Listening as An Inside Job

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Hello Reader,

Got inner listening?

Every few years, I come across a slick paged popular magazine article, with a description on “listening,” advising such skills such as nodding your head, or not crossing your arms. I say: “Never mind!” 

And (figuratively) so says Richard Farson, the man who first observed and described all those visible skills, skills now taught to social workers. At the time, he was working with psycho-therapist Carl Rogers. 

What Farson says, specifically, is he wishes he had never published all those “skills.” Because, and I agree with him, it is better just to listen sincerely. (He says this in his great little book Management of the Absurd, with forward by Michael Crichton) I am sure if you are listening hard then your physical actions, if any, will take care of themselves—Better than using your skills to to fake that you are listening! 

Instead of skills, why not follow the advice of Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurly Brown who said, in her famous Mad Men era self help book, Sex and the Single Girl, (in my own words) “when you go on a date, listen really hard.” Isn’t that common sense? I guess not.

Listening “hard and sincerely” leads us into the realm of “focus.” A good word. Unfortunately, the closest the magazine articles ever get to “focus” is this advice: to paraphrase back what the other person just said. But I think “saying back” is mostly meant to make sure you interpreted right, not for helping you to stay focused on hearing what the other person is saying.

Focus means getting beyond your ego. I try. People have long said I am a good listener, which would always surprise me: Doesn’t everyone try hard? But I realize now I’ve been doing more than just trying hard: Having recently read Zen in the Art of Archery, I am aware of things beyond our everyday understanding.

Now, before I delve into the “zen” of an ego-disciplined mind, let me hasten to observe that some well-meaning people dial down their listening. Why? Because they assume they are “supposed to” be trying to “think as they hear,” meaning: thinking of what they will reply. My response? Don’t do that! Don’t try to do two things at once. Only listen. 

I am convinced it is worthwhile to wait until the other person’s sentence has come to a full stop. Only then boot up your CPU (Central Processing Unit) to think it over, and then, only after that, think of what to say. What seems to take too many seconds? Worth it! For then the person feels heard… 

In this sad world, for too many people, being heard is all too rare: No wonder I get told I am a good listener. I will always show even an impatient “type A personality” that I respect them enough to take time to listen and think. Even an impatient person will respect that. 

And hey, let’s remember, time telescopes when you are being looked at. What seems like a few long seconds? Microseconds! It’s barely a few microseconds.

I am sure there is an inner level of listening many people never achieve. From Book Three of David Gerrold’s War against the Chtorr, told in the first person, is a scene in a children’s refugee orphan camp. Even though the hero wants something from the young camp director, he isn’t truly listening. 

QUOTE 

I made an impatient waving gesture with one hand. “I know all that, Birdie. Let’s just cut to the chase, all right?”

She turned her chair to face me, pulled it close and leaned in close. She said, “What I’m getting at is this: for someone who seen as much and done as much in the past two years as you have, you are one of the most pompous, arrogant, and unlikable bigots it has ever been my misfortune to deal with. I like you, but it doesn’t change the fact that you have the very bad habit of not really listening to people. You’re not really listening now. You’re more concerned with boogey men up in the hills than in dealing with the children you’ve supposedly accepted responsibility for. At the first…

UNQUOTE (page 289)

Key phrase: “You aren’t really listening.”

Ego. Such a strange filter. It is a listener’s weak ego, I am sure, including his “I know more than you do” that makes him assume his own concerns, during a conversation, including his thoughts about the future, are more important than the person “here and now.” Ego can filter out the big world, if we are not willing to humbly release our own little world while we listen.

But there’s another sort of filter used by the weak: Here’s a scenario from an essay by computer millionaire Paul Graham. He runs a company to advise groups of “founders” of “startup” (computer software) companies. Again the place is an office. Graham converses, but do they listen? He describes unsuccessful founders in terms of their listening.

QUOTE Like real world resourcefulness, conversational resourcefulness often means doing things you don't want to. Chasing down all the implications of what's said to you can sometimes lead to uncomfortable conclusions. The best word to describe the failure to do so is probably "denial," though that seems a bit too narrow. A better way to describe the situation would be to say that the unsuccessful founders had the sort of conservatism that comes from weakness. They traversed idea space as gingerly as a very old person traverses the physical world. UNQUOTE

At the office location, Graham’s partner wrote:

QUOTE
My feeling with the bad groups is that coming into office hours, they've already decided what they're going to do and everything I say is being put through an internal process in their heads, which either desperately tries to munge what I've said into something that conforms with their decision or just outright dismisses it and creates a rationalization for doing so. They may not even be conscious of this process but that's what I think is happening when you say something to bad groups and they have that glazed over look. I don't think it's confusion or lack of understanding per se, it's this internal process at work.

