Barry Lenson's Transcendentalism Blog

One Collar, No Waiting

Some curious events happened recently at an organization I know. Sorry, I cannot give its name here.

Among the members of this organization was a man who, for a very long time, engaged in all kinds of erratic and irresponsibile behavior. Schedule a meeting for 7:00 PM? He'd show up an hour late, if at all. Give him a position of responsibility on a task force? He'd never carry his weight. In fact, he'd try to get other people to do his work for him - and then he would take the credit. To make matters worse, his manner around women made them very uneasy, and with good reason. Although a married man, he seemed intent on trying to flirt with every woman in the organization.

But then something happened. One day, he announced to the group that he was going to attend seminary. He was going to become a member of the clergy! And you know what? Before too long, his leadership activities in the organization increased dramatically. He was giving invocations at all kinds of events. He was giving keynote speeches at functions.

His behavior did not change one iota. He remained irresponsible, unreliable and (for lack of a better term) lecherous. But because of his upcoming matriculation in seminary, people seemed to agree to ignore those facts.

It's just another example of the power of authority over people. So I ask you, wouldn't we all be better off if we tried to see people not for the credentials they carry, but for who they really are?

And wouldn't we be living better lives if we tried to help people, not to impress them with our degrees, our affiliations and all the other nonsense we suround ourselves with? The bottom line is, one effort to help another person honestly is worth a thousand times more than all the credentials in the world.

Emerson told us that we are responsible for the moral content of our own minds, something that must be built carefully, from the inside out.

Mumbeldy Peg

I still keep a pocketknife on my bed table, even though I never carry one anymore. When I was growing up back in the 1950s, I carried one every day along with my comb, a few quarters and a key to my parents' house. It was just part of my daily carryings. I now leave it on my bed table because carrying one today would only get me into trouble. I'd set off a metal detector at the airport or in a mall, or it would get me in trouble in some other way.

When I was a kid, I used my pocketknife a lot. It was handy when I was fishing, for cutting line and cutting bait. (I never used it for anything having to do directly with fish, because I never caught any fish - not once, ever.) It was also good for whittling, which I never did too much of either. It was also ideal for scraping that black dirt out from under my fingernails that always seemed to build up there when I was a kid.

I have another pocketknife in my dresser drawer. It was one that I gave to my dad as a Christmas present somewhere around 1961. I bought it off a display at Gantner's Hardware in Nutley, New Jersey. Gantners, run by John and Joe Gantner, my favorite place in the world, and a store that now lives on only in memory. The knife is a classic, just two little blades that fold out of a handle with faux bone sides that are really made out of plastic. My dad liked it and carried it, and that made me feel great in a way that bonds with a great dad can sometimes make a boy feel.

Apart from cutting fishing line and clearning my fingernails, the pocket knives my father and I carried were also good for playing mubbeldy peg. The game was simplicity itself. My dad and I would sit on the lowest wooden step of our back porch - a spot ideal for mumbeldy peg because of the nice patch of dirt that was right there under our feet.

The essential idea of mumbeldy peg was that one player would throw his knife into the ground so that it would stick, point-down. Then the other player would throw his knife, same goal. And the play would continue until one player failed to make his knife stick into the ground - then that player lost and you started all over again in a new game.

What made the game challenging and fun was the fact that it demanded each player to make a series of knife throws of gradually increasing difficulty. These imbued the game with an almost balletic grace. I cannot remember all the moves in order, but this is a sequence of plays that might be close to the one that my dad and I used:

THROW ONE - You hold the knife by its handle and throw it straight down into the ground.

THROW TWO - You hold the knife by its point and throw it so that it rotates a half-turn before sticking point-first into the ground.

THROW THREE - You again hold the knife by the handle and throw it so that it rotates one complete turn before landing point-first in the ground. This is a bit tougher than it sounds.

THROW FOUR - You make your hand flat, with your palm facing the ground. You then place your open pocketknife lying flat on the top of your hand, lying comfortably between your fingers with its point facing in the same direction your fingers are. Then you execute a soft upward flip of your hand so that the knife soars up into the air point-first, then executes a half turn as it falls down and sticks point-first into the ground. Think of this move as making your knife execute a swan dive - it is just that elegant and that full of energetic grace.

