Group Level Integrity

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Goodbye, Norma Jean … a candle in the wind

Rock singer, Sir Elton John

Who killed Norma Jean?

Folk singer, Pete Seeger

Who killed Whitney Houston?

Unsung

I’m still “getting it,” these questions of who did what.

What’s got me thinking is a passage from Book Three of a series about an ecological disaster, the Chtorr Wars, by a denizen of southern California, David Gerrold. The hero agrees to attend futuristic “human potential” training. There is a huge attendance, anonymous enough for guys to be tempted to wimp out and slack off, I guess. Friday night is “welcoming and orientation:” The students give their word that next morning they will be in their seats, ready to go, at nine a.m. Result? Some of them, about ten percent, “think so little of the words that fall out of their mouths” that they straggle out of their rooms late or don’t even show up and have to be summoned. The trainer is so angry. He explains this war won’t be won by accident; they will need “integrity,” which means: keeping their word and helping others to do the same.

So far, I get it; I try to have integrity too, not just because my favorite people do, but also as a consistent life style choice, even if I am in an anonymous crowd, or alone where no one will see me. The trainer continues—and let me say his anger is for emphasis, not for getting personal—and he says, looking unimpressed, to those who were on time, 

“So you think your integrity is handled because you were on time? Well, it’s not. Because there’s another whole level of it here that you’re not experiencing. It’s no accident,” Foreman said to him “that you’re in a group that can’t be trusted ten percent of the time. That’s you—that’s your integrity at the level of the group.”

As for me, well, at least I’m starting to get it, at least individually. My path to understanding began with my teacher, Mr. Thompson, playing folk records one day. He played for us Pete Seeger’s song for Marilyn Monroe, and another song of Seegar’s, Who Killed Davy Moore? “ “Not I…” said the manager, “Not I…” said the trainer…” They each had their reasons, rationales, excuses and so forth. What counts in the real world? Results! In fact, some business executives flatly refuse to hear excuses. I for one stopped trying to give “reasons” or to defend myself, after the first time some fool misinterpreted me as making an “excuse.” Ouch! So now I focus on results.

Mr. Thompson played those records only once. And so, down the many years, I have misremembered Pete as singing, “Who killed Marilyn Monroe?” (He actually said “Norma Jean”), years where I resolved not to wimp out if ever I came to be tested. (Although it’s too late for Marilyn) And never to say, “I’m only one man, behaving just like all the others want me to!”

And now, as I write this, my community is dealing with the untimely demise of yet another celebrity dying from over-doing drugs, however legal. Poor Whitney Houston. 

As part of our nation’s struggle to comprehend this, a British man on CNN interviewed two famous entertainers. Both were recovering addicts, one in a heavy metal band, and one in Hollywood. Both men said the group around Ms Houston, the “entourage,” failed her. The actor was so determined to publicly stay straight that he fired a man who knowingly offered him illegal drugs; the singer, married with children, finally went straight only after his manager was determined to walk away from all the cash, to quit, if the singer did not get clean. There will always be “reasons” to “enable” someone’s drug using… In my case, if I focus on having integrity, and accepting responsibility, then, I hope, I will “act as if” I am as brave as that metal singer’s blessed manager.

That manager set a fine example for me. We all set examples for our groups, in matters ranging from the life-and-death issues, to the small every-day ones; from a local business, to our national war on terror. A co-worker of mine, Lorna, told me about once being part of a group that traveled on business. As a lone voice, at first, Lorna persuaded all her colleagues not to fudge their expense accounts. In the long run, this surely meant a stronger, more effective group, a group with integrity, knowing they could all count on each other. At the national level the principle would surely apply too. I guess we are stronger, as a body politic, when we help each other do the right thing. The opposite would be, say, doing like folks in the Arab world, where they abdicate their citizen responsibility.

As for what we do, or don’t do, in our group lives… it all matters. For example: Today, if we are in an office, stationed overseas for counter-insurgency, where the “terrain” in which we are maneuvering is the “culture,” then at the very least, if we have given our word to understand that culture, we would stop a buddy when we see him carrying korans (bibles) down the hall to burn them. As you know, locals have found the ashes. As I write this, according to this morning’s newspaper, the riots are continuing, and the death toll is rising, without any regard for the public apology by President Barak Obama. The groundwork for giving the president’s apology a little credibility could have been started long ago. “Ugly Americans” could have encouraged each other to be respectful Americans. Ignorance is just not acceptable: The war will not be won by accident. Even more than in a conventional war, counter-insurgency requires individuals to be taking responsibility to have integrity.

