When was the last time a noisy vehicle or person was worth hearing?
No car or motorcycle blasts music that you welcome. Your favorite tune is never on the stereo of a car trembling amid its sub-woofer. No song is truly foul until you have heard it involuntarily in public. The moron shouting into her or his cell phone never will utter a clause that justifies the call, let alone your forced eavesdropping.
"Fools' names and fools' faces always appear in public places," I heard as a child. Modern electronics has exponentially exacerbated graffiti and other unwelcome communication.
Worse, amid the present post-literacy -- Thank you, Jerry Collins! -- the voices and choices of fools will assail public places. One cannot look away from amplified noise. The channel-changer does not seem to work. It's worse than being wedged into a faculty meeting.
Next: Haltom's Twenty-Fourth Law -- Neither Geniuses Nor Mediocrities Imperil Meritocracies as Much as Wannabes
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Friday, June 27, 2008
Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.
Those habitually disempowered generate symbols and spectacles of self-governance when chronic potentates find apparent democracy as useful symbolically as it is useless pragmatically and/or when potentates are divided.
The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.
When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.
Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]
At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.
Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].
Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.
When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.
In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).
When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.
The usually powerless govern most -- "most" meaning both "to the greatest degree" and "frequently" -- when the usually powerful are indifferent or sympathetic to the powerless because elites welcome popular governance that serves or does not compromise elites' interests. This supposition is well established among some political scientists.
When established "deciders" divide into factions, there may be more opportunities for "self-governance" than will usually be the case, but we should expect such opportunities to be transitory because some faction will want to capture or to coopt newly mobilized forces. Savvy hegemons -- elites who dominate but do not absolutely control -- who espy negligible stakes in conflicts will not waste resources on the conflicts but will exaggerate the rites and rights of "the people" and other myths. Participation and exuberance testify to democracy when and so long as the masses do not imperil the classes.
Still, the classes permit masses to frolic without supervision rarely lest activists or participants develop a taste for or expectations of self-rule. Various rites have evolved to promote the appearance and to stave off the reality of self-rule. Political conventions, for example, permit "spontaneous" demonstrations that have been choreographed and timed to serve nominees and other party hierarchs. Rank and file may commit candor, if at all, in private but not before cameras, microphones, or reporters. The assembled must coalesce around blather and absurdity. Delegates are largely free to choose buttons, headgear, and signs that do not contradict approved messages. [Indeed, the more disconcerting the costumes, the more that viewers welcome party elites as alternatives to mobs of hayseeds and morons.]
At the University of Puget Clowns, the classes -- administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists -- circumscribe masses of faculty and staff to preserve order and predictability. Staff are reined in because they can be disappeared overnight. Control of faculty, by contrast, must be somewhat subtler. To assure that faculty do not blurt out or even learn disconfirming information, administrators station decanal agents on "Faculty Senate" committees, assign observers to dinners for trustees hosted at faculty homes, and trade on their titular status as members of the faculty. To conceal disconfirming information, administrators rely on apparatchiks -- "reliable," "responsible," and therefore "reputable" faculty who consistently support administrators and thus get appointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] or the Professional Standards Committee [PSC] or other key positions. These appointees tend to be, shall we say, open to administrative direction. [To be certain, the FAC from time to time and the PSC almost always will include a gadfly or two to "demonstrate" the openness of faculty governance as well as the futility of reminding Power Committees what the Faculty Code and Bylaws say in opposition to what administrators and apparatchiks claim these authorities state.] Faculty not yet favored with sensitive posts on the Power Committees may apprentice as apologists. Apologists attest to the soundness of administrative decisions and to the bona fides of apparatchiks. When apologists stumble upon injustices that they cannot deny, they scapegoat faculty governance for problems. Apologists fulsomely praise civility and community, by which they mean servility and deference to authorities. Apologists acknowledge that the truest guide for governance is whatever administrators and apparatchiks say and that codes, bylaws, and other documents to which employment contracts refer can only undermine propriety and tradition.
Administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists overlap. Apologists who demonstrate their reliability and resistance to independent thought make themselves attractive candidates for service as apparatchiks. To preserve their reputations and status, apparatchiks must explain away malfeasance or nonfeasance without holding Power Committees or administrators accountable. Thus do doors between apologists and apparatchiks revolve. Administrators raised from among the Puget Clowns faculty will tend to have been apparatchiks, apologists, or both, but not every administrator is abjectly "reliable" or "responsible." Administrators who buck top-down policies and directives soon disqualify themselves from the elite and "restore" themselves to status beneath even apologists via memoranda that mention a desire to get back to teaching or research [whether or not the discarded did any research in recorded history or taught competently in collective recollection].
Guided by administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, faculty ostentatiously govern themselves but seldom interfere with elites. The masses validate and valorize the classes.
