Wish I'd Written That

By Mitchell

Many leaders operate in a comfort zone, where mediocrity is concealed by the size, prominence or wealth of the organization. Sometimes the mere fact of being president, chairman or CEO of a major international company, or being a cabinet minister, or a general or even an archbishop can be enough for you to be recognized as a giant in your field, almost irrespective of how well or how ineffectively you are doing the job. Such people can become over-protected by the infrastructure they inherit. They become self-important and distracted by their title, the acreage of their office, the private elevator, the prominence of their parking space and the sycophancy of their advisers. The endless courtesies and privileges are often highly intoxicating, not just for them but also for their spouses and even for their secretaries, yet they serve only to distract the leader from the key elements of what he or she is supposed to be doing. Power and influence can be destructive and dangerous commodities, and it is therefore not surprising that, when problems arise, many of these people prove unable to deal with them.

Jackie Stewart, Winning Is Not Enough

All the World's (Failures) a Stage

By Drew

Happy Friday everyone.

Our esteemed leader Mitchell sent me this email last night. I think he wanted me to do something with it, since he feels he's already been posting enough for one week - especially since he's technically still on sabbatical until the end of this month. (And on that score he keeps muttering something about "publishing later this year" or something like that, so I guess we'd better keep our eyes open.)

Anyway, what he sent me was a link to a quote from business writer Jim Collins, who has a new book out on how good companies go bad. Among other things, he lists five stages that lead to a company's self-destruction: (link courtesy of Stephen Spruiell at NRO)

Stage 1 is hubris born of success. The company's people become arrogant, regarding success as virtually an entitlement.

Stage 2 is the undisciplined pursuit of more — more scale, more growth, more acclaim. Companies stray from the disciplined creativity that led them to greatness in the first place, making undisciplined leaps into areas where they cannot be great or growing faster than they can achieve with excellence, or both.

Stage 3 is denial of risk and peril. Leaders of the company discount negative data, amplify positive data and put a positive spin on ambiguous data. Those in power start to blame external factors for setbacks rather than accept responsibility.

Stage 4 is grasping for salvation. Common "saviors" include a charismatic visionary leader, a bold but untested strategy, a radical transformation, a "game changing" acquisition or any number of other silver-bullet solutions.

Stage 5 is capitulation to irrelevance or death. Accumulative setbacks and expensive false starts erode financial strength and individual spirits to such an extent that leaders abandon all hope of building a great future. In some cases their leaders just sell out. In other cases the institution atrophies to utter insignificance.

Mitchell accompanied this with a cryptic note asking if this reminded me of "anyone you recognize?" I think we probably all do, whether a past or current employer, or a company we've witness hit the wall and sink without a trace (or even more frequently, to self-destruct spectacularly, creating more flames than the immolation scene from Götterdämmerung.

But, as NRO noted in linking to Collins' points, this doesn't apply simply to companies. It can apply to countries as well - and presidential administrations. Look at each of those five stages carefully. We may be looking not only at the past (as in a post-mortem), but at the future as well. And it isn't a pretty picture.

Regardless of the context, as always, we must keep in mind that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. We have before us the blueprint for failure - will we choose to learn from it before it's too late?

Wish I'd Written That

By Mitchell

Lisbon: And you know what’s weird about these guys? None of them seem to give a damn. A colleague of theirs falls out of the sky and they seem OK with it. Is that guilt or indifference?

Jane: Corporate brainwashing. Turns them into robots. Grief isn’t productive, and that’s all.

Lisbon: I don’t buy that. People make up their own minds. You can’t brainwash them.

Jane: Sure you can. That’s what these corporate retreats are all about. It’s primitive brainwashing via group suffering. It’s like office karaoke or fraternity hazing.

Lisbon: How so?

Jane: When the individual is humiliated, their perceived value of the group is raised.

Lisbon: I went on a retreat when I got promoted to head of the unit. I mean, I wasn’t humiliated. I wasn’t brainwashed.

Jane: So you say.

- Patrick Jane to Teresa Lisbon, The Mentalist, written by Bruno Heller.

