When my proposal for the new series was accepted, I imagined that I would merely have to write the scripts, and narrate them, and all of the other things that needed to happen in order to make them “ready for prime time”, such as putting in background music and doing sound editing, would be taken care of by experts who had been enlisted by the radio station.  And in fact, this is what I was led to believe.  But as idea shifted to execution, I soon discovered, once again, that the promises made by others had exceeded their capability to deliver on them.  I came to the sobering realization that if this series was ever going to air, then I would have to somehow take charge of every aspect of production, from start to finish.  It seemed like an overwhelming prospect, and I nearly despaired of even attempting it.  After all, never, in my wildest imaginings, did I think that I might be capable of sound editing, let alone musical scoring.  This was what I have called, in a previous blog (March 2015), a “cold, dark well” experience.

But rescue came in the person of a consultant hired by Cathy Hodges to assist her in doing the initial programming for the radio station.  His name was Joel Cohen, and he was a former teacher at the Columbia College in Chicago, which specializes in arts and media.  Joel took a personal interest in my project, and he not only encouraged me to rise to the task of taking on the entire project from start to finish, but also gave me practical suggestions on how to do such things as providing background music scores for the narration.  Still, my initial steps into the project were faltering ones.  It took me more than a year to compose, record, and sound edit the first episode, and several months to complete each of the next three.  But by the fifth episode, I had systematized the process, and become adept at carrying out all of its phases – from writing, to narration, to recording, to sound editing, to musical scoring – so that I was able to complete each episode within one month’s time.  Episode 5 was completed in January of 2004, and all of the remaining ones, through Episode 16, were completed by the end of that year.  It was in 2004 and early 2005 that the series had its first and perhaps only run at the local public radio station.  Over the next year or so, I made some further attempts to find avenues for getting a video production made, but with no success.

I am grateful to have had the opportunity to share the series through yet another entirely different avenue.  Ironically, I only did so because I had come into a “dry spell” in my blog entries, having run out of original ideas to write about.  I think that the average size of the readership of the series worked out to about the same as that of the attendance to my live presentations.  On the blog, two of the episodes, “The Secret Doctrine” and “Machiavelli: The Prince of Darkness” were conspicuously more popular than all of the others, but I suspect that the titles for these played a role in the interest that they received.  (I do, however, think that these were two of the best episodes.)

I actually made very few changes to the original transcripts that were written a decade ago: generally only correcting factual errors that I had discovered after the series aired.  (At the end of “The American Dream”, for example, I recount the story of the brutal murder of Kitty Genovese, which was witnessed by her neighbors, who did nothing to help her.  In the original version, I stated that there were thirty-eight witnesses to the attack, as this was what was generally believed about the crime after it occurred.  It has since been determined that this was actually something of an urban legend in its own right, and that the real figure is probably closer to a dozen.  Still, this was high enough in my opinion to merit retaining the story, as an example of personal non-engagement.)  And I must say that it was eerie how some of these episodes, as I posted them, seemed to provide timely commentary on current events, shortly after I published each of them on the blog.

Were I to rewrite the series today, however, I can think of a number of significant additions and changes that I would make.  It is embarrassing, when reading through them again, to see how culture-centric they are: telling a history of the world where most of the major events of consequence happen in Europe, and with America presented as a sort of final culmination of the story.  In the years since the series originally aired, I have had the opportunity to listen to two series of lectures on China: the first covering its ancient history, and the second covering its history in modern times.  A “Larger than Life” story, just as compelling as the one I told, could easily be written about China, and about other cultures and countries as well, no doubt.  I must say, too, that when reading through these again I was more than a little embarrassed to see the proliferation of male gender nouns and pronouns (“man”, “mankind”, “his”) when talking about general trends or phenomena, and here, too, a personal bias was apparent, as nearly all of the biographies presented are about male historical figures.  I tried to correct some of the more egregious examples of bias in my general nouns and pronouns, but barely scratched the surface, I’m afraid.  And in a future writing I would endeavor to be more inclusive in describing the people – male and female – who have contributed to the story of civilization.

Even the critique of the behaviors of modern human beings – and of Americans in particular – which was done in the final two episodes of the series, was probably colored by an egocentric bias: what psychologists call “projection”.  This is a tendency for a person to more often see one’s own faults reflected in others than in oneself.  In other words, there is a real possibility that many of the shortcomings that I ascribed to our contemporaries might actually have been unconscious reflections of my own.  For example, a lack of neighborly behavior, affinity for fast food, fleeting attention span, and tendency towards spiritual dilettantism are all charges that could be laid at my own doorstep.  I can only hope that my failings are sufficiently representative of those of my peers so that these and the other criticisms are genuinely relevant . . . and enlightening.

