When You're Right, You're Right

I've sometimes picked on Harvard in this blog, and though I'm sure I haven't harmed their stature or endowment, I think I owe it to them and myself to commend them sometimes as well.  This blog piece, which I first read on Zite, is a true gem -- anyone who reads it and has to give a commencement speech will probably steal it (I hope with proper attribution to Mr. Haque).

Create a Meaningful Life Through Meaningful Work

It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time

In Stumbling on Happiness, psychologist Daniel Gilbert wryly observes that “psychologists…take a vow, promising that, at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: ‘The human being is the only animal that…’ We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words.”  Noting several refuted hypotheses (e.g. uses tools or language), he goes on to say that “it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.”  Psychologists aren't the only social scientists who run the risk of premature generalization, as this post will prove.

Lately I’ve been reading several books that lie along the border of psychology and economics – Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow, Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational, Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness, all of which provide a lot of evidence that our abilities to predict the future, and even to act rationally in the present, are a lot poorer than we imagine.  Yet this never prevents stock market “experts” and management theorists from making a killing by confidently labeling businesses and their leaders successful or promising, flawed or doomed.  The danger with all these judgments, of course, comes when you make them before the fat lady has sung – because contrary to F. Scott Fitzgerald, there are plenty of second acts in American lives, and often Act II turns the expectations of Act I on their heads.

Take Charismatic Leadership in Organizations, by Jay A. Conger and Rabindra N. Kanungo, published in 1998.   Chapter 7, “The Shadow Side of Charisma,” begins, “Although we have emphasized throughout this volume the positive face of charismatic leadership, it has at times produced disastrous outcomes for both followers and organizations.”  True enough.  In fact, only three years later, Jim Collins’s Good to Great swung the pendulum of popular thinking decisively against charisma, showing that in the 10 “great” companies he and his investigators had found, one common factor was leaders who were “quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, understated…and so forth.”  Collins also noted that “in two thirds of the comparison cases, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”

Unfortunately, as the old newsreels used to say, “Time Marches On.”  With time,  Collins’s list of  great companies has come under severe scrutiny; by 2006, the average GtoG company was not in the Fortune Top 200.

Likewise, Conger and Kanungo went on to describe “positive” and “negative” charismatic leaders.  One of their key definitions was that “The negative charismatic leaders point their efforts toward achieving the goal of self-aggrandizement, whereas the positive charismatic leaders develop self-discipline to endure the personal risk or cost of benefitting others.”    Negative charismatic leaders create “goals that are largely self-serving,” and do not accurately estimate resources, support, or the larger (market) environment.  Finally, only the most positive leaders “recognize their own ‘organizational mortality,”’ and prepare properly for a succession of leadership.

In the abstract, all these points are well taken.  However Conger and Kanungo were betrayed by the need to concretize the principles with examples.  Here they run into the problem recognized by Einstein (and, oddly, attributed to Yogi Berra by over 10% of those who quote it): “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

The Internet, or course, gives a reader an unfair leg up on published writers, because any one of us can bring the discussion up to date with a few clicks.   After noting one case of a premature death notice, which I will discuss momentarily, I began to look up other examples to see how the leader and/or company fared after Conger and Kanungo’s judgment.

One such example was Lucent ‘s Henry Schacht, described as a charismatic but instrumental leader who was highly successful in planning for and mentoring a successor.  During Schacht’s brief tenure as head of the newly formed technology company, he named his successor immediately, and “assumed the principal role of teaching and coaching, helping [his designated successor, Rich] McGinn and his team to be more effective in building the senior team’s collective identity.” Starting with his accession in October 1997, McGinn then built his team with a further succession in mind.

But life, and markets, are what happens when you’re busy making other plans.  Exactly three years later, McGinn was fired by the board, and Schacht returned in an effort to save the sinking company.  Lucent’s stock, which had hit a high of $103 a share a few months after McGinn’s succession, was now trading at $27.  Two Octobers later it was a penny stock, at 55 cents a share, and had admitted a $125 million accounting error and several other dubious accounting and sales practices. It was later acquired by the French firm Alcatel. (Sources: NY Times, 2/28/1998; CNET News, October 23, 2000; CFO.com December 18, 2002; Kiplinger’s, May 2003). 