With the good groups, you can tell that everything you say is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if it's dismissed, it's because of some logical reason e.g. "we already tried that" or "from speaking to our users that isn't what they'd like," etc. Those groups never have that glazed over look. UNQUOTE

(from the essay A Word to the Resourceful, (link)

Maybe if folks say I’m a good listener then it’s because my eyes don’t glaze over: You might say I keep a zen “beginner’s mind.”

Back to those popular magazines with slick pages for people to carelessly flip through: I think it logically follows that pop writers won’t put in dense paragraphs that require effort: Nothing about such hard-to-describe things as “zen,” or “filters,” or even “focus.”  

I think if the average person won’t set their ego aside, then the average person won’t be a good listener. A wise man said: The average person can’t run a mile; it’s normal to be able to run four miles. 

Dear reader, let us listen normally, from the inside.

Sean Crawford

In a cabin in the foothills

Calgary

October

2018

Sad Sidebar: 

I wonder: Was Paul Bremer, America’s man in Iraq, in charge of America’s war effort “to instil democracy,” any good at listening? Or—? Question: Did President Bush send a closed-eared ‘control freak’ to Iraq? Given Bremer’s gargantuan, egregious mistakes, mistakes that every single Iraqi taxi driver, barber, translator or Iraqi leader would have advised against, crying “Nooo…!” I guess I don’t have to ask.

In the nonfiction book Imperial Life in the Emerald City (with a foreword by the director of the Matt Damon movie Green Zone) is the chapter The Plan Unravels.

How sad: 

An Arab council to create a government is listening and sharing and consensus building, and has al-l-l-most enough mutual confidence to announce agreement with Bremer’s plan. Rushing to a vote would only result in a glorified opinion poll. Bremer? Not listening. He uses his power, as leader of the American Occupation, to order them to rush.

Across Iraq, disaster ensues.

The chapter ends quoting Adel Abtel-Mahdi, later the finance minister, saying ruefully, “If Bremer had only given us an extra day, none of this would have happened. We would have had the democratic government that the Americans promised us when they went to war.”  

Our grandparents had a folk ballad:

For the want of a nail, a (horse) shoe is lost,

For the want of a shoe, a rider is lost,

For the want of a rider, a battle is lost,

For the want of a battle, a kingdom is lost,

And all for the want of a nail.

Sing it, sister:

“For the want of an ear, 

a country is lost,

For the want of a country,

A war (on terror) is lost, 

and all for the want of an ear.”

That book, by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, is published by Vintage Books, and has won several awards.

Three Footnotes:

~In the second paragraph I mentioned Carl Rogers. I really liked Roger’s brand of therapy, of listening with positive regard and acceptance—just reading Roger’s work was healing for me, back in my youth.

~Women's Liberation (feminism) arose as women met for circles of "consciousness raising" where they would defy society (and what they were "supposed to" think) by listening to each other.

~For Making Conversation, here’s a nice link, where I found that being in a conversation is like being in the world, like looking for a blog topic: Get off, (the couch) Go out, and “Prepare to be amazed.”

George Carlin and Diversity

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It’s impossible to overestimate the importance of Jerry Hamza in my career and life.  Without Jerry, I don’t think I would have escaped from the financial and creative swamp that bad choices and drugs had landed me in by the late seventies. Without his support and unerring instincts I would’ve never had the confidence to go beyond stand-up and begin to explore comedy as art. Along the way he also became something I’d never allowed myself before: my best friend.

George Carlin,

Strident, funny,

and gracious in person

1937-2008,

R.I.P.

I can relate to comedian George Carlin, as seen on Youtube. There he stands: independent, realistic, with his roots in diversity. That’s a buzzword these days, “diversity.”

In Carlin’s case, he came not from New York City, but from an all-Irish neighborhood within New York: Nuns, schoolteachers, nuns as schoolteachers, cops, everyone he knew in the youth gangs—all Irish. I suppose New York was ahead of the rest of the U.S. in replacing their old traditional belief in “melting pot” with “pluralism”: In fact, I think New Yorkers had never melted in: “Who’s your rabbi?” was the question a politician, back in Grandpa’s day, would ask of any individual who wanted action or help on something: asking this literally of any Jews, and figuratively, I guess, of any member of any diverse group. The impoverished concrete jungle was rough; you gained power from your group, fronted by “your rabbi.”