When colleagues profess not to understand why the Faculty Senate and plenary meetings of the faculty are so inconsequential, they mistake myths and rites for campus realities. The Faculty Senate, it is true, charges committees with certain responsibilities, but committees, under the surveillance and control of administrators, apparatchiks, and apologists, then do as they please. As the FAC has shown repeatedly, members of the FAC care not what the Faculty Senate says or what the bylaws mandate. The PSC has consistently refused to admit what it has done or otherwise to answer to the faculty. Members of Power Committees assert hypertrophic confidentiality and revel in their status as servants of Jones Hall.
In sum, committees and the Faculty Senate enervate critical faculty. That is what they were designed to do. When ad hoc committees crop up from time to time, expect administrators to get on the ad hoc committee (1990, 1996) or, if administrative shills do not control the committee, to rally apparatchiks and apologists to undermine the ad hoc committee (1996, 2006).
When elites appear to lose, therefore, the sensible citizen will wonder whether elites were indifferent on the issue on which they lost, were sympathetic with ordinary folk for some reason, or went so far wrong that even somnolent masses used their superior numbers to outmaneuver the classes. The last possibility -- that "the folks" awakened and stopped the deciders -- is the least likely.
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twenty-Third Law: Only lousy music emanates loudly from a vehicle.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Haltom's Twenty-First Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well
Often the most exacting plans are designed for the most useless projects.
Amid my first year of graduate school, the late Dan Lev greeted a proposed seminar project with the statement, "You have designed your project fastidiously, but I do not see your goal." I experienced that critique as a jarring slap to my peer because I did not yet understand that many presentations would be far stronger on answers to "How best might we do this?" than on answers to "Why should we do this?" Decades of presentations at professional conferences have demonstrated that academics often pound their methodology most when their findings are least interesting.
Some of the most pride-filled journals in political science offer "NEW! IMPROVED!" ways to "test" propositions that no one doubts and, all too often, that no one values. The exactitude with which "Duh!" contentions are contested is stunning -- so much time wasted on proving the obvious. Those who have mastered a statistical technique that baffles most readers or created a dataset to which most referees have little or no access must pretend to need such statistics or such data to disprove some political-science equivalent of the Flat Earth Hypothesis. Justices of the United States Supreme Court tend to decide cases in keeping with their partisan and ideological leanings? Other than every Senate Judiciary Committee in the 20th Century, who knew?
Perhaps similar experiences led a professional colleague to proclaim that "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I unabashedly stole this maxim from my colleague and list it as Haltom's Twenty-First Law.
Haltom's 21st is more interesting for its variations than for its stark truth.
If we do not welcome the results of some fact-finding or decision-making, for example, we do not state our distaste for arguments and evidence. Rather, we concoct methodological objections. In the 1990s, for example, the Faculty Senate was persuaded that learning what faculty think might be helpful. An ad hoc committee crafted and conducted a survey. The survey showed that much that the then-President and her Academic Vice President were claiming was sheer balderdash. Suddenly, the administrators drew on methodological expertise that neither possessed to critique the survey's methods. The spectacle of two administrators, each given to self-serving blather, impugning the expertise and integrity of colleagues trained in survey research was quite amusing. [It would be gratuitous for me to note that both administrators were hardened humanists accustomed to supplanting facts with interpretations, so I skip that part.]
The upshot was that the two highest academic officers at the University thought that learning and verifying were among the labors "not worth doing" but did not dare to say so overtly. Instead, they pretended to welcome a survey done well but derided the findings of a survey that was not done well because the survey returned unwelcome information. This is a variation on Haltom's 21st.
In "Rump Parliament" I have already discussed a similar use of pseudo-methodological criticisms. The first ad hoc committee that the Faculty Senate deputed to research problems with processes by which faculty receive or fail of tenure at the University reported to the Senate in early 2006 and recommended reforms. One meeting after that ad hoc committee had reported, a senator who did not welcome the committee's findings and had an alibi for his absence from the ad hoc committee's report then raised, utterly out of parliamentary order, a pseudo-methodological objection over and over. He consumed 20-30 minutes. He slathered objections into the minutes with no opportunity for the ad hoc committee to respond directly and immediately. He badgered the only member of the ad hoc committee present. He wondered why the ad hoc committee did not interview other faculty, including those who had claimed that confidentiality would not let them speak to the ad hoc committee.
This colleague raised not a single cogent point, but I doubt that such was his object. Rather, he wanted to suggest that the nonfeasance and malfeasance that the committee discovered and documented did not count because nonfeasant and malfeasant decision-makers did not get to control the report after the longstanding conventions of faculty governance. Since decision-makers could not cover up their misdeeds, the first ad hoc committee report was a task not worth doing. Unprepared to say so openly, the senator instead proffered a risible critique to give the nonfeasant and malfeasant ostensibly plausible deniability. Worse, this senator was no humanist and therefore was trained not to avoid unwelcome evidence. [Even better, of course, his tactics appear to have induced the next ad hoc committee to avoid pseudo-methodological criticism by issuing no findings. This senator, it seems, achieved a twofer: he berated colleagues for findings that he did not want aired and thereby induced the next ad hoc committee to air no findings that the senator did not want to hear.]