Mediocrity Isn't Good Enough

By Mitchell

In the interests of full disclosure, let me state at the outset that I consider myself a tried-and-true capitalist. If there's a better economic system functioning right now, I haven't met it.

Having said that, longtime readers of this site also know my healthy skepticism (read: contempt) for "Corporate America," which I consider more of a culture or a way of thinking than I do an economic entity. Suffice it to say that Corporate America, in my opinion, is its own worst enemy, and in many ways an enemy to all of us.

It was, therefore, with a great deal of interest that I read a piece by David Goldman (aka "Spengler") entitled "Mediocrity and Corruption in Corporate America." If there's anything in this piece I didn't agree with, I haven't been able to find it. A few choice bits:

Mediocrity breeds corruption. The business world is crawling with affable, industrious, intelligent people with nothing to distinguish them from ten thousand other affable, industrious and intelligent people, but who very much would like to be rich. . . These are the people most inclined to cheat, for they know that they have nothing unique to offer the world, and their ascent depends either on luck or unfair advantage. They cheat in every way possible, whenever they have a chance. One way they cheat is to steal from the stockholders by front-loading profits and back-loading risks. That is what destroyed the banking system. At the top of the market in 2006-2007 when risk compensation was stupidly low, bank managers made their return-on-equity numbers by adding leverage on top of leverage. Every one of them knew that it was a dumb and dishonest thing to do, but they all hoped that they would be promoted by the time the problem blew up in someone else's lap.

[...]

Dogged-as-does-it, steady-as-she-goes, unimaginative CEO's of the sort [David] Brooks' praises sat in front of spreadsheets, demanding that their subordinates make their numbers. Without keen insight, they simply piled on risk just as the portfolio hit the fan. The most imaginative, intelligent, and daring firm on Wall Street, namely Goldman Sachs, took out massive short positions against the subprime market. So did J.P. Morgan. Wonder why they are coming out on top? About those who came out on the bottom, a respectable silence is appropriate.

There is only one truly effective way to control corporate corruption, and that is through creative destruction. Let the wild men, the warped geniuses, the chip-on-the-shoulder mad entrepreneurs loose on the established corporate world. Let big corporations go bankrupt right and left. Drive out mediocrity with the scourge of innovation. Let new companies emerge, and then go bankrupt when something better comes along. Real genius, as Heinrich Heine once rhymed, pays cash at the bar. The oddball entrepreneurial types don't cheat. They see life as a game and want to play it by their own rules. They are out to prove that they are smarter than their peers, and to cheat would be to miss the point of the game.

And I'll add that this is by no means limited to what we think of as "Big Business." It can be found throughout the business landscape, from non-profits to small companies to - oh, say, automakers. Goldman is spot on in saying that mediocrity has to be driven out - there's far too much of it at every level of management for as far as the eye can see. As Pat Buchanan once famously said, Corporate America has to "workship at a higher altar than the bottom line." Mere competence would, at least, be a start.

Political Potpourri

By Mitchell

Some scattered odds and ends for the end of the week:

• At Architecture & Morality, Relievedebtor writes the kind of article I love - why the New England Patriots are Ayn Rand's team. Now, I'm neither a fan of the Pats nor of Ayn Rand, but I think the point here is a good one - that in a PC world, it's refreshing to see a team with a single-minded commitment to winning and nothing else - and I thoroughly enjoy how he supports the argument.
  