Carlin was intelligent but poor. He made it to ninth grade, and went off to the air force at age 17—where he hung out with black servicemen. Not from being diverse, but from being independent of white conformity. If the only fellows in the barracks who listen to jazz records and toke up are black, well, that’s where you go.

I can relate. A friend once said, “You out-liberal the liberals” as I wouldn’t let fear of losing my “straight white privilege” keep me from doing the right thing. I couldn’t control my natural fear, but I could control my actions. Well. To this day one of my brothers thinks I’m homosexual. I think he’s frustrated.

Late in Carlin’s career he stopped doing jokes about dogs and cats, driving habits and department stores. Instead he started doing angry jokes about the world. As Carlin learned at last regarding his stage comedy, italics his:

QUOTE (p 247) Laughter is not the only form of success. Boy, what a liberating recognition that was! UNQUOTE

Success could be making people think. So idealistic. Of course, then he needed to become an informed idealist. Here’s the previous, younger Carlin:

QUOTE (p228) “…I didn’t have any synthesized sets of feelings or information about politics. Beyond a few one-liners about racism or Vietnam I had no coherent point of view. It was more a question of: “Let’s just get HIIIGGGHHH! Yeah, man, I’m against this and I’m against that, but who the fuck knows why?”” UNQUOTE

That’s from George Carlin’s memoir, Last Words with Tony Hendra. I am sure George would want me to include Tony’s name, as George was a gentleman. For example, when he wanted to use ideas from Jurassic Park for his Save the Planet sketch, he got permission from Michael Crichton… (Remember Jeff Goldblume’s character? In the movie he merely gets to say, “You did it because you could, without asking whether you should!” But in the book version he gets several good long passages for speaking against hubris) …I know Carlin asked him, because Crichton said so on his web site where, until around Crichton’s death, Carlin’s Youtube sketch was embedded.

Carlin again:

QUOTE (P234) “My new direction was slowly making itself known to me—by the reading I was choosing and the things I was tearing out and circling in periodicals. I was beginning to keep what amounted to a journal in another form: a record of my reactions to issues.” UNQUOTE

I smile to think of the older Carlin having reactions, because, like his father who beat him, at an earlier stage George didn’t have much access to his feelings. I can relate. Today, like Carlin, I don’t join any political parties, although I know maybe I should. In Carlin’s case, in his memoir he admits readers might find it “escapist” that he doesn’t join parties and things, but he likes all people as individuals, and he thinks they lose something when they conform to a group. In Carlin’s defense, let’s remember he was a wide-ranging comedian, which to me means he shouldn’t be tied down

to one race, religion or (political party) creed.

Like Carlin, I may be left-wing, but I’m also like him in being independent.

QUOTE (p 232) “…The habits of liberals, their automatic language, their knee-jerk responses to certain issues, deserved the epithets the right wing stuck them with… Here they were, banding together in packs, so that I could predict what they were going to say about some event or conflict and it wasn’t even out of their mouths yet. I was very uncomfortable with that. Liberal orthodoxy was as repugnant to me as conservative orthodoxy.” UNQUOTE

I learned the word “orthodox” as a child from the science fiction novel Nineteen Eighty-four, by George Orwell. After that, I’ve avoided being orthodox, even as I leaned left. If I’m a liberal, then maybe it’s because I read science fiction. You know that amazing inter-racial kiss on the original Star Trek? (Kirk and Uhura) Maybe it was controversial to watchers of the telly; but not to readers of sf. Not to me.

But here’s the thing: I get homesick reading about the white picket fence towns in Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, written back in the 1940’s. If tomorrow I wrote a detective novel set in a sprawling U.S. Mars colony, with gleaming hydroponic tanks, then I might include slums for my gritty hero to walk down, but not enclaves of diversity, let alone walled ghettos. I say: Forget diversity.

A cry of disbelief, directed down at me from the peanut gallery: “What? —You can’t forget diversity! (It’s so true, good and beautiful) Don’t you want to nurture and fertilize it?”  

Let the last words be George Carlin’s, (p 158) italics his:

I used to be Irish Catholic. Now I’m an American. You know—you GROW.