I can think of at least a couple of episodes that could have been added to the series.  For example, I had not been aware of the role that occultism played in some of the significant trends and events of the past century or so, such as the rise of Nazism.  (I had discovered this recently when watching a show on the History Channel, which is not surprising, since Hitler and occultism seem to be two of the more popular subjects on that channel, along with extraterrestrials.)  A recurring theme in my series was how religious and magical thinking has persisted into modern times in an awkward side-by-side relationship with science and rationalism, and this undercurrent of occultism would have been a very tangible illustration of the phenomenon.

One of the biggest single gaps in the series is the absence of any discussion of modern mythology: science fiction.  This genre, which has grown, over the past one hundred years, beyond magazines and books to movies and television series that are popular on a global scale, has had a significant impact on both the ideals and actual scientific advances of our society.  Some scholars of ancient mythology such as the late Joseph Campbell have recognized this, and noted that science fiction has indeed taken over the role that ancient mythology once played.  (I must comment, however, that I disagree with Joseph Campbell’s choice of Star Wars as an iconic example of modern mythology expressed through science fiction.  I think that the original Star Wars series was merely successful escapist entertainment, and that the second trilogy of movies that were made several years after the first lacked even this quality because their producer, George Lucas, had felt overwhelmed by the great cultural importance attached to his movies by Campbell.)  At least one entire episode of my series could have been devoted to the evolution of this genre, its messages, and the tangible impact that these messages have had.  Clearly, much science fiction has tried to address the question of what our destiny should be, or should not be.  In this respect, it has even competed with religion in illustrating for us an end goal for our collective existence.

In the final episode, I tried to summarize the ideas that had inspired this retelling of human history and the additional insights that emerged from it after I had done so.  Probably the most significant such insight that came to me, by the time I had finished, was that science, while succeeding in better describing for us the “how” of the universe, and in doing so replacing many of the obvious distortions and misconceptions which had been provided by superstition and mythology, has singularly failed in providing a satisfactory “why” for our existence.  And an answer to that “why” is one thing that human beings continue to desperately need, both in their personal and collective lives.  It is a psychological source of sustenance every bit as important as the more material ones of food and shelter.  Science has not only failed in providing an answer to this question, but when attempts have been made to use it to do so, disastrous and tragic consequences have often resulted, either directly through the application of misguided philosophies, or indirectly when unscientific fanatics or demagogues have used the modern tools of science to destructive ends on a much larger scale than would have been possible before the modern age.  It is for this reason, I think, that religion continues to hold a great sway over our civilization, even when many of its practitioners doubt or even disbelieve some of its central tenets, because it provides a meaningful role for them.  I doubt that science, in spite of its impressive advances, will ever reach a stage where it can do so.  My hope is that religion will evolve (as the philosopher Henri Bergson thought it has, and it will) so that it can answer the “why” of existence without resorting to irrationalism or historical fictions.

And so I can return Larger than Life back to the shelf again, perhaps for the final time, after having found this new venue to share it.  As I find myself approaching the threshold to becoming (and I hate this term) a “senior citizen”, I doubt that even if an opportunity did arise to turn it into a television documentary now, I would present it myself (as, in my younger and vainer days, I imagined myself doing).  That chore would better be passed on to a younger and more photogenic presence.  My more practical, remaining hope is that some past or future reader of the series will be sufficiently inspired to attempt a similar project of their own, perhaps based upon the same underlying insights as this one, and do so in a much more eloquent, comprehensive, unbiased, and researched manner than I did.  If it becomes a success, then I will have been grateful to have played at least some small part in contributing to it, or, at the very least, in providing motivation for the accomplishment..

The Final Call

[The following is Episode 16 of my 16-part documentary series entitled Larger than Life, about the role that beliefs play in shaping the events of our civilization.]