If these variations on Haltom's 21st strike the reader as a bit removed from Haltom's 21st, the reader should reconsider Haltom's 21st in context. For at least the last 22 years, the Puget Clowns, especially denizens of Jones Hall, have had little taste or use for evidence that did not suit their agendas. Indifference to evidence makes the gathering of evidence not worth the bother. Ascertaining the actual is not worth doing. That makes ascertaining the actual not worth doing well.
Keep Haltom's 21st in mind the next time that someone invokes "the culture of evidence."
Coming Soon! Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usally powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.
Amid my first year of graduate school, the late Dan Lev greeted a proposed seminar project with the statement, "You have designed your project fastidiously, but I do not see your goal." I experienced that critique as a jarring slap to my peer because I did not yet understand that many presentations would be far stronger on answers to "How best might we do this?" than on answers to "Why should we do this?" Decades of presentations at professional conferences have demonstrated that academics often pound their methodology most when their findings are least interesting.
Some of the most pride-filled journals in political science offer "NEW! IMPROVED!" ways to "test" propositions that no one doubts and, all too often, that no one values. The exactitude with which "Duh!" contentions are contested is stunning -- so much time wasted on proving the obvious. Those who have mastered a statistical technique that baffles most readers or created a dataset to which most referees have little or no access must pretend to need such statistics or such data to disprove some political-science equivalent of the Flat Earth Hypothesis. Justices of the United States Supreme Court tend to decide cases in keeping with their partisan and ideological leanings? Other than every Senate Judiciary Committee in the 20th Century, who knew?
Perhaps similar experiences led a professional colleague to proclaim that "What is not worth doing is not worth doing well." I unabashedly stole this maxim from my colleague and list it as Haltom's Twenty-First Law.
Haltom's 21st is more interesting for its variations than for its stark truth.
If we do not welcome the results of some fact-finding or decision-making, for example, we do not state our distaste for arguments and evidence. Rather, we concoct methodological objections. In the 1990s, for example, the Faculty Senate was persuaded that learning what faculty think might be helpful. An ad hoc committee crafted and conducted a survey. The survey showed that much that the then-President and her Academic Vice President were claiming was sheer balderdash. Suddenly, the administrators drew on methodological expertise that neither possessed to critique the survey's methods. The spectacle of two administrators, each given to self-serving blather, impugning the expertise and integrity of colleagues trained in survey research was quite amusing. [It would be gratuitous for me to note that both administrators were hardened humanists accustomed to supplanting facts with interpretations, so I skip that part.]
The upshot was that the two highest academic officers at the University thought that learning and verifying were among the labors "not worth doing" but did not dare to say so overtly. Instead, they pretended to welcome a survey done well but derided the findings of a survey that was not done well because the survey returned unwelcome information. This is a variation on Haltom's 21st.
In "Rump Parliament" I have already discussed a similar use of pseudo-methodological criticisms. The first ad hoc committee that the Faculty Senate deputed to research problems with processes by which faculty receive or fail of tenure at the University reported to the Senate in early 2006 and recommended reforms. One meeting after that ad hoc committee had reported, a senator who did not welcome the committee's findings and had an alibi for his absence from the ad hoc committee's report then raised, utterly out of parliamentary order, a pseudo-methodological objection over and over. He consumed 20-30 minutes. He slathered objections into the minutes with no opportunity for the ad hoc committee to respond directly and immediately. He badgered the only member of the ad hoc committee present. He wondered why the ad hoc committee did not interview other faculty, including those who had claimed that confidentiality would not let them speak to the ad hoc committee.
This colleague raised not a single cogent point, but I doubt that such was his object. Rather, he wanted to suggest that the nonfeasance and malfeasance that the committee discovered and documented did not count because nonfeasant and malfeasant decision-makers did not get to control the report after the longstanding conventions of faculty governance. Since decision-makers could not cover up their misdeeds, the first ad hoc committee report was a task not worth doing. Unprepared to say so openly, the senator instead proffered a risible critique to give the nonfeasant and malfeasant ostensibly plausible deniability. Worse, this senator was no humanist and therefore was trained not to avoid unwelcome evidence. [Even better, of course, his tactics appear to have induced the next ad hoc committee to avoid pseudo-methodological criticism by issuing no findings. This senator, it seems, achieved a twofer: he berated colleagues for findings that he did not want aired and thereby induced the next ad hoc committee to air no findings that the senator did not want to hear.]
If these variations on Haltom's 21st strike the reader as a bit removed from Haltom's 21st, the reader should reconsider Haltom's 21st in context. For at least the last 22 years, the Puget Clowns, especially denizens of Jones Hall, have had little taste or use for evidence that did not suit their agendas. Indifference to evidence makes the gathering of evidence not worth the bother. Ascertaining the actual is not worth doing. That makes ascertaining the actual not worth doing well.
Keep Haltom's 21st in mind the next time that someone invokes "the culture of evidence."
Coming Soon! Haltom's Twenty-Second Law: The usually powerless govern most when the usally powerful are indifferent or sympathetic.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely one is to lift a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession will be to lift
Like "chicken hawks" and "war wimps" eager to send others into war, friends and colleagues are attracted to anything they cannot move except their own asses.