On the opposite side of the coin, Conger and Kanungo singled out one CEO above all as a model of the negative charismatic leader. They labeled this CEO both charismatic and narcissistic, a “particularly potent and dangerous” combination. They cite another author as saying the man “has a tendency to surround himself with people who, though talented, aren’t likely to question his vision.”  Like other narcissistic leaders (John deLorean and Lee Iacocca are mentioned), he often claimed credit for others’ ideas.   This person’s “visions became increasingly a reflection of personal obsessions rather than what the marketplace was seeking.”  After an initial success, his company’s market shares collapsed, and he blundered into expensive failure after expensive failure because he “could not defy the laws of the marketplace or ignore the dictates of the business he was in, no matter how passionately he viewed himself as being above such dictates.”

This paragon of egomania and market-blindness?  One “Steven” Jobs as the authors called him, who had just returned to Apple as interim CEO and who had nearly 15 years of unparalleled marketing and creative success ahead of him.  (A few weeks before his death, Apple had a market capitalization larger than Google and Microsoft combined, and the quarter that began with his death was Apple’s best ever.  Close the books on Mr. Jobs’s career, with a pretty positive balance sheet.)

This is not to say that Messrs. Conger and Kanungo are unusual in their inability to judge the future by the past. They’re just like the rest of us, this writer included.  But their story, like so many others, shows the common tendency to persuade ourselves that our theory can account for all contingencies (what Daniel Kahneman calls the WYSIATI or “what you see is all there is” fallacy), and of assuming that past performance is a guarantee of future results.

The Not-So-Smart World of Harvard Business School

           Ever since my graduate school days, as I pored over Renaissance love poems and Anglican sermons in pursuit of a Ph.D. in English, I have had a voyeur’s interest in the Harvard Business School, that megalith across the Charles river from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Divinity School, and other more ivory-clad Cambridge towers that are among the fiefdoms of the World’s Greatest University.  Any school that can charge over $57,000 in tuition and fees, and $11,000 for a week-long seminar, can get top price for its Review, then recycle the articles into thin $25 paperbacks, and can count Michael Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, Meg Whitman, and Robert McNamara among its alumni is surely good at what it does.

            Fortunately HBS drops some crumbs for gleaners who follow in the wake of its giant harvesters.  One of these is the HBR Ideacast, a podcast that features 10-15 minute interviews with the authors of new Review articles.  You can listen to the gist of a hot new article or a reflection by a master of the business universe for free while working out or driving.  Some of the ones I’ve listened to have been very impressive: Martin Seligman, Edgar Schein, Warren Bennis, Sherry Turkle, Oliver Sacks, and even Francis Ford Coppola have appeared. 

            Unfortunately, Ecclesiastes’ observation that of the making of many books there is no end is all the more true in the publish or perish world, and sometimes what passes for business wisdom falls very short. 

            Case in point, and only the most egregious of many such: one Richard Ogle, whose book Smart World: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas was actually published by the Business School in 2007.  The interviewer began by explaining Ogle’s thesis: “creative breakthroughs and great innovations don’t simply emanate from the minds of individual geniuses” but “are born from intelligent networks” that “access something you call idea spaces.”  I don’t know about you, but I only get the “don’t” part of that statement.

            At any rate, as the interview progressed, I found myself surprised by the examples Ogle gave: Rupert Murdoch’s brilliantly intuitive acquisition of MySpace in 2005, David Wallerstein’s supersizing idea, first used for  popcorn and soda at the movies, then brought over to McDonald’s; Ruth Handler’s creation of the Barbie doll.  Oddly, it seemed that all the ideas did emanate from the minds of individual “geniuses,” but let that go for the moment.

            Murdoch’s brilliant decision, made twenty months after Facebook had launched,  ultimately resulted in News Corp’s selling MySpace at more than a half billion dollar loss, and an additional half billion in losses before the sale.  Anytime you sell something for 6% of what you paid for it, your genius score obviously takes a huge hit. 