Welcome to the final episode of this series, “Larger than Life”.  I’d like to begin by going back to the questions that I asked at the very beginning of the series, about your own personal life.  If you recall, I talked about how each one of us creates our own story, our own legend, that puts our whole life into context.  Although we actually remember very little – at least in our conscious memory – about the events, thoughts, and perceptions that we’ve experienced in our past, we somehow manage to weave what we’ve kept into a tapestry of meaning.  It’s a story of who we were, what we‘ve become, and what we think our destiny will be.  For some, the story is a tragedy, for others, maybe even a comedy, and for others, it’s an epic, a great momentous drama unfolding on the stage of life.  For most of us, it’s probably a mixture, with the comic, tragic, and epic moments rising in prominence at different times and in different situations.  There are probably eras, or epochs, in our past, that mark off distinct “chapters”: childhood, the college years, the first job, marriage.  And there are probably artifacts that are silent monuments and witnesses to those eras: a guitar, a picture, a textbook, a cherished piece of furniture.  These are our own pyramids and monoliths, reminding us of an age in our past that is now only dimly remembered.  Think, for a moment, about your own life “story”, or drama.  Are you a hero in the story?  A villain?  A victim?  Were there great turning points, or other dramatic events, that defined who you are and what you think you’re destined to become?  And what do you believe destiny holds in store for you?  Are you anticipating your own apocalypse, or messianic age, when you will cross some threshold in your life and find a better or more meaningful world?  Perhaps the great event will be a happy marriage, or the right career, or simply that moment of truth when all self-doubts fall away and you truly live and act like the person you believe you were meant to be.  In any case, this story, this drama, is the most important one in your personal life, and you get to be author, actor, and spectator all at the same time.

 

            In this series, I’ve argued that our civilization works in exactly the same way.  Collectively, as a group, we try to make sense of who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we’re going.  And in creating this story, we put the emphasis on meaning, on what makes what we do important, and not just trivial, accidental, or ultimately meaningless.  In one episode I talked about the parable told by the Greek philosopher Socrates about prisoners bound up inside of a dark cave, who can only see shadows flickering on a wall.  In this parable, Socrates was trying to tell us that that’s what we’re really faced with in this existence, a flawed, incomplete perception and comprehension of what’s really “out there”.  Our five senses leave out more than they take in, and even what we do take in, is not always perceived correctly.  We misjudge things, we are fooled by tricks of the light, and sometimes we see patterns in things where a pattern doesn’t really exist.  Even what we take in, let alone take in correctly, is hardly remembered, if it’s remembered at all.  And memory itself usually only adds to the distortion of reality.

            If we were only passive beings, whose sole experience consisted of perceiving and reflecting upon what is really “out there”, we’d be living a pathetic existence to be sure, because we’d be wrong more often than we were right.  Like the prisoners bound up inside the cave, our lives would be wrapped up in illusion, and faulty hints of what reality is really like.  But that’s where the analogy ends, because we’re not just passive beings, like the prisoners in the cave.  We have the ability to react to our environment, affect it, change it, and even create it.  And the true miracle of our existence is that it is exactly this weakness of ours which gives us our greatest strength as creative beings.  When we see patterns that don’t exist, when we perceive things in a different way, or remember them in a unique way, and then act upon these differences, we are giving something back to the universe that is truly novel and original, we are becoming co-creators of existence.  When we create an object, a story, a personal destiny, based upon our unique perceptions and reflections, when we create a pattern that we thought had been provided to us, but we actually invented, because before us it had never really been there, we’re imposing a new kind of order on the universe.  But if it was merely this accidental, flawed, and limited nature of our existence that resulted in creative acts, we would be nothing more than monkeys sitting at typewriters, occasionally, accidentally, typing a page of poetry or a play worthy of Shakespeare.  The difference is that we give value to our projects, and the projects of others who enter into our lives, as well as the products of nature itself.  We say “This is good,” or “This is bad,” or, more importantly, “This is good to me,” and “I like this.”  Sometimes, in the act of creativity, our mistakes and flaws are intentional – we want to imagine, visualize, remember, or contemplate images and sounds that are different from those provided to us in regular daily experience.  And then, like the God of the Hebrews, our creations are not accidental, but deliberate. 

            Creation, in fact, is the first thing we really looked at in this series – we began with the beginning, or rather, the “beginnings”, looking at the ways in which the earliest civilizations explained how their peoples, and the world, came into being.  Because our ancestors, in trying to make sense of who they were and the why of their own existence, found the most comforting answer in an explanation of where they came from.  Clearly, this was important to them – important to them that their common story have a beginning.  And in these stories, we can see that they had a sense for, and appreciation of, powers at work in the universe greater than themselves.  But they needed more than this to make sense of their world, and how it came into being.  This power, or powers, had to have intelligence, and even personality.  These gods and goddesses had to be somehow like them – stronger, yes, with talents and abilities of an almost unimaginable scale – but still with enough similarities to humanity to at least make them comprehensible, and suitable characters for creation stories.  Only then could the storytellers talk about the wills, motives, and purposes of these supernatural beings and link these to an answer to the “why” of creation.