I learned Haltom's 20th the hard way. A graduate student who ended up an administrator -- another good girl gone bad -- asked me to help her move. It should have occurred to me that graduate school selected for brawn even less than for brains, but I did not appreciate that until I arrived at her place. I beheld at least a half dozen men who might never have seen football, let alone played it.
It stood to reason that when a heavy, awkward, fragile case for display [in both the functional and anthropologic senses of "display"] needed to be transported up a narrow, steep staircase, I was selected to be gravity guy. A rugger who then outweighed me was steering at the top of the case. I was pushing from the bottom. No more than two alleged adults fit in the stairway, so Joe and I were elected. As I sweated and slogged, Haltom's 20th law came to me: "Of course, she treasures this display case! Anyone with a chance of having to lift it would have selected a lighter case."
I learned Haltom's 20th the hard way. A graduate student who ended up an administrator -- another good girl gone bad -- asked me to help her move. It should have occurred to me that graduate school selected for brawn even less than for brains, but I did not appreciate that until I arrived at her place. I beheld at least a half dozen men who might never have seen football, let alone played it.
It stood to reason that when a heavy, awkward, fragile case for display [in both the functional and anthropologic senses of "display"] needed to be transported up a narrow, steep staircase, I was selected to be gravity guy. A rugger who then outweighed me was steering at the top of the case. I was pushing from the bottom. No more than two alleged adults fit in the stairway, so Joe and I were elected. As I sweated and slogged, Haltom's 20th law came to me: "Of course, she treasures this display case! Anyone with a chance of having to lift it would have selected a lighter case."
This maxim has cognate propositions.
- Those with weak backs will tend to to have wanderlust and myriad buddies too proud and too stupid to fake a back injury.
- Those who cannot raise a bet will be most indecisive about where furniture should go -- and more indecisive the heavier the furniture.
- Whenever the moving van arrives, the proudest would-be participants in a move will discover that their desk drawer needs immediate reorganization.
- Those who cannot use technology will be most enthusiastic about its availability and adoption -- especially slackers who look for labor-saving devices that save them the capacity to work.
Feel free to comment on perversities that correspond to Haltom's 20th law.
Coming Soon -- Haltom's 21st Law: What is not worth doing is not worth doing well.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Haltom's Nineteenth Law: The greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are
When ambition overweens, fantasies and visions take the driver's seat and take the bus over a cliff by a very direct route.
Innumerable academics have asserted that anyone who wants to be chair should by that wanting be disqualified from being chair. They produce many examples of those who want to lead in the worst way and do. In my 19th law, I slightly reformulate their truism to make it truer and a bit more general. Haltom's Nineteenth applies to presidential campaigns and to clubs or college reunions as well as to head officers of departments, schools, programs, and other insignificant billets.
My law is simply stated: the greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership your ambitions will usually make you. I suppose there are exceptions, but why mess up an apothegm with subtlety?
The problem is not people who want to lead. The problem is people who need to lead. When ambition is yoked to some other psychological drive(s), ambition secures the office that the other drives will misuse.
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!
When others must beg someone to lead, that someone might be Cincinnatus, a leader who accepts leadership as delegated duty and unwelcome burden to be surrendered immediately when dangers pass. Historical Cincinnatus became a military dictator because panicked Roman senators believed it necessary. After he put down the Aequi, Cincinnatus put down the fasces and picked up his plow. A statue outside Cincinnati, Ohio tells us so. [Cincinnatus also opposed attempts to benefit plebeians at the expense of patricians, but I am certain that that played no part is his acceptability to patricians as dictator. Well, maybe a little bit. Military dictators who are also egalitarians make things so messy, don't they, Fidel? But perhaps I digress.]
Wherever seeming beats being -- Haltom's Eleventh Law applies, for example, to the United States but not necessarily to all human societies -- expect the myth of Cincinnatus to be ritualized into mystification and usurpation. Some would-be decider reveals his ambitions but hides his certainties in an effort to be offered some top spot. [Is it coincidence that the word "certainty" hides "cretin" within? Readers from Louisiana may want to note as well that "certainty" is an anagram for "cretin yat." Yat denotes a dialect in New Orleans and those who use it. But perhaps I digress.] He mystifies the credulous with his willingness to serve them and thereby enthralls them. In the name of fantasies with which he plied them during his accession, he discards traditions and restraints. Nothing must condition the triumph of the will, will popularized the more personalized it in fact is. If Pseudo-Cincinnatus spins his regime well, he may align allies and successors with his will via spoils, patronage, and sloganeering. Born, bought, or broken, followers and wanna-be successors love Big Brother and propose new prerogatives today for The Leader but tomorrow perhaps for themselves.
Of course, the dynamics need not be so dramatic or revolutionary. As Aaron [Albert Brooks] warns us in "Broadcast News,"
What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? ... He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance just a tiny bit. ...
Aaron is correct: enthrallment is gradual far more often than revolutionary. A little self-governance lost this time; some consultation faked next time; slight amplification of slogans to dismiss objections based on standards, practices, precedents, and norms.