THROW FIVE - A lot like THROW FOUR, except you put your hand palm-up and lie your knife there before flipping it up into the air for its swan dive.

THROW SIX - You hold the knife by its tip and toss it up into the air. Then as it falls, you tap the end of its handle with your open fingers so that it reverses direction and spins forward. If executed correctly, this causes the knife to rotate about 1.5 turns forward as it falls forward. This causes the knife to - you guessed it - stick into the ground, point-down.

My knife - its point, the sharp edge of it blade - served as one point of interaction between me and the world. It was a tool I could use to learn about the hard, real stuff of the universe. It let me move molecules around and change the shape of things. And in mumbeldy peg, it taught me physics in a way that I could never put into numbers or learn from a book.

Transcendental learning? I don't know, you tell me. But right now, I am thinking of walking over to my bed table, picking up that knife and putting it into my pocket again. Maybe just this once. Maybe just for today.

And Now, a Word from Our Sponsor

What was on Ralph Waldo Emerson's mind on September 27, 1830? Lots, judging from this entry in his journal . . .

"Every man has his own voice, manner, eloquence, and, just as much, his own sort of love and grief and imagination and action. Let him scorn to imitate any being, let him scorn to be a secondary man, let him fully trust his own share of God's goodness, that, correctly used, it will lead him on to perfection which has no type yet in the universe, save only in the Divine Mind."

The Transcendental Tipping Point

Take a moment to think about this old joke:

"Take my wife . . . please!"

By the way, this joke works equally well as "Take my husband . . . please!"

Did you feel it? That little moment when your brain made a shift. You thought the joke was about one thing, but then your mind had to catch up because the joke was about something else. And when that shift occurred, you had an emotional response - the response of laughter.

Try another joke - any one you please. It could be something like:

Q: "How many [insert the ethnicity of any people you would like to poke fun at] does it take to change a light bulb?"

A: "Ten. One to hold the light bulb and nine to turn the ladder."

There was that same little shift there. Your mind assumed that you were talking about one person changing a light bulb. And then the punchline made your mind shift to change the definition of what it means to change a light bulb. And in that shift, you had an emotional reponse.

The shifts aren't always funny. Maybe you assumed that your "significant other" was faithful to you, then you found out otherwise. Your mind shifted to redefine a fundamental assumption and in that shift, you also had an emotional response - and it was not so happy. Or maybe you assumed that you were in terrific health and then found yourself lying on an operating table waiting for the anaesthetic to kick in before a surprise operation.

Our minds always scramble to recodify our worlds when forced to catch up with a new reality. And in that shift, we have an emotional response. Perhaps laughter. Perhaps an awakening, even if it is a tough one. Perhaps a new understanding of what life is really like. Perhaps wisdom. Perhaps, for a time, despair as we are forced to redefine our view of the world and our place in it.

A lot of people go looking for those shifts. That was what Thoreau was doing when he went to spend his time at Walden Pond. He went there and waited for a new reality to kick him in the pants, provide an emotional surge, and show him some new reality. And make him change.

A lot of people go looking for these transition points by finding new experts. A popular new book, for example, can show a new way of looking at the world. But how much more immediate it is, and more transforming, to make one of those fundamental changes by direct experience. And that means having the guts to experience life in ways that are new for you.

• You tell someone you love them, and see if they love you too.
• You try a new sport, or begin a new program of exercise, to see how it will change your world.
• You start to write a journal to see what emerges when your pen hits the paper or your fingers punch the keys.
• You take a walk in the woods on a winter day, feel the cold, and find your way out of the woods again.
• You write a book - just for the hell of it - and see what happens as a result.

Seeking those shifts and higher realities through direct experience is what Transcendentalism is all about. When we live life directly, we shift the world around us and emerge somewhere new. And by the way, don't take my wife . . . please! I am counting on her to come along with me.

The Library as Antidote to Lemminghood

I have been a business journalist for more than two decades now. In those years, I have seen popular business books come and go. I remember the year when Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was on every executive's desk. (Everybody owned a copy; nobody I met had ever actually read it.) Another year, it was The Wisdom of Teams. Just a few years ago, a lamentable book called Who Moved My Cheese? took the world of business by storm. Then there are the classic books that every executive knows about, like The Art of War and The Prince.