            Man desperately wanted to find some sort of affinity with these beings, because, having acknowledged that great powers did exist in the universe, the first order of business was to find a way to relate to them, for the sake of survival, if nothing else.  The ancients appreciated, much more than we do now, that the world is both terrifying and beautiful at the same time.  Amid the beauty of meadows, and singing birds, and picturesque landscapes, there is also the ever-present threat that life can be extinguished at any moment, through lightning, drought, famine, exposure, attack by wild animals, or simply an accidental fall.  By enlisting the aid of the supernatural, one might find protection against these disasters, as well as against one’s human enemies, and perhaps even a means to gain greater power and prestige.  Here was the origin of prayer and supplication, but also the practice of chanting invocations, and wearing special amulets that conferred power and protection.  Religion was born in these rites, but magic and superstition were its elder brothers.  Religion would grow into its own with the introduction of a new feature into the story of humanity.  Some ancient societies, in addition to searching for a beginning, also sought to find a meaningful end in their sagas.  The end could simply be the vision of a personal life after death – pleasant for those who lived a life pleasing to the gods, but much less so for those who didn’t.  But in religions such as Christianity and Judaism, there was an end as momentous as creation itself.  This was apocalypse, a final climax and turning point in the drama of creation, in which God would establish a kingdom of righteousness, and cast out all that had fallen afoul of the higher aims of creation.  For believers in this great and finite plan of creation, a new type of purpose in living was available to them.  They could make it a part of their own destiny to become agents in God’s great plan, subordinating their mortal goals and desires to the perceived ends of the Creator.  Here was the expression of religion in its highest form.  No longer did man look for ways to be aided or served by the gods, but instead sought out methods to become a servant of God.

"Feed the hungry and help those in trouble.  Then your light will shine out from the darkness, and the darkness around you will be as bright as day."  Isaiah 58:10

            But there was another way that stories, myths, and religions created meaning – both for the individual and for the society as a whole – and this was through identification.  One could feel a sense of personal pride for his peoples’ ancient heroes, such as Gilgamesh or Theseus, much as we do today for our favorite baseball, football, or basketball teams and their star players.  One could even feel a sense of pride and personal identity with the local ruler, even if this ruler was arrogant, harsh, and remote.  A man might be personally powerless, but still feel powerful because he was in the service of a mighty king or nobleman.  In fact, it was probably this shared sense of glory that motivated the commoners who built the pyramids and other great monuments of antiquity, as they realized that they were participating in projects whose glory would survive for countless generations after their own lives had ended.  And in the mystery religions of Greece, Crete, and Persia, we find the process of meaning through identification reaching its greatest extreme.  Through these practices, one sought to literally merge with the gods, to be possessed by them, infused with their spirit, and linked to them through empathy by participating in their death and rebirth.  In its highest form, this process of identification is a sort of self-transcendence: a true form of mysticism that offers liberation from the finite, time- and space-bound limitations inherent in mortal existence.  But in its baser forms, identification leads to racism, elitism, sexual and national chauvinism, and religious intolerance.  It poisons, rather than purifies, the soul, and has often resulted in the oppression, victimization, and widespread murder of entire populations.