  
• Speaking of Ayn Rand, I've often cited Whittaker Chambers' landmark review of Atlas Shrugged to illustrate my points about the dangers inherent in Corporate America's adherence to the bottom line as their high altar, especially Chambers' assertion that capitalism, without a moral foundation, is no better than any other -ism. What's been frustrating, though, is that I've never felt I've been able to adequately paraphrase Chambers' eloquent argument. Now I don't have to try; on the recent 50th anniversary of the publication of Rand's book, National Review reprinted the essay, which appeared in their December 28, 1957 issue. And here, I believe, is the quote that summarizes Chambers' feelings on the matter:
  
  

  At that point, in any materialism, the main possibilities open up to Man. 1) His tragic fate becomes, without God, more tragic and much lonelier. In general, the tragedy deepens according to the degree of pessimism or stoicism with which he conducts his “hopeless encounter between human questioning and the silent universe.” Or, 2) Man’s fate ceases to be tragic at all. Tragedy is bypassed by the pursuit of happiness. Tragedy is henceforth pointless. Henceforth man’s fate, without God, is up to him, and to him alone. His happiness, in strict materialist terms, lies with his own workaday hands and ingenious brain. His happiness becomes, in Miss Rand’s words, “the moral purpose of his fife.”
  
  Here occurs a little rub whose effects are just as observable in a free-enterprise system, which is in practice materialist (whatever else it claims or supposes itself to be), as they would be under an atheist socialism, if one were ever to deliver that material abundance that all promise. The rub is that the pursuit of happiness, as an end in itself, tends automatically, and widely, to be replaced by the pursuit of pleasure, with a consequent general softening of the fibers of will, intelligence, spirit.

  
  
  I couldn't have said it any better and, now, I don't have to.

• A week or so ago at 2Blowhards, Donald made an astute observation that I hadn't previously considered. His points:
  
  

• Fairly often I come across the assertion that "homophobes" are actually repressed homosexuals.
• Now let's generalize and posit that anyone with a strong dislike of some form of human behavior secretly harbors such behavior himself.
• Therefore, it would be perfectly correct to assert that people who hate Republicans are really repressed GOPers.

You gotta like that, don't you think?

Labor Day

By Mitchell

We're back from an extended Labor Day break.

At NRO, the editors give us something to think about for Labor Day - the state of organized labor in the United States. I think most of us know that the union movement in ths country is, to put it bluntly, a scandal. The conclusion:

In ages past, when the worker’s lot was much worse than it is today, union leaders stuck to what they did best: collective bargaining and improvement of work conditions. They fought for the well-being of their workers, but frequently opposed government intervention in the workplace, understanding that a free market would create jobs and opportunities for all. Today’s labor leaders simply fight to preserve their power, often at the expense of both the workers they represent and the country as a whole. Unfortunately, their closest political friends hold a majority in Congress.

And just to be fair, there's this piece I wrote a few years ago on the flip side of organized labor: Corporate America. As I said in the summing-up, "Just because the company owns your time, it doesn’t mean it owns your life or your soul. That’s a message all too often lost on Corporate America."

Would that we had a Corporate America in which we didn't require unions. Would that we had unions honest enough to keep Corporate America on the straight and narrow.

*****

A housekeeping point: you may have noticed that we have switched back to Haloscan for combox moderation. Although Haloscan does allow anonymous comments, we are hoping you will at least pick some kind of pen name to use if you don't wish to share your real name - as we've said, it's hard to have a discussion with someone who wishes to remain unknown.

The Office "Holiday" Party

Classic Our Word

During this exciting time of year, who has time to blog? So over the next couple of weeks, we'll be augmenting our new material with some of our Christmas posts of the past.

Many of you are probably getting ready for your office "holiday" parties about now, so it seems like a good time to revisit this piece of Mitchell's from 2004. Try not to read it on a full stomach.

*****

Hang on, here comes another rant against Corporate America!

This time it’s the corporate “Holiday Luncheon.” Of course, we ought to be used to that kind of terminology by now, but here’s what makes this one interesting, and perhaps even more irritating – the subtitle, “A Celebration of Diversity.” The events being commemorated are Ramadan (Islam), Diwali (Hinduism), Christmas (Christian), Hanukkah (Jewish), and Kwanzaa (African American). A short description of each is included in the flyer handed out to employees announcing the luncheon. Not surprisingly, the description of Christmas is accorded less space than any of the others.