My question is, why is there this lemming-like tendency to seize upon the same books - to stampede to one and then to another. If you spend a little time in your local library or online, you will find that there are thousands and thousands of books that offer wise ideas, not only the handful of books that have entered into popular business culture.

In the last year or two, I have learned a lot from . . .

• The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar, for its insights on strategy and planning
• The Confessions of Saint Augustine, for its humility and deep human understanding
• Metamorphoses by Ovid, for fables that teach us to live more wisely
• The diaries of Sir Winston Churchill, for insights into one person's growth to greatness
• The speeches of both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis, for wisdom on greatness, and how it can go awry
• Inside the Third Reich by Albert Speer, for a glimpse inside the mind of a despot and his circle
• The novels of Horatio Alger, for insight into the social aspects of success
• Walking by Thoreau, for lessons in independence

By the way, you can do a lot of exploring from the very chair you are sitting in now, by visiting the Gutenberg Project online. It's an immense online library of free eBooks that you can download and read.

I think that Emerson and Thoreau woud agree that to capture wisdom, we have to cast our nets wide.

Sometimes, You Need an Expert

Transcendentalists are famously rugged individualists. We are our own authorities. When we can do things for ourselves, or think for ourselves, we resist the idea of asking other people for help. It's the old self-reliance thing.

What I can do for myself, I do. But even I have to admit that there are times when we need authorities. I don't know about you, but if I needed a coronary bypass, I would not attempt to perform the procedure on myself. I like to work on my car and I could probably change my transmission if it failed. But I think that would be one time when it would be a lot more efficient to let a good mechanic do the job.

And there are times when we need other help too - help that seems to be lacking. For example, there are legitimate authoritative roles that the U.S. government should be playing. The FDA should test drugs and make sure they are safe before allowing people to use them. Instead of approving lots of drugs and later discovering that they cause harm or do not work at all. Similarly, the government should make sure that products like Teflon-coated pans are safe to use. Apparentlly, they are not. And the U.S. government should have intervened, long ago, to prevent opportunistic lenders from writing mortgage loans to people who could not afford them. The government's failure to put controls on lending is deplorable. There are times when the market will regulate itself and times when it will not - or will self-regulate in traumatic ways. As it is doing today.

So self-reliance is great. But there are times when my own ability to make a sound judgement is too limited. At times like those, I welcome authoritative ideas and controls.

Small government? Well maybe. But on the other hand, isn't it crazy to spend so much in taxes and expect nothing in return?

An Authoritative Way to Judge Presidential Candidates

If our heroes Emerson and Thoreau had it right when they said that we have to be authorities for our own lives, where does that leave us when it comes to picking candidates?

Here in New Hampshire, I have personally seen talks and town-hall meetings given by Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Gravel, Kucinich, McCain, Obama and Richardson. (It's good to live in New Hampshire.)

This won't surprise you, but they all talked about plans and policies for immigration, taxes, the war in Iraq - and a certain repetitive rota of other issues. Since chances are that most of them will be moving ahead on 10 percent, or less, of the initiatives they talk about, maybe there is another way to judge the candidates entirerly.

How about taking a simple guess about their competence as administrators, for example? That is only one way of many alternative ways to judge them, but is seems at least as good as trying to decide whether they will really deliver on their promises about health care or any of the other issues.

In judging administrative ability, we have to figure in a lot of factors . . . .

Will the candidates set up streamlined systems for information processing? We know, for example, that very specific warnings were issued in the weeks ahead of the 9/11 attacks and that they were not given priority - proabably due to the glut of information within the government and inefficient processing of it. So which of the candidates will make effective communications a priority?

Which candidate will assemble the most capable cabinet and supporting team? Of course, it can be hard to know this about a candidate until he or she steps into office. But I think that we can predict more than we think we can in this area. Looking at George Bush, couldn't we have known ahead of time exactly the kind of people he would pick to offer advice? I think we could have, with some certitude.

Which candidate will balance the books? Okay, this point might verge into political judgment. But any CEO or CFO needs to balance the books and run an enterprise that is economically robust. Which of the candidates can do that? Again, it is hard to tell. Looking back, I would never have expected Bill Clinton to do so well in creating his economic policies, or to have surrounded himself with such wise advisors. But still, we can look at the current crop of candidates and guess.