            Of course, no one is immune from financial blunders, or from praising eventual blunderers, but considering the whole Murdoch enterprise and its current fairly predictable humiliations, was this the best choice of examples?  (Murdoch is now being wonderfully evoked in the person of Sir Richard Carlisle, an early 20^th century British tabloid mogul based on the real Alfred Harmsworth, in Downton Abbey.  Bet he won’t be half as villainous as Murdoch himself.)

            The supersizing example is even more remarkable, not only for its choice but for the arguments behind it.  After all, Ogle was interviewed in 2007, three years after Morgan Spurlock’s “Supersize Me” had exposed the McDonald’s regimen’s effects, and had caused the company to phase out supersizing in favor of an “Eat Smart Be Active” campaign.

            Ogle’s explanation of the original brilliance of supersizing is even less persuasive than his evaluation.  According to Ogle, movie theaters wanted people to go back for second helpings, but Christian ethical prohibitions against greed inhibited them from doing so. Wallerstein realized that offering one huge portion avoided the stigma of greed and thus increased sales.

            Assuming that Ogle’s argument even passes what Alan Dershowitz called “the giggle test,” it’s hard to know where to begin challenging it.  Do people who go back for seconds, at buffets for example, look more greedy than people who heap their plates to overflowing the first time around?  How profoundly do Christian views of greed affect the population of the most Christian and most obese country in the world?  And didn’t Ogle ever go to the movies?  Most of us don’t go back for seconds because we don’t want to miss anything, just as we all hang on and rush to the rest rooms when the credits come up.

Regarding Christian ethics and gluttony (which is really the term Ogle should have used), last year Northwestern's Feinberg School of Medicine published a study reporting that religious people were 50 percent more likely to become obese, while the Gallup Poll’s 10 most religious states are all among the 20 most obese states (including #1,2,4 and 5), while the 10 least religious include 8 of the 20 least obese states. 

Finally, isn’t there something distressing about Ogle’s apparent definition of brilliance?  To choose, out of all the possibilities available, businesses that contribute to so many cultural ills, from the sexualization of childhood to numerous physical ailments, to the incivility of public discourse, suggests that the only criterion for genius that Ogle and his publishers recognize is pecuniary.

Why not, for example, single out the creation of microloans for developing countries, the use of multi-drug therapies for HIV, the invention of adaptive technologies for people with disabilities, online fundraising for charities, and innumerable other recent innovations that have actually done good while usually both making money and making people more productive and happy?

            Of course I’m only judging the book by what Ogle chose to cover in his interview.  But if the coming attractions seem awful to you, how bad is the movie going to be? 

There's no Corpse in Corporations

The rose is a rose,
And was always a rose.
But the theory now goes
That the apple's a rose,
And the pear is, and so's
The plum, I suppose.
The dear only knows
What will next prove a rose.

--  Robert Frost

At my all-male Jesuit high school, the senior retreat was a major life event.  (Those of you who have read the sermon given at Stephen Daedalus’s retreat in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man will understand why.)  But our retreat was no fire-and-brimstone jeremiad.  In fact it began with an ode to logic.  The theme of the opening sermon was “Pigs is pigs” – an odd choice of text for 200 boys from New York City. 

What our retreat leader meant was that things are what they are, and no amount of wishful thinking should be allowed to obscure their reality.  An example he gave may seem arcane, but it certainly made sense to us.  “When a baby or a young child dies, people often say ‘Now he’s an angel in heaven.’  No he’s not.  He may be in heaven, but he’s no angel.  He’s still a human being, and human beings and angels are entirely different things.”  (This was largely to set us up for the theme of not deceiving ourselves into thinking wrong was right just because it might be convenient or desirable that it be so.)

But the idea always stayed with me not just in the moral sphere, but in everyday life as well.  For one thing, it and other experiences like it convinced me that the Jesuits had an undeserved reputation for crafty thinking when in fact they simply had a methodical way of looking at the facts.  More important, it helped me perceive logical leaps made in the service of personal preferences or beliefs, whether or not these were strictly of a moral nature.

I find it strange, therefore, that a Supreme Court with two Jesuit-trained members can so often disregard common, even universal, facts in order to bolster a dogmatic conclusion.

This week we’ll take up one such instance. Borrowing from that old Jesuit, we’ll begin with a simple tautology: “Persons are persons.”