            Another popular belief that held great appeal for many was that of a lost, golden age, in which the peoples were happier, more advanced, or more enlightened than those of contemporary times.  Atlantis is probably the best example of this – its enduring legend continues to offer a vision of a powerful, advanced, and even utopian civilization that once dominated the world.  Often in our history, the hope has been entertained that there were survivors of Atlantis who passed on its legacy in secret doctrines to fortunate individuals who were able to comprehend them and preserve them.  The existence of Atlantis is still just a matter of speculation, but in Rome we find a great civilization whose existence is beyond doubt.  And for the peoples of the Renaissance, a return to the greatness that had been Rome – a recovering of lost glory - was one of the greatest incentives to achievement.  For the Jewish people, hope and inspiration could be found in the tales of King David and King Solomon, and the nation of Israel.  In the centuries of persecution that they faced after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, as they lived scattered among the emerging nations who came into being in the aftermath of Rome’s fall, Israel was a focal point of hope, with its promise that a happier place and time once existed for them, and could someday exist again.  Closer to our own time, the legend of Arthur provided an inspiring picture of a kingdom held together by a great leader, and bound by a code of conduct that encouraged both bravery and gracious behavior among its strongest toward those less powerful.  But why do these stories of lost ages, or civilizations, have such a hold over persons of later ages?  Their power probably lies in the belief, and the promise, that something has already been attained, and therefore may someday be attained again.  For it is hard to convince someone that something can be achieved, if there is no evidence that the achievement is possible.  On the other hand, if we see that somebody else has done it, or if we believe this to be the case, it gives us a greater faith, and a greater incentive to strive for that lofty goal.  Probably the best example of this in recent history is the achievement of Roger Bannister.  From the days of the ancient Greeks, the quest to run the mile in less than four minutes was one that seemed unattainable, and a general belief evolved that it was a natural barrier that could never be exceeded.  And then on May 6, 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in less than four minutes, shattering this so-called barrier.  But what is even more remarkable is that within a year of Roger Bannister’s breaking this record, thirty-seven other runners also ran the mile in less than four minutes.  And three hundred others broke the record within a year after that.  So this simple belief, that something had been done, provided sufficient power and inspiration to others to make what had once seemed impossible, possible.  Even if Atlantis, and King Arthur’s court, had been fictions, illusions, the belief in their existence, in a similar way, has impelled civilization forward, in an effort to recover the lost glory of a bygone age.  Individuals who today are remembered as great pioneers in scientific discovery, like Kepler and Newton, derived much of their inspiration from a fascination with esoteric doctrines, such as astrology and mysticism.  Perhaps their work began as part of a youthful quest to rediscover lost wisdom of the past.

            In the Age of the Renaissance, the dream of recovering the glory of a lost age found its fullest expression, and most tangible success.  For a Europe that had been plagued for centuries with war, disease, famine, barbarism, and superstition, a new hope was restored that mankind was fulfilling a special destiny, and was moving closer toward a richer and more inspired existence.  But with the scientific advances that began to reshape our civilization’s views of the universe in the sixteenth century, many of the most cherished beliefs and assumptions that gave humanity a special place in that universe were shaken to the core.  For although the twin legacies of Greek philosophy and Jewish monotheism clashed in many respects, both had passed on to us a common belief that humanity had a special place in the cosmos.  Earth was the center of the universe, and human beings were its most important occupants, fulfilling a unique role in the process of creation.  Christian tradition had assigned some guilt to that role, emphasizing humanity’s responsibility for introducing sin into the world, but this only served to reinforce the belief in man’s ultimate importance to God’s plan, rather than undermine it.  The new worldview that came out of science changed all that, in very profound and ultimately unsettling ways.  The work of Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo made a convincing case that the earth was not a stationary object, with everything in the celestial heavens revolving around it.  The Earth was but one of the many planets revolving around the sun.  Three hundred years later, Charles Darwin would make popular an alternative theory about the origins of the human race, which would explain the emergence of man in terms of biological processes – adaptation, competition, heredity – processes that all species on the planet share in common with humanity.  While these new worldviews comprised a more rational way of looking at the world and man’s place in it, they undermined those beliefs that had most supported man’s faith in his ultimate personal value and special destiny.  No longer a central actor in the drama of creation, he was now an insignificant entity in an immense, and ultimately indifferent, universe.  And the new science had not only taken away man’s sense of uniqueness, it had taken away what had always been the most tangible evidence of God.  That evidence had been the remarkable order, complexity, and apparent design that existed on the earth and in the movements of the celestial bodies, but now science asserted that all of this was the product of impersonal, mechanical forces.