My point this morning is, let's not get spoonfed our issues and our beliefs by other people. As the old saying goes, there is more than one way to skin a cat. Finding the right way - a different way - just might prevent al of us from also getting skinned in the process. 

PC = ?

The letters PC stand for a lot of things these days. They stand for Political Correctness. Of course, they stand for Personal Comptuer.

But they stand for something else too, in my mind. They stand for Plato's Cave.

You remember Plato's Cave, don't you? It was a cave, described in The Republic, where prisoners were held. They were chained in such a way that they could only look upon the back wall of the cave. Shadows moved there, cast by the real people and real things in the world outside. And because those prisoners could not turn their heads to look at those real things, they believed that the shadows they saw were reality itself.

Perhaps Plato was a lot farther-sighted than most of us realize, because wasn't he also writing about personal computers? We stare into them, search the Internet, until we come to believe that what we see is real.

I believe that our spiritual authorities, Thoreau and Emerson, would have encouraged modern people to get up, breathe the real air of the outdoors, and meet with real people. An email might resemble communication, but can it ever equal a conversation with a friend?

We need reality. We need direct contact with nature and life - unfiltered and pure. Despite the great usefulness of computers, we owe that to ourselves if we are to stay anchored in reality - not illusions. We need to tear ourselves away from our screens and experience life itself. Come to think of it, I'm shutting my PC down down, right now.

I Tried to Stop Myself, But . . .

"Whosoever would be a man [or a woman] must be a nonconformist . . . " - Ralph Waldo Emerson

I have tried to stop myself from commenting on the presidential election (not that the world was exactly waiting to hear my views). But it has been hard, possibly due to the fact that I live in New Hampshire. By virtue of that, I have personally seen candidates Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, Kucinich and Obama. I could have seen even more of them, if my time had allowed.

Where is self-reliance among the current candidates? Where is individuality? It is interesting to hold those Transcendental questions up as a yardstick against each candidate.

Overall, it seems that most of the GOP contenders are taking a path that is the opposite of non-conformism. In fact, they have identified constituencies to which they would like to belong and tried to appear like members. Giuliani and Romney, both socially liberal, have tried to position ththemselves as anti-gay marriage, anti-womens' rights and religiously conservative. Ron Paul is unique in trying to go his own way. (Anyone who both wants to abolish the income tax and withdraw all our troops from Iraq is,if nothing else, an independent thinker. ) And as for Huckabee, he is a man who has completely immersed his life in allegiance to various authorities. Even at that, he is honest and he doesn't try to conceal his fealty to religious and other authorities. With him, you at least know where you stand - and that could make you either happy or not, depending on your position.

On the Democratic side of the electoral equation, we have more of a non-conformist outlook from Edwards at least. And when I hear Obama say that there should be no red states or blue states, but only the United States, then I hear an undercurrent of challenging the foolish, divisive authorities that have been set before Americans today. In Clinton, we see a woman who has spent so much time living by varous rules and allegiances that it is hard to see her from a Transcendentalist, anti-authoritarian perspective at all. In Kucinich, I hear many anti-authoritarian sentiments and statements. He would favor negotiating with anyone and everyone - even with leaders whom our current administration has called evil. His solution to illegal immigration is not to build a wall or deport illegal immigrants, but to encourage fair trade agreements and allow America to encourage economic growth in Mexico and other countries. His point is wise and highly individualistic. If people can work and feed their families where they live, why would they want to come to the United States illegally? Have you heard other candidates express such a wise viewpoint - one that does not try to curry favor with people who hate? I know I haven't.

So it seems to me that, at this juncture at least, Obama and Kucinich would be the candidates of choice for Thoreau, Emerson and members of their anti-authoritarian, indepdendent-believing circle.

But I will see Obama again in two days when he appears locally here in New Hampshire. What would Emerson and Thoreau be feeling if they were in that gymnasium there too, listening to Obama talk? I might not come up with any answers to that question. But as I listen I will attempt to think like a non-conformist, see how Obama's words pass through that filter. And then I will write about what I found.