Many of us were surprised to learn in 2008 that corporations were now persons, as this had been a contested view even up to the term of Chief Justice William Rehnquist.  For two centuries Americans have debated where corporations should be treated as persons, but only in the last few years has the blanket “corporations are persons” (or people) become a plausible statement.  If you doubt this, try Googling “corporations are people/persons” with and without adding Mitt Romney or Supreme Court to your search.  Of approximately 3.19 million hits for the phrase, less than 1% of all the citations occur without reference to the court’s 2008 decision or Romney’s recent comments.

Occasionally we do learn that something is other than what we thought it was,  but those shifts come almost entirely because of new knowledge: influenza is caused by bacteria, colds by viruses, the sun is a star, matter is atoms, etc. etc., all are agreed to be true because we found out something heretofore unknown.  Similarly, sometimes we learn that something should be re-categorized because we finally take in the data in front of us.  That non-whites are people, for example, was self-evident from anatomy and biology, but it took centuries for certain racial prejudices to give way before the facts.

            But in the case of corporations no new discoveries abut respiration, procreation, motility, or any other aspect of personhood, or life, have been recently been made by examining GM, AT&T, or Walmart more closely.

            In fact, except as a legal fiction, there is hardly anything about corporations that is even faintly human.  Corporations don’t have human bodies, can’t ambulate on their own, have none of the senses that people have.  They can theoretically live forever in the physical world (or at least on paper), and “procreate” by splitting themselves, like amoebae and other non-human forms of life. 

            Further, we don’t normally treat them like people.  You can kill a corporation and not fear arrest.  When they die, there’s nothing to bury, cremate, or otherwise show reverence.  They don’t serve on juries or practice religion, nor are they able to hold office, even if they were born in the United States.  And, as one observer recently noted, if people can own them and compel their service, then they are slaves, and slavery is unconstitutional.

            But of course what proponents of corporations are people mean is that they are legal persons for certain aspects of civil and criminal law.  When a corporation enters into a contract with a person, another corporation, or another entity, say a government agency, that contract is enforceable.  They have to pay their debts – though unlike people, they can be punished by corporate “death” for failure to do so.  They can be fined for crimes or other violations of regulation, and can be made to make reparation for damages, and can sue or be sued for damages. 

            But if it all comes down to money or its surrogates, that still leaves a distinction.  The most renowned current defender of the peoplehood doctrine is Mitt Romney, whose argument goes as follows: “Of course corporations are people.  Everything corporations earn ultimately goes to people.”  Quite aside from the fact that the statement disproves itself (if money goes from corporations to people, then it’s clearly going from one kind of entity to another), it doesn’t constitute a proof at all. Let’s take the case of horses, for example.  Horses do work, whether by hauling people and goods, powering traditional mill wheels, water pumps, and other devices, and most lucratively, by running, jumping or trotting.  All the money the horses make ultimately goes to people, but that obviously doesn’t make them people.  (We don’t euthanize people who break an ankle, do we?)  We might even say the wind and the sun make money when they power windmills and solar panels, and that money goes to people, so even natural phenomena would be people under Romney’s argument.

            Romney’s statements clarify the core issue – money.  All the areas where we treat corporations similarly to persons are based on money: contracts, fines, monopolies, safety standards, and so forth, are rooted in the corporation as an economic entity.  If one believes that economics is the sole, or paramount sphere of civil life, then the position makes some sense. And of course the hot-button issue regarding corporations is their right to spend money to promote their (meaning of course their shareholders’ and other beneficiaries’ ) goals in the political arena.  Does anyone argue that any of the non-economic amendments or sections of the Constitutional – the number of seats in Congress, freedom of religion, the right to bear arms, the limits on presidential terms, etc. --  apply to corporations? The sole area of disagreement is whether corporations have the same speech rights as persons, and that means the right to spend money to influence legislation. (We’ll avoid the second paradox involved, i.e. that “money is speech” at least until another time.)