Sean Crawford

October

Calgary

2016

Footnotes:

~Last Words by George Carlin

with Tony Hendra

Free Press

New York, NY

2009

Trade paperback edition, quoted here, November 2010

A Memoir,

with Introduction by Tony Hendra

~I think Crichton was a guest on the PBS Charlie Rose show more times than any one else: I wish Crichton’s estate would put the Charlie Rose interviews back on his web site…

~I wrote of Crichton and the “politicization of science” in my essay Angry With Michael Crichton archived November 2011

Global Hot Air

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So my brother e-mails me all the way from the Philippine Islands, where he lives, to say he figures this global warming stuff is a smoke screen for something... He asks me if I have any ideas about what's going on. I don't know.

I reply that here in the Alberta oil patch if the average person writes into the newspaper letters section to express any skepticism at all then there is sure to be an emotional insulting reply, from another person, accusing him of being a stooge for an oil company. Hence no one will write in anymore. So that's it for public responsibility.

I said that a (local?) syndicated journalist wrote that it is OK for journalists to be biased on this issue—  although normally journalists hold on dearly to their ethics. Except in this case. So that's it for responsibility from the fourth estate. (journalists)

Which leaves only the scientists, those who traditionally, regardless of their community passions, strive to be scientific when it comes to science. Unfortunately I read in the paper how a local university professor did not go to a conference of his peers back east. He said he would be extremely unwelcome for his views on whether or not global warming was caused by carbon dioxide. So that's it: "Objective" scientists will object to someone expressing "his" views rather than respond by analyzing "the" views.

I told my brother it's like being in one of those science fiction societies where the hero and his pals are the only ones who know of X. I take comfort from President Harry Truman, a history buff, saying philosophically, "We go through such hysterias on occasion; nobody knows why."

If individuals on the far side of the globe are starting to ask questions, then maybe the Dark Side is not so monolithic. Dawn will come. As President Lincoln said: This too shall pass.

Sean Crawford,

Jedi Knight,

Spring 2008/13

Update: Today, April 22, 2013, the Canadian Minister of Natural Resources is reported as being stonewalled by the New York Times, in the Calgary Herald. It seems that "according to Oliver and his aide, he sent a 550-word op-ed or letter to the editor to the NYT—sent to various inboxes—but it was never published...the (NYT) also has a huge staff and surely must screen for letters that come from government officials who are rebutting several pieces that have run on their editorial pages.

So, there are two possibilities here. Either the editors read Oliver's letter and didn't like that it exposes their shoddy fact checking, or ...

So, Oliver is hoping that his meeting with the New York Times today will help set the record straight."

It is an open secret that many are opposed to the Keystone pipeline not on the merits of 21st century pipeline technology but as a way to combat tar sands and global warming. It looks to me like the media is still biased—although, as I said, normally journalists  believe in ethics.

footnotes:

~By "syndicated" I mean she was also published in the Sun for two other cities.

~The professor story, by Licia Corbella, ran November 30, 2005 on page 4 of the Calgary Sun.

~Regarding science, my Smokers essay of September 2011 refers readers to Michel Crichton's speeches on his web site. He quotes the UN climate report at length, and documents how climate data from a European site "has been changed." Back home on the farm we called that "has been falsified."

Citizen Rocky

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Perspective

In the US of A are many ideologies. I call it “ideology” when believers won’t second-guess themselves upon meeting someone from Canada or Britain, even when that someone gives them a funny look and says, “Are you sure? Because no one in my country believes that.”

Here’s my thought experiment: Suppose, like many in the US in recent years, I am a “market fundamentalist,” believing the free market is always functional and Good and Morally Correct. (Let’s forget we had to rush up to Canada for vaccines after the marketplace failed us during the panic over the avian flu) Suppose one day I’m at my country club with two of my fellow “fundies.” In walks a man pleased with himself and his new million-dollar bonus, a financial executive who has just helped to melt down Wall Street and plunge the world into a recession. Do I smile, share his happiness at his new bonus, and invite him to join us to make a foursome for golf?... No…

The principle here, it seems to me, is all of our enforceable US laws are under the umbrella of the US Constitution. Meanwhile, all my morals, my circles of friends and my ideologies are under the non-enforceable umbrella of Citizenship. It’s a higher umbrella: Any warm body, any civilian, is always under the legal code; but only good citizens will choose to commit to a moral code. For financial executives, it’s a choice as old as the Greeks: As Homer pointed out regarding Agamemnon’s unfair treatment of Achilles, an unfairness that undermined the war effort, “sometimes a citizen has the perfect legal right but not any moral right.”

I learned in college about how the Iliad begins with Achilles, the invulnerable superhero, sulking in his tent. This I learned only from taking a liberal arts (general studies) class - praise the Lord for higher education! I  don't believe college is purely for job training; I don't believe in market fundamentalism.  I do believe in citizenship... 