What are we to make of this? Let’s start with Hanukkah. For many years, it has been celebrated alongside Christmas as if it were the Jewish equivalent, despite the fact that it is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar. Last year, John Derbyshire at National Review Online shared these insightful comments (page down to December 22) from a correspondent: “[O]ne of the main reasons Christmas has been marginalized and even the word 'Christmas' is disappearing from public discourse is because Hanukkah has been elevated to a position out of all proportion to its traditionally minor significance. And the success Hanukkah has enjoyed in gaining public recognition has inspired the more recent success of Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and other winter festivals in gaining prominence in America, all at the expense of Christmas.”

While it’s customary to include Hanukkah in “Happy Holidays,” what about Ramadan? That was October 15, which seems to be really stretching it to include it in a December celebration. Diwali commemorates the “triumph of righteousness, knowledge and enlightenment over ignorance, sorrow and spiritual darkness.” One can’t help but think that for Hindus, belief in any of the other faiths included in the celebration is a sure sign of “ignorance, sorrow and spiritual darkness.” Then, of course, there’s a prime competitor to Christmas - Kwanzaa, an event celebrating not diversity but divisiveness, which as Derbyshire describes, "was invented out of whole cloth by a violent 1960s criminal-radical thug, employs a language spoken by the ancestors of practically no black Americans at all (and a language which owed its own prominence to its use as a lingua france for Arab slave traders), celebrates the fruits of harvest at a time of year when nobody in the world is harvesting anything, [and] promotes communistic values." Read this devistating review by Richard Rosendall for more details.

Well, it certainly is a diverse group, but it’s hard to see how honoring these five dates amounts to a celebration of diversity. In fact, most of these events commemorate a lack of diversity – Kwanzaa is an exclusionary event, limited to African Americans, and Diwali and Ramadan celebrate revelations that would seem to put believers at spiritual odds with non-believers. What we have here is a mini-United Nations of faith celebrations. It’s also like the UN in that it attempts to force these five into some kind of common ground. It’s like trying to mix oil and water.

There is one exception, of course. One event that is diverse, inclusive, meant for everyone, both inside and outside its given group.

The event, of course, is Christmas.

In the words of the “Holiday Luncheon,” Christmas “[c]elebrates the birth of Jesus Christ.” As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Savior was born for all, not just for a select group. While Christians understand that acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is essential for salvation, we don’t believe this message is only for Christians. It’s for the whole world, for anyone who wants to hear and believe. While the Jews were originally to be the initial beneficiaries, the ultimate plan was to extent the benefits to all, regardless of race, creed, sex, or national origin, and it becomes the duty of every Christian to spread the word, to make sure as many people as possible can hear it. The sacrifice to which this birth inevitably led was all-encompassing, the Blood “shed for you and for all (pro multis, for the multitudes) for the forgiveness of sins.”

A truly diverse group, in other words, and if this event alone doesn’t qualify as “A Celebration of Diversity,” I’m not sure what does.

And yet, the sole rationale for a “holiday” event, the only reason for its existence, is to deny the very mention of the word Christmas and to minimize, if not completely eliminate, its meaning. Ironic, isn’t it?

Some will point out that Muslims, for example, also believe in one God. But they see that God as Allah – Master. Jesus referred to God as Abba – Father. And there’s a fundamental difference right there, between compelling belief and inviting it. Ah, but we could spend days discussing the implications of this. I’ll try to stick to the point.

I guess what really gets me is this continuing attempt to lump these events together and give them some kind of moral equivalence. They take such obvious pains to minimize Christmas to the point where it’s only considered an equal with the others (if that), as if they have the same meaning and significance, not only within each individual group but for all groups.

If individuals belonging to other groups or faiths want to celebrate particular events, well and good. There should be no attempt to prevent them – this country does believe in religious freedom (at least for non-Christians). But can we really, in good conscience, look at the numbers of adherents and their contributions to American culture and say that these days deserve equal billing with Christmas? As Derbyshire’s correspondent put it, “Neither Hanukkah nor the other winter festivals have anything to match even this very tiny portion of all the great art inspired by or associated with Christmas. However, once we admit that Hanukkah should be treated as the equal of Christmas, despite the fact that its significance in Western culture is close to zero and its significance in traditional Judaism is minor, we really cannot complain about Kwanzaa or Ramadan.”