And if my readers think I shouldn’t, in the middle of an essay, suddenly mention the War that now occupies our minds, then perhaps, in reality, we don’t care about the words out of our mouths, or heard in our ears, or even feel responsible for the proper noun “war,” and then maybe, in reality, we don’t possess enough integrity to prosecute the War. And if so, then we should stop… and think about such a lack of commitment.

Perhaps, for individuals and groups, it is fear that keeps us from accepting, and acting, on our responsibilities. Gerrold considers such fears in a passage in his first Chtorr book, where the hero is in high school. I can still picture the hero sitting at his desk in global ethics class, with the teacher symbolically pressing his hand down hard on the kid’s shoulder, putting him on the spot, saying to the kid something like, “…Is that what you think responsibility is? Blame, shame, burden and guilt? Sounds like a law firm.” In time, the class decides that responsibility is not a burden, but instead is a “willingness to be a source.” Yes. For me this definition invokes lightness and empowerment. In other words, when I am acting on my perceived responsibilities I might become tired, but I won’t feel all twisted up. Not anymore.

As for the concept of “group level integrity,” I’m still thinking it through. Consider the death penalty. Up here in Canada, where a “life sentence” is at most 25 years, (even less with statutory release) a released killer might kill again. On the other hand, a death penalty means killing too. We-just-can’t-win! What I think now is we make our choice, and then, whichever we choose, I wear clothes of gray. As I see it, I’m a responsible, weathered adult. I’m not someone wearing virgin white robes who pins the blame for our “not having a death penalty” totally, and solely, on the government. Nor do I say sending peacekeepers to dusty barren Afghanistan is solely of the government. My feeling is this: Even if, say, I didn’t even vote in the last election, I am still not lily-white innocent. Living with this grayness, I think, is part of my responsibility at the level of the nation.

During my youth we lived in black-and-white, saying, “If you aren’t part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem.” Maybe that is true, while, as a paradox, I also live in a gray world. As for star entertainers, it seems to me that their plight is... living in a nation that puts intense pressures on them, and enables their drug use, despite contrasting ideals not to do so.

It's not easy, being in the real world. I’m trying to do the right thing, trying to have an awareness of my responsibility for the level of integrity in my group as a whole. I wonder: If I was associated with a woman’s luncheon group, would I mention the death of Ms Houston, and try to discourage us all from getting prescriptions from multiple (two or more) doctors; would I suggest bringing in a guest speaker to speak on housewives overdoing substances? Or would I wimp out of making the effort to speak truth to the power of peer pressure?

As I documented in my essay Better to Sow, I have strong recycling credentials, but I still don’t know if I would speak truth to power: If I was with some environmentalists, standing idly near a house that had been condemned for toxic mould, from a marijuana grow operation, and suddenly one of us pulled out a joint, then—? Would I say, “Stop!” while I pointed to that house and the enviro-damage? And then say that poor Whitney had been embedded in a society where some of us enabled drugging? Would I add that I, for one, just can’t be supporting the big drug machine? …Or would I be too afraid, and instead just patronize my peers, by rationalizing that they weren’t ready yet to be part of the solution?

I wonder.

… Goodbye, Norma Jean, …Goodbye…

Sean Crawford,

East of Eden,

February 2012

Footnotes:

~As you know, the Greeks lied, falsified, covered up their debt status in order to be admitted into the euro-zone. Was the Greek government able to do this because they were embedded in a nation that believed in falsification and graft? Perhaps. And perhaps any “group” turn around, to finally produce "economic productivity through integrity," would have to be a “national” turn around. Where each and every one was participating. Or perhaps, instead, it will be easier for Greeks to endure years of poverty (over a decade) than to change. …Yes, I read about Greece in the current best seller Boomerang Travels in the New Third World by Michael Lewis.

~Integrity counts because things are connected: interesting quote from the above, p 202, "It's not just a coincidence that the debts of cities and states spun out of control at the same time as the debts of individual Americans."

~The Japanese may be encased in formality, yet their nation did a fine turn around, for the time being, to dress informally—no jacket and necktie—in business offices so as to save energy (from air conditioning) after losing some nuclear reactors to the tsunami.

~Here are the two songs.

~Better to Sow is archived under November 2011

~Focus and Commitment is archived under June 2011

~For things Chtorran, David Gerrold’s home page is here.

(I still don’t believe in doing links, especially for my own posts, but David’s a computer guy, so I guess he would want me to link to him)

Citizen Rocky

essaysbysean.blogspot.com

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.