Citizen Rocky

I still remember a warm summer evening when Corporal John Oxley, an old army buddy, walked me around and around a park and talked some perspective into my head. It helped immensely. A few years later it was my turn to do the same one warm evening at the end of term, walking with a young university man. I’ll bet he still remembers, too. Call it paying it forward. The student’s name was Rocky. He knew how to study hard. But here was the thing: Rocky had just spent a year studying awfully hard, only to get awfully poor results. As we talked, I came to see that my challenge that night was to give Rocky permission to see things from a bigger perspective.

Perhaps, if Rocky and I had been women, I might have pointed out how “just recently” we women, through our weekly consciousness raising groups, had given each other permission to see that society was wrong… The messages we women were getting about when to speak up, what we were supposed to look like and how competent we could appear to be—or aspire to be—were just plain wrong. … Back then nobody could have imagined there would one day be an hour-long weekly TV series about a woman commanding the federation starship Voyager.

Rocky and I, being males of the white collar read-for-pleasure and attend-university sort, had received messages too. On TV was there was the Dick Van Dyke Show and Bewitched: both about businessmen. Peruse the contents of a collection of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and again the message was clear: the hero and his wife and their friends were not merely of the working world, but were specifically of the office world. No proletariats, no artists. It followed logically, then, that the most grown up thing for a white collar university student to do was to value a career program over, say, a program in the fine arts, and to value a business program most of all. And poor Rocky was an earnest sincere young man. Of course he believed what society appeared to believe.

But I knew something about Rocky: he was like me. As a young soldier I had not just been a person wearing green clothing and carrying a gun. No, I had aspired to be a “real soldier” between my ears. And now Rocky was trying to be a “real student.” As it happens, some students, poor fools, are merely persons carrying books, while they merely talk about the weather and gulp beer. They might just as well be clones of their non-student peers. Not Rocky. He conversed with students about “the meaning of life, the universe and everything.” He played on a varsity team, he got involved and of course he voted in student elections. He cared about life. Because I knew Rocky cared, I knew how to reach him.

Perhaps, that night, bearing in mind how students have found “you can’t go home again…” I pointed out to Rocky the importance of the personal growth we associate with our student years. Not so much our later years: For non-students there may be such a thing as too much growth. A book for police chiefs, Police Command, (page 63-64) from the days of long hair, back when peace officers were called “pigs,” notes the common belief, back then, that a policeman will be better able to relate to the community if he takes a few college courses. Then, in the wisdom of that time, he shouldn’t get a complete diploma because too much education would ruin him. (This has changed) Perhaps I pointed out how on remote army bases, just as in General Baden-Powell’s day, soldiers could quickly learn to put on comic stage plays, but the training and growth needed for acting in serious dramas would be beyond their best interest. (This is still true) Only students, traditionally, are seemingly unharmed by, and encouraged in, culture shock and growth. They are not encouraged to squish themselves down. But then they can’t go home again.

Maybe I said such things, but most likely? I think I talked in terms of citizenship. After all, Rocky was already an involved, participating member of his university... A few weeks later, as a number of us were straggling into the warm night from the student bar, I overheard Rocky saying something like, “Sean said a soldier has a narrow circle of interest, a businessman has a bigger circle, but a citizen has the widest view of all.” In a nutshell, that’s what I had said to him. Why squish yourself down, before you even graduate, to restrict your circle? Why not, to quote my feminist soccer friends, “go for the gusto!”

It follows logically that a spirited citizen could well use the campus years to pursue some grand interests. The old motto of the University of Calgary, translated, is “I will lift up my eyes.”  Rocky switched majors to something he cared about, something that fit his values: He started to seriously learn about history. Immediately, without any more effort than before, he was getting A’s. (This was in Canada, where A’s are hard to get) It all worked out; now he has a good job with a good pension. Today Rocky is still like me: I teach classes at work, and with my essays, while Rocky teaches at school.

Summer becomes winter; winter becomes summer. Down the years into middle age I have had my circles of friends, and yes, some of them have been “fundies.” I maintain my economic bias and vested interests, of course, but I never forget how all this is embedded in something higher, in “the big picture.” When I lift up my eyes I lift my spirits too.

Sean Crawford

Summer, 2011

Calgary

Sidebar:

Choose your values well: In the literary novel Revolution Road (later to be a Brad Pitt movie) the hero has a tragic friend: A man who, like many in those days of the “strong, silent Hemmingway ideal” had used his considerable will power to warp his life into being a “regular guy,” a man uncultured, with an uncultured wife, a man not too verbally skilled. Sad to say, I can relate to him.