            Faced with a new, mechanistic model of the universe, many of civilization’s most eminent thinkers tried to find a way to restore a special place for humanity.  Philosophers such as Hegel and Bergson tried to develop new worldviews that combined evolution with spirituality, envisioning an ongoing plan of creation that spurred development in both the world of nature and in the souls of man and society.  But for other philosophers, such as Karl Marx, souls, either world souls or personal souls, were no longer a necessary part in the mechanism of the evolving universe.  He argued that the same lifeless, mechanical processes that produced order in nature were also responsible for the evolution of social order, and of civilization.  Nevertheless, Marx and the materialist philosophers tried to retain one of the most compelling elements of the Judeo-Christian model, that of apocalypse, and a future utopia.  All of the features of the Jewish and Christian worldviews that gave man a sense of meaning and purpose were preserved, except the belief in God and the human soul.  But for many, this new, secular humanism did not provide a satisfying substitute for the traditional means to find a sense of personal destiny.  If there was no hope of reward in an afterlife, and no means of self-transcendence and merging with the divine, the rewards of participation – even active participation – in an impersonal process of evolution seemed hollow, and not worth any meaningful sacrifice.  For those who did not see the attraction in being anonymous supporters of a possible future secular utopia, another, more personally satisfying alternative offered itself.  This was the lure of power, the temptation to become – as far as possible – godlike, in a world in which it was demonstrated that no real gods existed.  This was not a new or novel idea.  From the days of the earliest civilizations, one avenue along which men might move closer to gods was through the acquiring of power, either real, physical power, or secret knowledge that would confer god-like abilities upon the adept.  If self-transcendence were not possible, then perhaps self-transformation was.  If man could not become a god, then perhaps he could at least become a superman, and enjoy a larger measure of the fruits of existence. 

            A more benevolent form of this doctrine expressed itself in the creative aspirations of artists, composers, and architects.  And with the rise of the Industrial Revolution, another by-product of the new age of science, men could be inventors, creators and architects of new industries, and also masters of men, wielding power through their commercial organizations.  A new philosophy of personal success arose from the feats of these individuals, offering promise to those smart enough, brave enough, and strong enough to practice it, which would allow them, at least in some measure, to rise above the impersonal forces that controlled the lives of their fellows.  This new philosophy of success, however, with its premise that the opportunity to rise to a higher station in life was open to anyone willing to practice it, had a darker side:  It removed a measure of guilt over the conditions of those who were not successful in society.  It suggested that those who labored on farms, worked menial jobs, or spent long hours toiling in factories had, at least implicitly, chosen their fates.  Because of laziness, timidity, or lack of ambition, those who appeared to be less fortunate in society had actually settled for a less challenging, if admittedly less pleasant, existence.  It was probably a belief such as this that accounted for the apparent disparity in behavior of many of these “captains of industry”, such as Andrew Carnegie, toward their fellow human beings.  On the one hand, Carnegie had been a generous philanthropist, making abundant charitable contributions, building libraries, and supporting other selfless causes.  On the other hand, he had been an uncompromising employer, allowing his executives to resort to the most extreme measures, even violence, to keep his laborers in the steel mills in check.

            But if the lure of the superman presented a dark side in business, its manifestation in the realm of politics was far more sinister.  The twentieth century, in particular, saw the rise of leaders who had no scruples about sacrificing countless human lives as means to an end, whether this end be some utopian vision of a worker’s paradise, or the securing of world domination under the control of a master race.  Like the industrialists, these leaders saw themselves as architects who legitimized the subordination of large numbers of human beings in the service of a great enterprise.  But unlike the industrialists, they created little, and, through the mechanism of war and political repression, destroyed much, much more.

            If Darwin took the soul out of nature, and God out of the cosmos, he still preserved one of the most endearing myths that provided consolation to humanity.  This was the idea that the world was evolving, improving, and perhaps moving toward some ideal state of order and harmony.  But for our civilization, this idea received a shattering blow early in the twentieth century, when the most powerful, and apparently most enlightened, nations of Europe engaged in a devastating, horrendous, and ultimately pointless war.  The horrors of that century that followed in its wake only served to confirm what the Great War had demonstrated – that the advance of science, and the waning influence of religion, had not moved humanity onto a higher, more rational, plane.  On the contrary, it made possible the commitment of atrocities on an unprecedented level.

            The astronomer Carl Sagan once referred to our present age as one of technological adolescence.  What he meant was that, like a human adolescent, we as a civilization are now confronted with great powers and abilities that we have not learned how to harness and control.  Because with these new powers have also come powerful passions, and a confused sense of identity and purpose.  It is an optimistic analogy, because for the normal individual, adulthood brings the maturity needed to channel the passions and drives of youth in the service of a rational, personal goal, and divert energies that could be potentially very destructive – to oneself or others – into the service of this objective.  Even this series, with its episodes organized to suggest a forward, progressive movement in time, has succumbed to that optimistic model of history as a record of progress and development.  In spite of the increasing level of destruction and human violence that we have seen over the past century, we still doggedly want to believe that somehow, in some way, civilization is evolving, maturing, improving.