Through revolution or evolution, the Devil needs souls but cannot seize them. He must seduce them. Either way, the Devil comes disguised as Cincinnatus.
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!
Once offered the top spot for which he has slobbered and schemed, putative Cincinnatus turns into some cheap knock-off of Howard Fast's Marcus Licinius Crassus [Laurence Olivier in Kubrick's Spartacus] of whom Sempronius Gracchus [Charles Laughton] says, "This republic of ours is something like a rich widow. Most Romans love her as their mother, but Crassus dreams of marrying the old girl to put it politely." [As far as I know, this is historically accurate: Marcus Licinius Crassus remains one of the richest men ever but died in pursuit of a triumph. But perhaps I digress.]
Gracchus is barely polite and hardly subtle but exactly right. Having played the reticent fellow whose leadership qualities have shown through and inspired a Senate frightened by Spartacus to bid him dictate, Crassus just happens to have his senatorial toga under his cloak and a plan to consummate his dictatorship under wraps. Crassus summons Senator Gracchus and informs him, "The enemies of the state are known; arrests are being made; the prisons begin to fill." Gracchus sees his prophetic characterization of Crassus fulfilled. Rome must "assume the position." Cincinnatus got back to his plow in under three weeks; Crassus seems determined to take his time and to enjoy his prerogatives. [In the movie, Gracchus notes, "Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?" Here history and Howard Fast pun. In Latin, "crassus" means fat or heavy. But perhaps I digress.]
Crassus is an ambitious, wealthy schemer who waits for Rome to turn to him, then launches his deliberate reckoning with slaves, with plebeians, with the mob, with the Senate, and with just about everyone else who stands in the way of his triumph. Crassus is the model Pseudo-Cincinnatus. [Did I mention that Crassus's undoing is that tantalyzing triumph that he wants to cap off his career? Crassus has more money than Croesus but wants a monument and a parade and a laurel held over his head. That leads him to his demise. But perhaps I digress.]
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
Crassus is the epitomic Pseudo-Cincinnatus not least because his drives and desires are readily discerned, or would be if senators were not so spooked and if the mob were not so credulous and impotent. Crassus longs for liaisons with Spartacus's wife and Spartacus's best friend -- paging Dr. Freud -- but needs to liaise with fame to match his capacious fortune. [Crassus's marriages and affairs resemble the HBO series "Big Love" or certain outlaw sects in Utah or cults in Texas. But perhaps I digress.]
Crassus' needs define and drive him according to Kubrick: "If there were no gods at all I'd still revere them. If there were no Rome, I'd dream of her." [If one has sufficient funds, delusions are doable, I suppose. But perhaps I digress.]
Like Crassus, other Pseudo-Cincinnati almost always chase fantasies that doom not only those dictating but those dictated to. Pseudo-Cincinnati have visions. They see things. They foresee their own triumphs and so undertake fiascoes that take them down. They dream of Romes built in some short term but take Rome by a short route to chaos. Like many fanatics, the further their mirages recede from their efforts, the more they dedicate themselves to throw new efforts and old followers at causes that were lost before the Pseudo-Cincinnati accessed authority. When they fail of those visions, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"
Of the Great Leader's necessity, failures betoken not the faulty vision or foolish schemes of an ersatz Cincinnatus but the deficient loyalty and halting perseverance of the followers, who do not deserve their Great Leader but are about to absorb punishment that their Great Leader believes they deserve for frustrating his fate. [This entry reminds me of certain madmen in authority in the world today, but I mustn't digress.]
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
In sum, Haltom's 19th warns us that ambitious, energetic people who need to get their way and disregard decorum and decency to get their way should be contained and constrained. This is especially the case in academia, where very little good can be done and so very many students, staffers, and faculty may be harmed before the tinniest pots "fulfill" their delusional destinies.
What might be done? What should you do? Simulate collegial courtesy. Invent effete but therapeutic tasks for which the power-mad are well-suited. Let them seem to be in charge of something safe, like a Web site. Redirect their drives and desires into the world's most perfect bowling league.
But never let them take charge. All too often members of programs, departments, schools, colleges, and universities set out to find Cincinnatus but turn up not even Crassus but Captain Ahab or Captain Queeg.
If you would not hunt white whales or missing strawberries or weapons of mass destruction, beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely someone is to lift or move a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession to be lifted or moved will be.
Innumerable academics have asserted that anyone who wants to be chair should by that wanting be disqualified from being chair. They produce many examples of those who want to lead in the worst way and do. In my 19th law, I slightly reformulate their truism to make it truer and a bit more general. Haltom's Nineteenth applies to presidential campaigns and to clubs or college reunions as well as to head officers of departments, schools, programs, and other insignificant billets.
My law is simply stated: the greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership your ambitions will usually make you. I suppose there are exceptions, but why mess up an apothegm with subtlety?
The problem is not people who want to lead. The problem is people who need to lead. When ambition is yoked to some other psychological drive(s), ambition secures the office that the other drives will misuse.
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!