I know what you're thinking. “It's only religious tolerance,” some will respond. No it isn’t. Tolerance doesn’t mean the same thing as equality. This is political correctness.

Compare this to a political convention, where the party has to make sure every faction has their say at the podium. The party may say they’re all “important.” But there’s no misunderstanding the pecking order – smaller, less significant groups get stuck on C-SPAN and go up against Regis Philbin, while the big names – Clinton, Ahnold, Kerry and Bush – they get the prime-time network coverage.

But imagine the Republicans had Bush speak at 3 a.m., while giving the prime-time network coverage to some obscure county commissioner running for re-election. See what I mean? When push comes to shove, political parties don’t try to pretend all groups have the same importance, carry the same weight and significance. And neither should we.

I know these rants of mine against Corporate America might strike some as odd, coming as they do from a conservative. Believe me, I’ve never forgotten that, as a friend of mine put it, “corporate America does produce jobs, after all.” And I still prefer capitalism to the other kinds of –isms out there.

But you notice that I always capitalize the word Corporate. I’m talking about an ideology unto itself, a way of group thought and group speak that I believe is extremely damaging to this country. It’s companies that don’t care about using pornography to advertise their products as along as people buy them, and television networks that don’t care what they show as long as people watch. It’s calling deviant behavior normal in order to court favor from special interest groups and make a buck off them, using corporate funds to support the abortion industry, and providing benefits to “domestic partners.” It’s all this and a hundred things more that call to mind the words from the Book of Wisdom, “But he considered our existence an idle game, and life a festival held for profit, for he says one must get money however one can, even by base means. For this man, more than all others, knows that he sins when he makes from earthy matter fragile vessels and graven images.” (Wisdom 15:12-13) And recall also the words of our Lord Himself, Who said, “Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes!” (Matthew 18:7)

There are a lot of them out there, and they are the worst enemies that capitalism has, because they turn people against them, and the people start to wonder if there’s a better way. They force governments to regulate them because they can’t or won’t regulate themselves. And for all of us who do believe in a Christian form of capitalism, who think it’s better than the alternative, it’s up to us to do something. That’s why we speak up, we boycott, we call attention to the fact that something is not right. We run the risk of being mocked – called old-fashioned, fundamentalist, intolerant, mean-spirited. We may not be able to do much, but we do what we can – do it with love and charity in our hearts and words – and leave the rest in God’s hands.

It’s also why sometimes we don’t go to “free” lunches. We know the price of a free lunch can be too high a price to pay.

This Cheese Has Holes In It

By Mitchell

Every once in a while you stumble on something that perfectly fits the mood you're in. It's even better when you find this completely by accident, without even looking for it.

Such is the pleasant coincidence I had looking through Eve Tushnet's blog this evening, wanting something to write about. (It's not that I don't lack for subject matter; it's Friday and I'm tired - I lack for energy!) I followed her link to Doublethink, where she'd had a piece published recently. And here, in the table of contents, I came upon this article: "Who Moved My Cheese? and the Meaning of Life," by Peter J. Hansen. With a subtitle reading, "How business bestsellers help impoverish our souls," it was irrestible.

I read Who Moved My Cheese? once, and considered myself both richer and poorer for it. Poorer, in that I was exposed to thinking and writing so banal that I could easily have become depressed at my own lack of success in getting published. Richer, in the sense that I was both encouraged ("Hey, if he can get published, anyone can!") and in knowing that I'd never run out of things to write about, thanks to the unlimited pablum in Spencer Johnson's "book".

Ever since the birth of this blog almost a year ago, I'd intended to write about Cheese. I'd gotten as far as doing a first draft of a fairly lengthy, if sloppy, post. There wasn't a month gone by that I hadn't meant to get back to work on it. But other things would always come up, often pieces that I found easier to compose, and Cheese remained on the back burner. Thanks to Peter Hansen, it's time to move it to the front.