Footnotes from Academia:

Here is a link to a good editorial in the local student newspaper on "why university?" with a perspective on citizenship

US citizens may be surprised to hear that here in the Canadian part of North America nobody bothers to put the adjective “good” in front of university. As in Australia and Europe, all of our universities are good. Same with our high schools.

US Americans may also be surprised to know that in Asia students enjoy being photographed with their sensei, while in Canada teachers are respected and nicely paid. (Respected, but with mixed feelings, like with lawyers) When I read Michael Crichton’s brief scene of how US yuppies regard teachers, (in Timeline?) I felt revulsion. Don’t yuppies know any better? I recall a congressional committee during the cold war investigating US schools and then reporting that if the system had been purposely set up by communists it would not have been any worse.

Imagine my despair last month when the New York Times was serving as a forum for concerned citizens who were strangely ignorant of the efforts of their congress even though they were concerned about the state of the schools… they were trying to be open minded… but not one was bloody willing to take their head out of their america! No one dared look at how other nations do it. Hello, there are foreign countries? Where people speak English? It’s not impossible to do like Rikki Tikki Tavi: “Run and find out!”

Meanwhile, I don’t suppose they looked at what a fellow New Yorker, John Gatto, wrote back in 1991, either.

As for post-secondary schools, as regards real world professional status: According to my professors, who have traveled to North American academic conferences, (and compared and contrasted) my Canadian degree program is easily equivalent to a US master’s degree. Easily. But the Yankees won’t admit it. Among the reasons is this: They forget that US universities, besides still not achieving closure on the Vietnam conflict, have still not addressed the grade inflation of the Vietnam years. This inflation was from department heads trying to help draft evaders keep from flunking out. There are still entire faculties where the average grade is definitely not a C.

Angry With Michael Crichton

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Headnote: This essay came about because two or more obituaries claimed he was "rebuked by congress." I tried doing a tiresome google search using rebuke and testimony. I found only that one or two congresscritters had disagreed that day with Crichton before he even started to speak, with one saying she wanted "facts not fiction" but I found no record of a rebuke.
MAYBE those obit writers were better researchers than I...BUT I suspect they did not like Michael's philosophy.



This week the author of the novel State of Fear, Michael Crichton, has passed away. (Better known for Jurassic Park.) If a politician dies, or even retires, all is forgiven. A gentleman doesn't speak ill of the dead. But Crichton continues, right now, to inspire fresh hatred from the global warming crowd. And he hasn't even been buried yet! I hope his family will eschew the internet.

On the 'net I see people being willfully blind, irrational— and hateful. One fellow, this week, going down a thread, kept raising new straw man arguments, against Crichton, as fast as they were knocked down. This on a thread that started as a sober memorial by fans. The problem, of course, is that, unlike being able to forget an out-of-sight politician, the hate-mongers can't forget how Crichton's essays and speeches are still in print. As is State of Fear.

As it happens the hate-mongers, some of them, will openly say on the web they haven't read his book, nor his testimony before congress. Instead they will attack him as a person, adding that being a mere novelist, and not a scientist, he "should not be allowed to testify" in the first place. His speech in the senate (which as you know is one half of the bicameral congress) is on his web site. I found his speech, but not his testimony. I, for one, sense the hate-mongers are claiming that Crichton testified against global warming and carbon dioxide. By fixating on their claim, like a pit bull stuck to an arm, they don't have to lift their eyes to face the implications of what Crichton actually said.

(Sex)

It is ironic. By expressing hatred, by refusing to read, by refusing to objectively refute, they are living proof of what Crichton testified about: that science, at least in the climate change domain, is moving away from science towards politics and propaganda. It is amazing to me that in our day and age people can graduate college but not soak up basic "Philosophy of Science 101."

Understanding the basis of Science—not just climate science—is the Key.

If I might reference an earlier controversy: I wasn't born yet when Alfred Kinsey did his research. He astounded people by showing that homosexuals were not a mere fraction of a fraction of one percent. And not, it logically followed, just a scattering of "bad" people who had "chosen" to be gay. By using the "Key" an entomologist can have a valid opinion regarding the methodology of a sex researcher. And vice versa. A scientist with a Christian religion who disagrees with Kinsey's 1940's sex research findings should be able to calmly, without hatred, refute Kinsey by doing "new, improved" research. But hatred is a good excuse for claiming, "I don't have the time to research, I don't need to read Kinsey..." Sounds familiar, I know. "I don't need to read the footnotes in State of Fear..." The novel is purely fiction, the copious footnotes are true and pure.