When others must beg someone to lead, that someone might be Cincinnatus, a leader who accepts leadership as delegated duty and unwelcome burden to be surrendered immediately when dangers pass. Historical Cincinnatus became a military dictator because panicked Roman senators believed it necessary. After he put down the Aequi, Cincinnatus put down the fasces and picked up his plow. A statue outside Cincinnati, Ohio tells us so. [Cincinnatus also opposed attempts to benefit plebeians at the expense of patricians, but I am certain that that played no part is his acceptability to patricians as dictator. Well, maybe a little bit. Military dictators who are also egalitarians make things so messy, don't they, Fidel? But perhaps I digress.]
Wherever seeming beats being -- Haltom's Eleventh Law applies, for example, to the United States but not necessarily to all human societies -- expect the myth of Cincinnatus to be ritualized into mystification and usurpation. Some would-be decider reveals his ambitions but hides his certainties in an effort to be offered some top spot. [Is it coincidence that the word "certainty" hides "cretin" within? Readers from Louisiana may want to note as well that "certainty" is an anagram for "cretin yat." Yat denotes a dialect in New Orleans and those who use it. But perhaps I digress.] He mystifies the credulous with his willingness to serve them and thereby enthralls them. In the name of fantasies with which he plied them during his accession, he discards traditions and restraints. Nothing must condition the triumph of the will, will popularized the more personalized it in fact is. If Pseudo-Cincinnatus spins his regime well, he may align allies and successors with his will via spoils, patronage, and sloganeering. Born, bought, or broken, followers and wanna-be successors love Big Brother and propose new prerogatives today for The Leader but tomorrow perhaps for themselves.
Of course, the dynamics need not be so dramatic or revolutionary. As Aaron [Albert Brooks] warns us in "Broadcast News,"
What do you think the Devil is going to look like if he's around? ... He will look attractive and he will be nice and helpful and he will get a job where he influences a great God-fearing nation and he will never do an evil thing. He will just bit by little bit lower standards where they are important. Just coax along flash over substance just a tiny bit. ...
Aaron is correct: enthrallment is gradual far more often than revolutionary. A little self-governance lost this time; some consultation faked next time; slight amplification of slogans to dismiss objections based on standards, practices, precedents, and norms.
Through revolution or evolution, the Devil needs souls but cannot seize them. He must seduce them. Either way, the Devil comes disguised as Cincinnatus.
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnatus!
Once offered the top spot for which he has slobbered and schemed, putative Cincinnatus turns into some cheap knock-off of Howard Fast's Marcus Licinius Crassus [Laurence Olivier in Kubrick's Spartacus] of whom Sempronius Gracchus [Charles Laughton] says, "This republic of ours is something like a rich widow. Most Romans love her as their mother, but Crassus dreams of marrying the old girl to put it politely." [As far as I know, this is historically accurate: Marcus Licinius Crassus remains one of the richest men ever but died in pursuit of a triumph. But perhaps I digress.]
Gracchus is barely polite and hardly subtle but exactly right. Having played the reticent fellow whose leadership qualities have shown through and inspired a Senate frightened by Spartacus to bid him dictate, Crassus just happens to have his senatorial toga under his cloak and a plan to consummate his dictatorship under wraps. Crassus summons Senator Gracchus and informs him, "The enemies of the state are known; arrests are being made; the prisons begin to fill." Gracchus sees his prophetic characterization of Crassus fulfilled. Rome must "assume the position." Cincinnatus got back to his plow in under three weeks; Crassus seems determined to take his time and to enjoy his prerogatives. [In the movie, Gracchus notes, "Corpulence makes a man reasonable, pleasant, and phlegmatic. Have you noticed the nastiest of tyrants are invariably thin?" Here history and Howard Fast pun. In Latin, "crassus" means fat or heavy. But perhaps I digress.]
Crassus is an ambitious, wealthy schemer who waits for Rome to turn to him, then launches his deliberate reckoning with slaves, with plebeians, with the mob, with the Senate, and with just about everyone else who stands in the way of his triumph. Crassus is the model Pseudo-Cincinnatus. [Did I mention that Crassus's undoing is that tantalyzing triumph that he wants to cap off his career? Crassus has more money than Croesus but wants a monument and a parade and a laurel held over his head. That leads him to his demise. But perhaps I digress.]
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
Crassus is the epitomic Pseudo-Cincinnatus not least because his drives and desires are readily discerned, or would be if senators were not so spooked and if the mob were not so credulous and impotent. Crassus longs for liaisons with Spartacus's wife and Spartacus's best friend -- paging Dr. Freud -- but needs to liaise with fame to match his capacious fortune. [Crassus's marriages and affairs resemble the HBO series "Big Love" or certain outlaw sects in Utah or cults in Texas. But perhaps I digress.]
Crassus' needs define and drive him according to Kubrick: "If there were no gods at all I'd still revere them. If there were no Rome, I'd dream of her." [If one has sufficient funds, delusions are doable, I suppose. But perhaps I digress.]