Hansen only tangentially touches on Johnson's magnum awful, concentrating on the business book world in general. And what he sees isn't pretty:

In general, the business book genre reflects and reinforces our desire to make careers fill a place in our souls that they cannot truly fill. As human beings we want more out of life than jobs can provide - and thank God for that - but many or most of us don't know where else to turn. The business book genre as we know it is born of that emptiness; and it issues in emptiness as well. The lonely hunger of atomized individuals invites the empty promises of (mostly unwitting) false prophets. Whatever faults Americans had in the generations before we acquired a taste for these books (and no doubt we had many), we do not seem to have gained in self-understanding or happiness.

One of the reasons I never finished my piece on Cheese was that I knew I'd have to go back and read it again in order to get my facts straight, and I figured I'd wait for a really, really bad sin to pop up in confession so that I might suggest to the priest that I read Cheese as a penance.

But I don't think I need to reread this cheesy book to know that the central premise is a dangerous one: the idea that nobody is in control. Sure, as Christians we understand that the strength that lives in us comes from the reality that God, not us, is in charge. So there is a benefit to understanding that we can't control everything. But Cheese goes one step further, suggesting a nihilistic world in which an unseen hand maliciously manipulates our actions, moving the cheese around the maze like a deranged scientist experimenting on rats.

Why do I use the word nihlistic? Because in Johnson's world, no one has the answers. The fact that the book has become popular with CEOs everywhere (including, as Hansen dryly points out, some of the most unsuccessful companies in business today) indicates that the lesson applies to them as well: even a billionaire CEO has to react to circumstances beyond his control. And while there's something levelling in this (the idea that your boss, no matter how glib he or she might be, could just as easily be steamrolled as you), there's also something disturbing, at least to my mind.

For where, in the world that Johnson describes, is the motive in living? Free will would seem to be a farce; your only choice is to adapt or die. There's no suggestion that your decisions can play a an active role in shaping your future, that God has an interactive plan for us all. No, the message is that change happens, there's nothing you can do about it, get used to it. No wonder we look for refuge in sex, drugs and rock 'n roll - or in the increasingly impersonal Internet. Having already discovered the dehumanizing world of Corporate America, which breeds cynicism and despair the same way mosquitos breed disease, why bother to have any human interaction at all?

Hansen does cite business books that seem, however imperfectly, to recognize this. In Now, Discover Your Strengths, authors Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton "argue that it is generally more important to develop one's strengths or talents than to overcome one's weaknesses. 'Without underlying talent, learning a skill is a survival technique, not a path to glory.'" However, Hansen adds, the book is flawed by the "apparent absence of the thought that there is something higher than being an effective cog in the economic wheel":

The problem isn't merely that the authors are looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. One subtle effect of books like this is to redefine human strengths as the ones that productive organizations in fact need. The authors encourage us to discover our strengths so that we can put them to use in our careers. Thus empathy makes one suited for sales (rather than, say, friendship or raising children); imagination makes one suited for formulating business strategy (rather than art or, if allied with other abilities, philosophy or science); and so forth. There is no suggestion that our strengths or virtues point to anything higher than our careers. The book implies, or at least encourages the reader to feel, that one should either redirect or neglect those strengths that have no economic application.

Hansen explains that "[s]mall organizations (including families) can experiment with giving their members a high level of autonomy; but this is much more difficult for large organizations." This would have come as no surprise to G.K. Chesterton, who raised precisely this point in arguing against the dangers of Big Business. Although Hansen doesn't use the term, the employes he describes - those for whom "[s]ubordination and drudgery are inevitably part of the job" - are living, breathing examples of Chesterton's "wage slaves."

The modern company in Corporate America does recognize the existence of human beings, and the necessity of satisfying their needs. However, the humans they serve are not the employees, but the stockholders; and the needs are not spiritual, but material - the bottom line is, indeed, the bottom line.

Hansen makes a telling observation about the change in the relationship between our work lives and, for lack of a better word, our "real" lives:

As late as the 1950s, most men saw their jobs primarily as a means of supporting their families, the most important thing in their lives. As the success of books like Now, Discover Your Strengths attests, many men and women now look to their careers to provide the central satisfaction or meaning in their lives.