(Key)

Crichton was a man who knew the Key. He found himself, in this brave new millennium, having to raise the awareness of congress by referring to the methods used in drug research trials, methods which are naturaly more stringent that the ones for, say, sociology. A hate-monger claimed on the web that Crichton was saying that climate research should be just as rigorous and verifiable as medical research. Wrong. Crichton was saying that we should not shrink from trying to have reasonable science standards where possible.

These standards would include doing separate experiments to verify research, and separate computer simulations to verify computer modeling, both in space (today) and in time. (After some years, does the computer model still hold up?) The fact that it took literally years before the United Nations hockey stick graph was verified by two Canadians... and thereby exposed as false... is a disgrace to science. Not just to the global warmers but to Science. The fact that the hockey scientists would not readily share their raw data... is not what I was taught to do as an idealistic student in science class. Unlike magic, a science experiment must be repeatable by others.

I remember when that graph, of global temperatures shooting up like the blade on a stick, made the front pages all over the world. Being an idealist, as I have documented in my Citizen Activists essay, I appreciated that graph. I thought: Sweet! Cool! Wow! ...Years later I did not appreciate abruptly learning how unscientific the graph was. I felt betrayed. I fully expect scientists, in their everyday lives, to be less than saints. I also expect them, in their professional lives, to be reliable. To have, as my grandmother would say, integrity.

(Witch)

Oh dear. Did everyone notice how in the above paragraph I just "had" to wave my activist credentials? A sure sign that society has hysteria is when I have to look away from an issue and, instead, call a time-out to "defend" myself. To me this is so degrading: as in arguing against the horrors of Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunt and suddenly coming to a full stop—and switching gears—to say whether I am now, or have ever been, a witch. Oh well, at least my credentials were on topic; at least I didn't try to gratuitously say whether or not I believed in the environment.

Most folks who have read this far, enjoying people in general, would be bored to hear any more about the hate-mongers.... Many readers, interested in individuals, would rather I moved on to tell my personal story. OK, that suits me, even though I am modest—because my life story is relevant to my being angry with Crichton.

Angry With Crichton, Part II

My life was nice. At a young age, in my twenties, many of my happiest productive hours were spent as a young volunteer reporter for my university student newspaper. Our campus had no career program in journalism, but as keen volunteers we soaked up "Journalism 101." I learned that an ethical reporter will always strive for "balance" by using multiple sources, and then letting the reader decide. If I quote a rehabilitation expert, as head of a parole board, saying that a memorable killer with a life sentence is to be allowed to go free, and if the parole board experts all agree, then I should nevertheless also seek out someone who disagrees, perhaps a tearful survivor. My readers will of course agree with a consensus of experts, but they still deserve a chance to consider the other side.

My journalism peers told a folk story, to promote the rule of balance, of the sole exception to having ethics: a man followed some G.I.s into a Nazi death camp and proceeded to file his grim story without first getting a Nazi quote for balance. "Sometimes," he said "there is no other side."

(Con)

Years ago l noticed that a certain nation-wide chain of newspapers was publishing every single one of its global warming stories without ever trying for balance. Unfortunately, in the media, ownership tends to mean control. And I think, from some (off topic) scant evidence, that these particular owners are too arrogant to go back and learn ethics 101. For a long time I had noticed this bias. Finally, at last, a syndicated journalist with a weekly environment page addressed the issue by saying that it was fine to not have balance because of the importance of the issue, because readers might be "confused." At the time I hoped it was just "her and the owners" and not "her and the other reporters too." Now my hope has dwindled. That no other journalists rang any alarm bells is a sign of— ...of something disgusting.

My young life was nice. At the age of 17, when I moved out alone from the innocent farm to the big city, I didn't know the slang "grifter." I did know "con artist." I knew I wasn't magically immune to being fleeced. I figured I had only two things going for me. First, cons usually depend on the mark being greedy. I wasn't. Second, the con man usually generates a sense of urgency. So as I gawked at the skyscrapers I resolved to be on the lookout for any such urgings. When the above journalist implied, "the end justifies the means" she was trying to exuse her actions, to herself and others, by trying to generate a contagious urgency.