Like Crassus, other Pseudo-Cincinnati almost always chase fantasies that doom not only those dictating but those dictated to. Pseudo-Cincinnati have visions. They see things. They foresee their own triumphs and so undertake fiascoes that take them down. They dream of Romes built in some short term but take Rome by a short route to chaos. Like many fanatics, the further their mirages recede from their efforts, the more they dedicate themselves to throw new efforts and old followers at causes that were lost before the Pseudo-Cincinnati accessed authority. When they fail of those visions, "Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night!"
Of the Great Leader's necessity, failures betoken not the faulty vision or foolish schemes of an ersatz Cincinnatus but the deficient loyalty and halting perseverance of the followers, who do not deserve their Great Leader but are about to absorb punishment that their Great Leader believes they deserve for frustrating his fate. [This entry reminds me of certain madmen in authority in the world today, but I mustn't digress.]
Beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
In sum, Haltom's 19th warns us that ambitious, energetic people who need to get their way and disregard decorum and decency to get their way should be contained and constrained. This is especially the case in academia, where very little good can be done and so very many students, staffers, and faculty may be harmed before the tinniest pots "fulfill" their delusional destinies.
What might be done? What should you do? Simulate collegial courtesy. Invent effete but therapeutic tasks for which the power-mad are well-suited. Let them seem to be in charge of something safe, like a Web site. Redirect their drives and desires into the world's most perfect bowling league.
But never let them take charge. All too often members of programs, departments, schools, colleges, and universities set out to find Cincinnatus but turn up not even Crassus but Captain Ahab or Captain Queeg.
If you would not hunt white whales or missing strawberries or weapons of mass destruction, beware Pseudo-Cincinnati!
Coming Soon -- Haltom's Twentieth Law: The less likely someone is to lift or move a possession, the heavier, more fragile, and more awkward the possession to be lifted or moved will be.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Haltom's Eighteenth Law -- Never mess with someone who has more free time than you do
In a war or contest, beware the enemy or competitor with abundant leisure and deficient sense.
I learned this formulation of common sense from a colleague at my first academic job. This colleague practiced what he preened. At any hint of resistance to his designs or demands, he would escalate unconscionably. He thought himself an academic warrior. He would mass his forces to overwhelm an opponent who did not realize a battle was imminent. [That did make for a surprise attack because, as Richard Mulligan's psychotic General Custer might have stated in Little Big Man, "Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without reason!"] After the opponent capitulated to the bluster and psychopathology, my colleague would bray that the opponent should not have started a conflict with someone who had more free time.
I learned this formulation of common sense from a colleague at my first academic job. This colleague practiced what he preened. At any hint of resistance to his designs or demands, he would escalate unconscionably. He thought himself an academic warrior. He would mass his forces to overwhelm an opponent who did not realize a battle was imminent. [That did make for a surprise attack because, as Richard Mulligan's psychotic General Custer might have stated in Little Big Man, "Nothing in this world is more surprising than the attack without reason!"] After the opponent capitulated to the bluster and psychopathology, my colleague would bray that the opponent should not have started a conflict with someone who had more free time.
The persons with the most free time tend to be those who invest in conflict time that they otherwise would spend on blogging, schmoozing, drinking, or other "social" leisure. This means that Haltom's 18th warns us not to clash with those who have little better to do than to strike poses, project outrage, protest umbrage, and otherwise play the blameless victim. While others may free up time by restricting their energies to essential tasks and by neglecting time-drains that are not very meaningful or rewarding, many layabouts have been clearing their schedules for years.
Even more dangerous is the loafer with something to disprove: his record of dissipation; the hard-earned disrespect of all or nearly all coworkers; his overweening arrogance based on no apparent talents or attainments; actual stigmata and imagined slights that sullied an otherwise spotty reputation. The truer the characterization that the wastrel wouold deny, the greater the wastrel's investment in reclaiming the good name he never enjoyed. Behold the notoriously unreliable chaps who bear any burden and meet every hardship to assure that those who see too clearly and who say what they have seen pay dearly for candor.
Please re-read my immediately previous entry [Haltom's 17th Law] to see how malignant narcissists scare up time to attack the enemies over whom they glory and to "demonstrate" their precarious self-worth. Since they define themselves by defiling others, these "people of the lie" are even more dangerous than loafers and layabouts. The latter losers badly need something similar to a victory and have ample time in which to post ersatz wins. The malignant narcissist craves triumph through conquest and subjugation and has little control over what he will do to crush the enemy.
Sarah Packard [Piper Laurie] saw the malignancy in Bert Gordon [George C. Scott] in Robert Rossen's The Hustler:
Sarah: And that way you are looking at me. Is that the way you look at a man you've just beaten? As if you've just taken his money and now you want his pride?
Gordon: All I want's the money.
Sarah: Sure, sure. Just the money. And the aristocratic pleasure of seeing him fall apart. You're a Roman, Bert. You have to win more.
So avoid the loafer and the layabout and others with ample free time. But most of all, avoid the malignant narcissist who will create free time for your destruction.
Coming soon -- Haltom's Nineteenth Law: The greater your ambition to lead, the less fit for leadership you are.