            And where does America fit into this picture?  What is our role in this story - we, who currently consume one-fourth of the world’s energy supply and an equally significant share of its other natural resources?  Are we truly the living heirs to, and the crowning achievement of, the progress of history?  Or are we merely a nation of self-involved, ignorant, overweight, and gluttonous individuals, squandering the world’s resources while whiling away much of our time in escapist entertainment or wrapped up in the mundane daily dramas of our own exaggerated self-importance?  Should we consider it fortunate that we live in a country that, as the result of some happy accidents, great men and women who shaped it in its early days, and abundant natural resources, has produced for us wealth unimagined since the dawn of civilization?  Perhaps we feel it is presumptuous for anyone to suggest that our better circumstances give us an obligation to others outside of our borders.  We might even be tempted to say to the rest of the world, “Too bad for you, but you can at least take consolation in knowing that somebody on this planet had the ability to truly enjoy life, and live it to the fullest, with great food, great entertainments, relative comfort and security.”  Perhaps we are content if our politicians and leaders are merely good at keeping the rest of the world at bay, allowing us to continue to enjoy our happy existence without letting any evil or envious people elsewhere in the world jeopardize that existence.  After all, doesn’t that mean that it really wasn’t all for nothing, since if it isn’t possible for every human being to live a good, happy life, it was at least possible for a few?  But the fact is that few people in America – even the wealthiest – are very happy, if they are happy at all.  They are obsessed with personal anxieties, daily conflicts, and a strange mix of stress and boredom.  Their lives are empty and unfulfilled because, after all, they have no ultimate purpose, and with no ultimate purpose they have no sense of significant personal value.  Do we, as Americans, have a national legend, a common destiny or myth that provides a context for our privileged existence?  Or is it just a glorious accident?  Will some future age look back with wonder at this strange, short episode in world history when a country once existed, powerful, affluent, with all of the races of the world living together peacefully in freedom and relative security?  Where the world believed – at least for a time – that humanity really was progressing toward a state of greater perfection, peace, and civility, and that America was leading the way?  Or will our country look like an Atlantis, or an Israel under the glorious reign of King David, or the great city of Troy, lands in whose greatness lie the seeds of their own downfall?  Will idealistic persons in that unknowable future - perhaps descendents of the real Americans - secretly harbor a hope that that idealistic, golden age that once existed in the distant mists of the past might someday return?  These latter day devotees to a lost civilization might commit their lives to studying the events, beliefs, and knowledge of the Americans, trying to understand what made the land great, and what led to its demise.  In this future world, which might be in the grip of a bleak, dark age, more grim and chaotic than the centuries following the fall of Rome, the legend or lost secrets of America might provide a blueprint for the hopeful on how to recover some purpose, or at least some means of comfort, to suffering humanity.

            But to determine our place in this story of civilization, it is probably best to take one final, cursory look at how our past has influenced, and is influencing, our present – how the legacies of Sumer, Egypt, Troy and Israel, Greece and Rome, Christ and Darwin, Washington and Napoleon, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan define our lifestyles, and shape our worldview.  From Sumer, we have the sixty-second minute, and the sixty-minute hour, and from Egypt, the belief that there were ancient civilizations as great as, or greater than, our own.  The refugees of Troy, and the Hebrew slaves who defied an Egyptian pharaoh, set history on a course that would lead to Caesar, Christ, and King Arthur.  The Greeks bequeathed a philosophical outlook that remains unrivalled to this day.  Machiavelli was the prophet of a new order of national politics, and Washington and Napoleon, in their own unique ways, shaped the forms that America and Europe would take in the modern age.  Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Darwin demonstrated that the majesty of the universe, with all of its order and complexity, could be explained in terms of impersonal forces that did not require a god, or a central role for humanity.  And the great inventors and industrialists of the past two centuries, along with the great dictators, demonstrated the awesome power now available to ambitious human beings to both create and destroy, and in either case to affect millions of human lives, for better or for worse.  Myths, legends, and core beliefs, both personal and national, can have distinctly different consequences.  They can provide the hope, inspiration, and driving force to attaining some higher end.  They can offer a kind of harmless lie, giving one a sense of importance, or belief in a future, that is entirely fictional.  Or they can be pernicious and destructive, to oneself, and to others.  Our civilization has fallen under the sway of all three of these types, and we may never develop the capacity to fully recognize and distinguish them.  Perhaps we shouldn’t, because without the capacity to dream, and to succumb to dreams, we would also lack the capacity to create, and to find higher truths.