            The legal debate turns on an interpretation of the Constitution. But as Abraham Lincoln saw clearly, the moral foundation of the United States rests on the principles enunciated in the Declaration of Independence. For the corporatist view to prevail, therefore, it will need a new Declaration as a foundational principle.  We conclude with a draft of its opening, in the words of Rod Serling on The Twilight Zone “offered for your consideration”: 

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Corporations are created equal, that they are endowed by their Articles of Incorporation with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Existence, Influence, and the Pursuit of Profit. – That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among Corporations, deriving their ‘just’ powers from the consent of the Corporations – That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the Corporations to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new Government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Power and Profitability.”

P.S. For Holiday Corporate Caroling, click on Hallelujah Corporations

           

Ground Zero, An Alternate Reality

Just as America opened its Ground Zero memorial and shifted into the second post-9/11 decade, Amy Waldman’s novel The Submission appeared and was quickly hailed as the finest work to date that directly considered the attacks and their aftermath.  Since I was about to visit the Ground Zero site and meet the memorial architect, as I mentioned in the last blog, it seemed ideal to read the novel at the same time.  I did have some concern that the fiction would pale before the encountered reality.  As it turned out, I needn’t have worried.

As many of you will already know, The Submission takes place several years after 9/11.  The New York jury selecting a memorial design from a number of anonymous submissions chooses one – a walled and treed garden quartered by shallow canals -- by a young architect with the ominous name Mohammed Khan.  The controversy that ensues, and its effect on a number of characters, together with Khan’s ultimate choice, make up the rest of the book.

Obviously, we already know the actual designer and design.  Most of us have seen it, if not in person, then in the media.  We also know that a different conflict over a nearby Muslim community center occurred during the construction of the new memorial. And unlike such subjects as “if the South had won the Civil War” or “if Germany had won World War II,” the World Trade Center story is still living history to all of us over the age of twenty.  So how can a counterfactual novel, coming so close upon the reality, help but seem either derivative or wildly implausible?

I can only share my own experience, which might best be compared to one of those “young woman at her toilette or an old crone?” or “goblet or two profiles?” optical illusions.  Despite my knowledge and actual presence at the site of the reality, my mind easily slipped between what I knew had happened and an utterly plausible alternative reality.

How did Waldman achieve in so many readers such a willing suspension of disbelief?  In part ,because she brings to bear in this first novel skills drawn from real-world reporting, and uses these to create a remarkably persuasive narrative fabric.

As a former journalist, Waldman has an ear for the public statement, whether from an interviewee or a reporter.  During the height of the controversy she give us perfectly voiced shrieking from the New York Post – “MYSTERY MUSLIM MEMORIAL MESS: ADDING ISLAM  TO INJURY – as well as nuanced challenge from The New Yorker: “We should judge him only by his own design.  But this is where matters get tricky.  In venturing into public space, the private imagination contracts to serve the nation and should necessarily abandon its own ideologies and beliefs.”

There is just enough direct connection between Waldman’s imagined world and actual post-9/11 events to enhance the alternate one’s reality.  The runner-up design, for example, is “A towering black granite rectangle, some twelve stories high, centered on a huge oval pool.”  Not Michael Arad’s creation, certainly, but enough like it to draw the two worlds together, especially when a leading character focuses on the most common element between the two: “The other night I dreamed about that black pool around the Void, that my husband’s hand was reaching up from the water to pull me down into it.”  This parallelism later appears ironically. As I looked over the railing at the enormous dual waterfalls descending into the abyss where each tower once stood, I smiled to recall the contention made by consultants hired to critique Khan’s design that “The canals were also a safety liability.  ‘One child falls in and the whole memorial shuts down.’  They recommended scrapping them.”

And, although Waldman has said she had completed a draft of the novel before the beginning of the falsely-termed Ground Zero mosque controversy, these arguments from her “Save America from Islam” coalition meld immediately into our real-world consciousness: “Muslims build mosques wherever they’ve conquered.  They could never get away with putting a mosque at this site, so they’ve come up with something sneakier: an Islamic garden, this martyr’s paradise, it’s like a code to jihadis.”  (Careful readers will recall that in the book’s opening pages, the jury’s spokeswoman for the artistic community had objected to the design on the grounds that “Gardens are fetishes of the European bourgeoisie.”)

