New York Times I

June 2010

Two items in the paper struck me this week. By paper I should clarify that I mean the New York Times which I read in print and online, and have read since I went to college on Long Island forty years ago. I don't really have any feeling about the liberal NY bias of the newspaper – compared to my own liberal bias, theirs is slight. I do have a little problem with how they portray the rest of the country, especially the South where I am as I write this.

The reporters and editors are not always amazed that people outside of the NY area usually have some teeth and may even know how to make (and pronounce) vichyssoise but sometimes it does feel like that. The one thing I will say about NYTs reportage is that when I am reading an article and a question arises in my mind, it is generally answered in the same column. Contrast that to almost any TV reporting where I am often left not only with questions but sometimes with anger over the bias in phrasing, inflection, and emphasis — not to even mention the willful ignorance.

The first article was actually an Op-Ed piece (“The Learning Knights of Bell Telephone” by Wes Davis, 6/16/10) about a program Bell Labs started in 1952. This was essentially a very compressed and extremely high level Humanities program for engineers on the management track. Bell’s thinking was that these serious and practical men of science, if they were to run a major American company, needed to be able to mix with, and converse with, non-scientists and perhaps even so-called cultured folk. In an article in Harpers in 1955, a sociologist wrote that Bell’s concerns were that “. . .a well-trained man knows how to answer questions; an educated man knows what questions are worth asking.”

It was a stellar program involving direct contact with some of the finest and most creative minds of that time — 160 of them ranging from W.H.Auden to R.P. Blackmur, Lewis Mumford, David Riesman and Virgil Thomson. I would have loved to be a part of it. By all accounts the participants found it challenging but rewarding. And it began to change their lives as they were exposed to the considerable bounty of Western civilization. They became more thoughtful, more sensitive to their surroundings — "looking at the world in a different way"— and increasingly were able to see many sides to any question. Unfortunately for Bell they also began to be less uncritically accepting of the "company lines."

One thing to be said up front is that these were men — and we can safely assume that they were all men – whose college training, if they had had any, was primarily in the sciences. And that even if they had been forced to sit through a History of Western Civ class that was years ago when they were students. Being exposed to the foundational ideas of your culture when you have some life experience in that culture’s current incarnation makes a huge difference.

I remember saying in the course of an argument with a just-out-of-college relative of mine that the powerful had an obligation to the powerless. This was during the Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991. And my relative was a callow youth and had grown up in a far too parochial atmosphere. He disputed my statement and from what ensued it was clear that for him Liberal Arts hadn’t sunk in much nor had anything much of the Judeo-Christian tradition. But then again maybe he had just been reading too much Nietzsche or Ayn Rand.

One gentleman said that prior to the courses he had felt he was a mere straw floating down the company stream, following willy-nilly the current's predetermined flow. The exposure to the great art and great ideas of his culture gave him a sense of his role in his own destiny, and of his need and ability to be the captain of his own fate. These "negative" traits the course created or encouraged in the participants caused the demise of the program in 1960.

In some very real senses most of us are straws drifting along in the various institutional streams of our lives; and I include culture itself as one of those streams. But to realize that fact and then to explore the parameters and decisions that are open to us in even a limited way is to confirm the benefit of that old canard about Analysis: you won't end up any less unhappy but you will clearly understand the origins of your unhappiness. The second verse of the lovely prayer of St. Francis fits in there somewhere as well, with perhaps particular relevance to men of science in the second half of the 20th Century.*

The other interesting thing Bell's program and its cessation bring up is how institutions are best served by the rank and file. By institutions here I don't just mean the large global corporations that affect us all in large and small ways every day but schools, churches, governments and even families. The almost universal hierarchical nature of such groups always seems to promote a “go-along, get-along” attitude. And indeed there is something to be said for "not pushing the river." Though adopting that philosophical stance has often been very difficult for me.

I remember being exhorted time and again during my brief sojourn in the corporate world to "get in the boat.” To be fair to my frustrated managers and corporate mentors they had listened politely to my constant caviling; decisions had been made; time was to move on; and as usual I was tirelessly, tiresomely beating a dead horse. Someone once remarked, not unkindly, that I am unemployable.

A friend of mine who spent his career at P&G talks about always being encouraged to push back. That is a brave and wondrous attitude for a corporate culture to espouse much less practice. My pushing back, which in reality was nothing more valuable than a donkey-like obduracy, got me fired.

Asking for a push back bespeaks both enormous corporate confidence and deep faith in the people you have hired — perhaps even deep faith in people period. That faith is what Bell lost, I think, when it began creating Frankenstein's monsters out of its formerly focused engineers. One of the issues with being part of an institution is finding out or knowing who you are serving. And this is not the simple answer to the God or Mammon question — those lines of distinction have never been as clear cut as the question would seem to assume. Add to that the question of how will the institution "serve" those who serve it and you have a lot to consider if you have been reading everything from Plato to James Joyce.

The questions may all boil down to balance. Balance between doing what is right for the stockholders, the employees and the consumers of one’s product or service. And as David Souter noted in his oft quoted (at least by me) Harvard Law Commencement speech this year, sometimes freedoms are in tension or even conflict and the balance may shift as we learn more. In other words the institution must be able to change or shift priorities around a certain set of core values which are part of the answer to the question "who do you serve?"

So in order to protect our loyal and valued employees and their equally valued families during a downturn or retrenchment we may have to short our stockholders a bit by suspending a dividend and putting that cash back into operating expenses. (Assuming we aren’t simply going to make the cookies a bit smaller and put fewer in the bag hoping nobody will notice.) Not a novel approach but a hard sell to the institutional investors and a difficult path to take if you only serve short term profit.

It may be that exposing those 50s engineers to pre-industrial, anti-industrial, and pre-consumer capitalist ideas gave them a sense that doing the right thing and doing what the company's priorities dictated were sometimes in conflict — or even inherently in conflict. To think too much and too deeply can forestall the kinds of action orientated decision making often required in business – especially if what you are thinking deeply about is the value and meaning of human life and dignity. And yet, and yet, perhaps more of that discursive “on the one hand on the other hand” kind of thinking – rather than a risk management assessment – could have altered BP's priorities as communicated to their contractors, and even allowed the Catholic Church to take a more honest, humane and effective approach to its endemic problems with priestly abuse. Something to think about as “training and re-training” take on huge importance for people left high and dry during the Recession.

What I wonder about is where those men are today. What they think about and what their careers and lives have been like. Are they retired and fishing on some river bank after having read Isaak Walton or reading all Shakespeare’s plays in order and out loud or have they forgotten all about their 10 months away from the “real” world, and live in the world of “reality” TV like so many of us seem to. I hope, and think, the former — as I can’t imagine anyone spending eight three-hour seminars on Ulysses and ever fully returning to the real world.

*A reader chastised me for not including the verse from the prayer. It is below.

“. . .grant that I may not so much seek

to be consoled as to console;

to be understood as to understand;

to be loved as to love.

For it is in giving that we receive;

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned. . .”