            But as the result of all of this, we live in a society with a plurality of ideas, where God and science exist side by side in an awkward coexistence.  Most of us believe in evolution, and science, and yet doggedly retain religious beliefs that we vocally profess, at least one day a week.  Somehow, in our universe, God exists, and affects destiny, and cares about how we live our lives, at the same time that vast, impersonal forces move the earth, the planets, and the stars, and leave human civilization as an insignificant event in the cosmos.  Like the ancient Romans, we are exposed to a veritable marketplace of alternative beliefs and spiritual disciplines, and thanks to our highly evolved commercial economy, these can be presented to us in books with catchy titles, and affordable video and audiotape series that we can listen to for enjoyment as well as inspiration.  Many of these are little more than modern renditions of the lure of practical magic – answering the ancient desire to control one’s destiny through soothsaying, or by learning simple tricks and formulas that will make one more powerful, or change one’s fate.  If one visits the philosophy and mysticism sections of most modern bookstores, one will probably be just as likely to encounter books on Tarot cards and astrology as on Plato and Immanuel Kant.  And not only higher truths, but the more banal entertainments of sex and violence are packaged and promoted in movies and television programs that vie for our attention.  We enjoy the spectacle of the coliseum, without having to endure the guilt of knowing that human beings are actually being brutalized.  Our jobs are routinized and standardized, and a rigid work schedule is imposed upon us.  Wealth and power is still controlled by a select, elite group, but the rest of us are no longer peasants.  Most of us are employees who earn our keep by doing something we feel is beneath us, but at least is not intolerable, and allows us to afford our entertainments.  And in spite of all this, we still try to find meaning in our lives.  We want to believe that life has a purpose.  We try to find it in those philosophies of personal success and self-improvement, or in the spiritual doctrines that are sold in marketed tape series and best-selling books, or offered in seminars.  We have sufficient free time to at least harbor the hope that we might do something, someday, that is generally creative and meaningful, after retirement, if not sooner.  We want to believe that America really is a beacon on a hill, in spite of the fact that our leaders often treat it as a fortress instead, to be defended against a myriad of pernicious threats, that originate from both the inside and the outside, like drugs, and terrorism.  What is the story that you believe in?  Do you believe that God will intervene, that the Christian apocalypse will still happen?  Or do you believe that the impersonal forces of evolution are driving us forward to some as yet unimaginable final destination?  Or is it some combination of these – is it a world soul evolving, and raising the spiritual consciousness of humanity?  What is your role in this drama, if any?  Do you choose to ignore this, and focus on your personal destiny, and whatever success that you can attain in this life, perhaps with the hope that other rewards lie in the afterlife?

            In any work of history, the weakest chapter is always the final one, in which the author attempts to extrapolate from the important trends they've identified, to some future innovation, resolution, or continuation of what has taken place in the past.  Without exception, these forward looks are always wrong, and as the future audience ponders over these faulty predictions, they often question whether the author’s view of the past was flawed in the first place.  It is no consolation to accept that any view of a pattern in history might be an illusion, and that progress might be a myth.  It goes against the grain of our belief to consider such a thing.  Somehow, the faith in an encompassing story seems to be a source of sustaining energy and power for us, as important as the light of the sun – that celestial body that was revered by so many of the ancients who gave us our earliest such stories.  And so we strive to believe that history moves forward, and that in some way we are a part of that process.  But for those who insist on this view, the belief presents a special obligation.  It means that each of us bears the burden of stepping outside of ourselves, and making some contribution to that destiny.  We can turn to our own heroes, and see in their examples a demonstration of how the greatest among us have done exactly that.  Or we can search for a link to some greater power that will guide us, and inspire us.  There is, of course, always the temptation to shrink from the task, and to limit our concerns to our own personal problems, or worse, to lash out at a universe that we feel has not given us a sufficiently prominent place.  But if we want to believe that each of us truly has the capacity to write the story of our collective destiny, then that is a luxury that none of us can afford.  Like Moses, we must accept that the call to freedom can be terrifying, but that only by answering that call can we find a meaningful answer to who we are, and what we are meant to be. 

 

            I thank you for following this series, “Larger Than Life”.  May your own journey be an interesting one, and your story a happy one.