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Haltom's Seventeenth Law -- Propagandists project crimes they are poised to commit
When accusers accuse, they often draw on their own misbehaviors past and planned.
I cannot quite recall the origin of Haltom's 16th Law, but I can pinpoint the source of Haltom's 17th -- Jacques Ellul's Propaganda [p. 58]: "The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit."
I cannot quite recall the origin of Haltom's 16th Law, but I can pinpoint the source of Haltom's 17th -- Jacques Ellul's Propaganda [p. 58]: "The propagandist will not accuse the enemy of just any misdeed; he will accuse him of the very intention that he himself has and of trying to commit the very crime that he himself is about to commit."
Ellul here posits one of the enduring truths of society and politicking. Once one degrades an opponent into the enemy, one entitles oneself to use means that would be forbidden if one were competing with a worthy opponent within some rule-governed venue. At Guantánamo or in the Army-McCarthy hearings [M. Stanton Evans and Ann Coulter notwithstanding], the Marquis of Queensberry is/was not consulted. Those who believe that they would not win a fair contest heap onto the enemy the foulest intentions. One source of such intentions is one's own basest schemes and designs.
Suppose some malignant narcissists -- see The People of the Lie in the UPS Book Nook -- are jealous or resentful of a colleague. The narcissists are likely to accuse the colleague of flaws, schemes, and scams from the narcissists' own hearts. One narcissist foists his own foibles onto the colleague, dragging the colleague down to his level even as his accomplice transforms the absence of evidence for her charges into evidence of absence so that the enemy's innocence is made to seem evidence of cunning deceptions and false fronts. [Otherwise, the narcisists proclaim, the evidence would be clear to everyone and not just to the narcissists.] Opportunistic sociopaths, like other propagandists, project onto their enemies sins from their own pasts, sins that they may reprise in the near future, sins that avert attention from them and direct suspicion to despised others.
From this example we see that well-designed propaganda does double duties. Propaganda is a tool at once offensive and defensive. As offensive weapon, propaganda disparages intentions and imminent actions of enemies. As a defensive shield, propaganda preemptively blames enemies for what the propagandist argues he or she was compelled to do or may be compelled to do in self-defense. In adidtion to those offensive and defensive uses, propaganda works retrospectively as well as prospectively. It rationalizes the past even as it excuses the future, all in the service of getting past some present difficulty.
For instance, if a colleague quietly and privately informs me that I have violated a professional norm, I may strike back at the constructive critic with propaganda at once offensive and defensive, retrospective and prospective. On offense, I hunt down [in multiple senses of "down"] or make up accusations or suspicions and float them [like turds] among confidantes so that my confidantes may propagate smears and rumors without their being traced back to me. On defense, I bootstrap my offensive propaganda into defensive propaganda: my critic concocted false charges against me in a cynical, hypocritical effort to distract everyone from my critic's far greater sins and the true charges that the critic feared I might prefer against him. These tactics are retrospective in that widespread innuendo diminishes both the critic and the criticisms. ["Can you believe it? That toad called me ugly!"] but prospective in that publicized defamation undermines my critic-target-victim.
Hence, I might choose to make a critic's private criticisms public to pre-empt his or her doing so and to incline naifs to ask, "Would he admit the past if he were culpable? The original criticisms must have been unjust."
Ellul's insights go beyond accusations to attributions of intentions and spinning of interpretations, which more generally define [p. 57] " ... the real realm of the lie; it is exactly here that it cannot be detected. If one falsifies a fact, one may be confronted with unquestionable proof to the contrary. ... But no proof can be furnished where motivations or intentions are concerned or interpretation of a fact is involved."
Ellul does not underestimate the potency of false facts. When audiences consist largely of those distracted or ditzy or ignorant or indifferent, one need not engage in more sophisticated propaganda but may simply prolong or promulgate falsehoods. Supposed connections between el Qaida and 9-11, Barack Obama as a Muslim, and exposed urban legends make for low-cost but effective palaver into which accusations or other propaganda may be infused. The more credulous and conformist the throng, the more that flimsy fabrications and evidence-free suspicions will suffice.
Audiences deemed too sophisticated to succumb to bunk will be treated to interpretations and intentions. Malignant narcissists and other propagandists complement rumors, innuendo, and lies with half-truths and non-truths [e.g., statements of values that can be neither true nor false] and rely on the hubris of the sophisticates -- "I am too clever to be taken in by anything but the truth" -- to win over the mob. Once a target has been tarred as an enemy, factionalism do the rest: "Who are you with, the evil one or the forces of goodness?"
When next someone is projecting some image that he or she would like you to credit, ask yourself how open and clear the colleague seems. Colleagues who cite their sources or who direct attention to evidence or otherwise enable peers to test propositions are probably not spinning their own shortcomings into characterizations of others. Colleagues -- peers or superiors -- who invoke trust, civility, confidential information, or other devices to occlude usually have something to hide and some reason to avoid "the culture of evidence." Pay close attention to their charges, suspicions, and interpretations. They may be telling you what they have done and will again do.
Coming Soon --- Haltom's Eighteenth Law: Never mess with someone who has more free time than you do.
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