Many of Waldman’s characters are draw from obvious stock.  Her 9/11 mourners include the suburban widow of a businessman, the blue-collar brother of a deceased fireman, and the widow of a Muslim janitor hired illegally by a building subcontractor.  There is also the over-aggressive reporter, the hate-mongering talk show host (“I Slam Islam” is his credo), the manipulative state politician, and Muslim attorneys and community activists at once fearful, indignant, and self-serving.  But these characters have additional facets, and some shift roles and perspectives in surprising ways through the course of the story.  As a seasoned New Yorker, Waldman subtly gives shape to her figures.  The memorial jury’s chair, for example, thinks to himself just before opening the fateful envelope, “To know the winner’s identity before the jury, not to mention the mayor or the governor…What better measure of how high Paul Joseph Rubin, grandson of a Russian Jewish peasant, had climbed?” 

The implications  layered, especially since the  main designers of the World Trade Center memorial and site reconstruction are both Jewish and have both been the subject of antisemitic diatribes by those who persist in seeing 9/11 as a Jewish plot.  But even upon immediate reading, isn’t it strange that the Jewish Rubin is named after two of the key figures in the New Testament, including the notorious convert Paul?  Later, when we meet Rubin’s sons, Jacob and Samuel, the anomalous interweaving of assimilation and identity becomes even more obvious.

The book’s title is so clearly multivalent that few reviewers have commented on it, whether because they don’t see it (highly unlikely), or because they fear being accused of stating the obvious or of flaunting their textual skills (about equally likely).  So let’s just get it on the table:  the submission of a design by a supposed disciple of the religion whose name means submission leads to a battle in which the architect must decide whether to submit to pressure and withdraw his submission. 

Of course, Mohammed Khan stands at the center of the story, and if he were not a convincing and complex character, the novel might have failed.   Fortunately, he holds the reader’s attention from outset, when he finds himself, like so many others, stereotyped in the immediate days after 9/11, to the surprising conclusion, where we find him looking back over a long career of which his Ground Zero design was both a false start and a catalytic event.  As he embraces a heretofore peripheral identity (he is, after all, American-born and non-practicing when we first meet him), then backs away from both his opponents and his apparent partisans, he is given a strong voice, though only one of many.  One of the great virtues of the novel is that few characters are allowed to remain static figures who keep our admiration, sympathy, or disdain.  In the book’s final pages, in fact, we connect in surprising, and surprisingly satisfying, ways to many figures from the heart of the decades-old controversy

[See "Nine Years After" under "Recent Articles and Reviews" for a piece on other 9/11 writing]

Ground Zero, November, 2011

Our local independent bookstore features literary quotations written high on its walls.  My favorite is from Logan Pearsall Smith, an early twentieth century writer: “People say life’s the thing, but I prefer reading.”  I wouldn’t go that far, but I think life is often enhanced by reading while living.  When I travel, for example, I seek out both fiction and non-fiction about my destination before and during the trip.

Two weeks ago, I experienced an almost perfect symbiosis of life and reading.  Visiting New York for a board meeting of Facing History and Ourselves, which was to begin with a visit to Ground Zero, I took along a novel that enriched an already profound experience.

Because of Facing History’s reputation and its many supporters, we were given exceptional access to the site, including a talk by the director of the National September 11^th Museum, and a tour of the memorial with him as our guide.  Next we were privileged to participate in a small group conversation with architect Michael Arad, the designer of the “Reflecting Absence” pools that occupy the site of each tower.

Every part of this event was simultaneously painful, and, in a sense, uplifting. Museum director Lee Ielpi, a retired New York fireman whose firefighter son died on 9/11, introduced us to the mementoes people retrieved from the site and donated to the museum.  One in particular struck me: an investment manager who had located the small set of bilingual dictionaries he had used for his work, and who said he donated them as a reminder of the need for all peoples to understand each other.  Among the quotations painted on the museum’s pillars and walls, I read with a shudder both of shock and of admiration for their power, these words of the poet Hettie Jones: “We are breathing the dead, taking them into our lungs as living we had taken into our arms.”

Mr. Ielpi spoke to us of his son, their last phone call as the young man headed out with his rescue crew, and the three months before his body was discovered.  Throughout the tour he focused not on esthetics and numbers, but on the human beings who perished – and who he always described as “murdered.”  He consistently referred to them as souls, and told us of the 19,000 yet unidentified body parts and the more than 1000 victims as yet unaccounted for.  He told us the remains will be stored below the memorial, and re-examined as DNA research advances, and most movingly, of the special rights families of the missing will have to visit the vaults to be near whatever may remain of their loved ones.