Corporate America not only reflects this change in our priorities, it's been the agent of the new reality. And they expect us to put up with it, indeed to thrive in its toxic atmosphere. As Johnson says, when your cheese is moved you don't stand around wondering what happened; you accept and adapt to change, because there's nothing else you can do.

But that's where corporate martinets are wrong, for there is something we can do about it. There always is. For starters, we can reject the world painted by Johnson and his like-minded cronies. We can fight back against the idea that we're only puppets in a deist world, that we've been left alone to bob up and down in the cruel seas of life, buffeted by these incessent winds of change. By applying logic, reason and critical thought we can use our minds - our God-given minds, infused by the wisdom of the Holy Spirit - to determine the proper response to a new idea. And we can realize that there is a place to go for answers, and Someone Who can and will give us the straight scoop, unlike the impotent CEOs that live an implied existence in Johnson's maze.

Sometimes change must be embraced, or even championed (the civil rights struggle, let's say), but sometimes it must be fought - to the death if necessary (the heresy of the Reformation, to cite just one example). The past, just because it's old, doesn't always deserve to be swept under the rug every time something new comes along. That might be the way Elizabeth Taylor treated her husbands, but human dignity deserves and demands more.

And you're not going to get it by eating cheese that's been left out in the open for too long.

MH - Let's Talk About Distributism - Part I

Yes, let's.

For one thing, what is it?

To answer that question, let's take a step back for a moment, to an article in the January issue of First Things. Written by William McGurn and entitled "Bob Casey's Revenge," it discusses how the Democratic Party got to its present pro-abortion state, and subliminally asks the question "what would happen if we had a pro-life Democratic Party?"

We need pro-life Democrats to be able to breathe again. This means that we need a Democratic leadership that doesn’t demand that Democrats vote against, among other things, judicial nominees whose only crime is their “deeply held” personal beliefs or a suspected skepticism toward the one dogma in the Democratic Party: that while all other Supreme Court decisions are malleable and must bend to the social and political agenda of the day, Roe v. Wade is holy writ.

Aye, therein lies the rub. Many conservative Catholics have concerns about America's direction politically - the war in Iraq, various government policies regarding spending, taxes, civil rights, the growing influence of Corporate America. In other words, issues on which they might normally be expected to side with the Democrats (never mind for the moment that the Democrats are far from perfect on these issues themselves), but because of issues such as abortion, homosexual marriage, euthenasia, and embryonic stem cell research - the social issues, in other words - they find themselves with the choice of either voting GOP while holding their noses, voting for a third party (and "throwing their vote away"), or not voting at all.

Conservatives find themselves frequently distraught over what they see as a "betrayal" by the Republican Party (or the "Stupid Party," as the late Sam Francis put it) on issues ranging from spending to a perceived softness on those social issues. Of course, as I learned long ago, one problem with mixing politics and religion is that religious leaders frequently find themselves working so hard for a seat at the bargaining table, they forget the one waiting for them at the Lord's table. Well, what can you expect? After all, the GOP is a political party, not a church. I'm not trying to excuse the squishiness so often found in Republicans; merely pointing out that a political party, like all other organizations created by fallible man, is nothing in which to put your trust.

Many conservatives are drawn to Libertarianism, but on social issues they can be morally bankrupt. Third-parties such as the Constitution Party stand for all the right things, but they're usually seen as trying to out-Republican the Republicans. They also run the risk of being preceived as even more "cruel and heartless" than the Republicans, although I don't much hold with that. Then there was the Reform Party (or the "All Others" Party, as I called it) - true, Pat Buchanan took it over a few years ago, but that was such a hash to begin with, there wasn't much hope.

Someone once suggested (all right, it was me who suggested it) that what this country really needs is a genuine Christian Democratic party, similar to the ones that you used to see in Europe. Not just a tweaking of one of the existing parties, but an entirely new and radically different concept. One might think of it as a party that was socially conservative and economically moderate.