(Panic)

It was nice how the other student reporters let me volunteer to "do the Ernest Hemingway newsman thing" without first being a student myself. Years earlier, just like young Louis L' Amour, I was an avid reader yet not afraid of hard work. And so I was once a soldier—for six of the happiest years of my life. I was picked for junior (NCO) leadership school. Yes, it was hard.

Of course we took parade drill and book learning such as the Geneva convention. More important was learning problem solving, "task procedure," for on base and in the field, and, most important of all, learning "NATO battle procedure." This meant disciplining our minds to always do certain things in a certain order. Leading an attack was stressfull but straight forward. Equally hard, in a different way, were mock problems such as using our troops to suddenly improvise an effective checkpoint, rescue a wounded paratrooper high up a tree, lead a bomb search without any previous search training, and so forth. As confident soldiers, our tendency during such role playing was to revert to what we thought we would do in real life. Wrong. Or to hurry too fast. Wrong again. Our true goal was this: to learn to use army procedure with due deliberate speed.

Of course in an immediate emergency such as first aide we would "think" super-fast, rather than use deliberate thinking...but we would still follow super-quick procedure (ABC means airway breathing circulation—in that order). There is never, ever, a need to close our eyes and hurry in a blind panic. I won't close my eyes to the scientific method, depite the urgings of persons with a global warming religion.

I wish certain civilians would learn to slow down. Poor U.S. soldiers might have avoided Iraq; we might have avoided eight years of President Bush, if only the Florida designer of the "butterfly ballot" had slowed down enough to take the time to do a user test. At least, to her credit, as a check and balance, she did have the humility to go down the hall and show the butterfly ballot to some other government workers. Unfortunately, they carefully looked it up and down and pronounced it, "Good."

Had the Florida folks slowed down to spend a little money on research into what computer experts call the "user interface" they would have learned something: actual users do not look a ballot up and down. They just look for their candidate's name so they can mark it. They won't always notice if the butterfly "wings" are not symmetrical but offset by a line. God only knows how many votes, which should have gone to Bush's rival, went instead to some guy named Buchanan. Call it the butterfly effect: Someone waves a ballot and years later a storm of steel rages over Baghdad.

(Ethics)

Urgency does not excuse panic. I believe there is always time for media ethics, for science ethics, and always time to verify science. We could do double blind experiments; we could take the time to give the same research problem to three laboratories. We could give an experiment, of ice core rings, say, to three labs. Let all three do algorithms and generate equations and do regression analysis and so forth. If all three get a hockey stick then, "Sweet!" No team will dare fudge results. By doing proper science we will never have to sadly say, as Florida did, "If only—."

The late Michael Crichton explained so much so well during his senate speech. His family has restored his web site; once again I can read his speeches and essays. Meanwhile, his hateful detractors not only won't read his testimony, they will not even care to know he has those articles, articles not merely about climate but about things under the general roof of science—and media too. I think people are wrong to be angry at him.

His site includes several PBS videos from being a guest on The Charlie Rose Show. I am grateful to have seen several long video-taped speeches where Michael is charming and understated. Of course, being human, at some level he must have been angry. Perhaps he expressed his anger at home. Figuratively, I am beside him in solidarity. As a guest in Michael's kitchen, I am angry too, right along with him.



Sean Crawford

November, 2008

footnotes:

Forgive my overkill, but here Journalist Jon Franklin, who won a pulitzer for his account of a brain surgery, has posted his a keynote speech to toxicologists, addressing the politicalization of science.  It's quite a long speech but I was fascinated all through, as I'm sure his audience was too. The truth is out there, and it's grim.

And here a local writer tackles the issue of verifying computer models with the real world, over time.

Update for January 2014: Chricthon's website has been changed to leave things out. Here is a snipped version of his speech. It would be sad for you to go from that short version to a link where people, including scientists, are wilfully misrepresenting him to put him down. I don't know if they are being self-important or have a vested interest. I have yet to see him put down by someone who explicitly states a belief that global warming is not (anthropegenic) manmade.

I found several YouTube clips of congress that seems to be made by a Nineteen Eighty-Four type of leftist: everything edited to put Crichton in shadow and highlight his detracters. His actual testimony was NOT shown... I can't fathom having so much hatred as to cause such unfairness.

I referenced Crichton last month in Editing and Climategate, also in my very short essay Global Hot Air, (May 2011) and in my one where I call him my hero, Smokers and World Peace. (September 2011)

By the way, another writer hero of mine is Sir Winston Churchill. I have many of his books. During the war if any of his staff wrote that today in Burma our forces were "fighting with the Japanese" he would have them change it to "fighting against the Japanese."