Leaving the museum, we went to a nearby location, where Michael Arad spoke about his design and answered questions.  Arad, who was 34 when he began working on the project, barely looks that age today.  He spoke about the concept for the design, and the many ways he worked on it before ever entering the competition.  (Just before he received the commission, he had been working for New York City designing police stations.)

Above all, Arad’s sensitivity to the meaning of the memorial came through.  The most contentious part of the project had been the inscribing of names.  Some had assumed simple alphabetical order, others had urged that rescuers be separated from other victims, still others that their ages, affiliations, or other information be included.  Arad firmly believed that a name alone should represent each person, and that aside from noting the tower, plane, or other location where people died, and placing police and firefighters in their own groups, there should be only one ordering principle: families should be allowed to request proximity of their loved one to others important to them.  Despite opposition from many who thought the task too complicated, and with Mayor Bloomberg’s support, he persevered, and with enormous care and patience, 1200 specific requests were accommodated.  Some of these were remarkable: partners who had not shared the same last name, best friends, but also some that required ingenuity, such as the young woman who wanted her father, killed on one of the planes, to be near her friend, killed in the towers, or two brothers, one a firefighter, the other a policeman.  In these cases, one of the two is listed as the last person in their section, tower, plane, or rescue group, and the other as the first person in theirs.  That such care was given, even though perhaps only one living person will know, demonstrated a depth of commitment from the living to the dead that was, as I said earlier, inspiring and uplifting, even in the face of grief.

Next blog: the truth of fiction

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            Whenever I read about educating American students so they can “compete and succeed” (usually followed by “in a global marketplace” or some such), I think of a story I once heard about Americans introducing football to Samoa just after World War II.  As the story goes, the Samoans took to football instantly, which seems entirely plausible, given the fact that Samoans are now 56 times more likely to play in the NFL than other Americans (yes, they are Americans). 

            The strange (and admittedly unconfirmed) part, is that the Samoans played with one difference: they played for a significant length of time, and when the score was tied after enough play, they happily stopped, while their U.S. teachers tried to explain that the purpose of the game was for one side to win.

            True?  I’m not at all sure.  But there are many other cases where we know that the European-American view of competition and winning clashed with other cultures’ views of cooperation and sharing.  Think of the Native Americans in Manhattan and elsewhere, who thought they were agreeing to share land and exchange gifts, while the colonists thought they were buying exclusive rights.

            Last week I talked about what it would mean to prepare all children equally by giving them equal access to health care, education, technology, nutrition, and personal safety.  I can’t help but think that, aside from the enormous amount of money that would demand from the wealthy, there is also an underlying fear of truly unleashing millions more highly capable people into American law, business, medicine, and other lucrative fields. 

            That fear assumes that a large majority of these young people would be eager to compete, and to compete for the same things.  But if that were true, would anyone go into the clergy, teaching, social work, health care (other than the highly paid specialties), or any of the hundreds of jobs that do not promise large financial rewards?  We know it’s possible to make people want things they wouldn’t ordinarily – look at the power of marketing and advertising in America today – but the fact that the number of humanities majors has dropped by almost half since 1970, while the number of business majors has risen by almost three-quarters, is only proof that our wants are conditioned, not innate.

            More and more research shows that people, and many of our near and even distant mammalian cousins, are more cooperative than we once thought.  From mirror neurons, which cause us to react biologically as if we are having the same positive or negative experience as someone we are watching, to evidence that people who help others report a greater increase in happiness than those they helped, it is becoming harder than ever to see either nature or ourselves as entirely red in tooth and claw.

            So don’t worry, millionaires and billionaires. Even if every child in America had a clear path to becoming a Donald Trump or a Bill Gates, the majority of us would still be content with entirely different lives, based on entirely different definitions of success.  Frank Lloyd Wright, who worked for a number of them, once said “Many wealthy people are little more than the janitors of their possessions.”  It might be better to be a real janitor, but be in possession of your life.