Is such a thing possible, you ask? Practically speaking - probably not. Third parties don't have a great history in this country. Besides, a lot of important forces would join together to prevent the formation of a Christian Democratic party. But if we begin to inform ourselves of the moral and spiritual dimensions of such a movement, we might find ourselves changing in our political outlook, and thereby influencing our friends and colleagues in different ways.

Where do we begin in looking for the foundation of this philosophy? Well, we don't have to reinvent the wheel. Instead, we need to look at Catholic social teaching and the writing of great Catholics such as Chesterton and Belloc. In short, we need to talk about Distributism.

Which we will - in the next post in this series...

MH - There Is No Diversity in Diversity

I love Derbyshire's columns, even though he never answers my emails (!), and this one is no exception. Look at the ranks of college academia, or in the HR department of any company in Corporate America, and you'll see these deneutered male types:

The older guys with jackets and ties looked cowed and didn't say much. The younger ones, the ones with earth shoes and collarless natural-fiber shirts, seemed almost as keen on diversity as the women. What brings a man, particularly a "European-American male," to an affair like this? I wondered. In the case of the older, PC-whipped-looking guys, the answer was probably just the determination to find out where all the "diversity" landmines are planted, so they could make it to retirement and pension in one piece. Good luck to them. But what about these younger ones? They really seemed to believe this stuff. What was driving them?

[...]

There was, it seemed to me, something horribly ignoble about these young men. To yield not just meekly but enthusiastically to the stripping away of their privileges, real and imagined; to acquiesce so whole-heartedly in their dispossession, seemed so...unmanly. Not that they looked particularly unmanly in themselves. One of them was large and muscular — though it was the cosmetic muscularity of the gym, not anything intended for actual — ugh! — physical work. (I hasten to add that there were no obvious indications that he might belong to a behavioral minority group.) So why was he jeering along with the others at the mention of "objectivity"? Why did he hoot along with the rest at "gender-blind and color-blind"?

The only possible explanation? "They really believed it all. They loved Big Sister. I had fallen among pod people." Derb's conclusion: "Diversity is, in short, a cult."

Yet another example of how the PC-ers and the Thought Police have taken a perfectly good word and turned it on its ear. As I said in an earlier post, Christianity is the most diverse religion ever. After all, Christ died for everyone, even those who wouldn't accept Him.

It's a fact. Just don't say it too loud when you're around the Diversitoids.

MH - The Legacy of Big Business

Time once again for our favorite game, "Who Said It and When?" This week's entry is as follows:

"What has done more to destroy the family in the modern world, even before the state got in on the act, is a rampant and unbridled capitalism. It is capitalism that has taken women out of the home and put them into commercial competition with men. It is capitalism that has destroyed the influence of the parent in favor of the employer. And it is capitalism that has driven people off the land and into the cities, making them more attached to their factories or their firms than to their families."

OK, time's up.

The answer - G.K. Chesterton said it in The Well and the Shallows, written in 1935. That's right - 1935. That's, oh, seventy years ago.

Now, to paraphrase Ronald Reagan, ask yourself if you're better off now, if our society is better off now, than it was then. We know Corporate America is...

MH - Sorry, You Forgot to Give Me a Lobotomy With My Nametag

I know, I stole the headline from someone else. But I couldn't help it - I loved the headline! The post is both very funny and very sobering, both for the same reason - the utter stupidity of so much of Corporate America. As far as I know, I don't work for this company - but I know how the writer feels...

MH - No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

Hang on, here comes another rant against Corporate America!



This time it’s the corporate “Holiday Luncheon.” Of course, we ought to be used to that kind of terminology by now, but here’s what makes this one interesting, and perhaps even more irritating – the subtitle, “A Celebration of Diversity.” The events being commemorated are Ramadan (Islam), Diwali (Hinduism), Christmas (Christian), Hanukkah (Jewish), and Kwanzaa (African American). A short description of each is included in the flyer handed out to employees announcing the luncheon. Not surprisingly, the description of Christmas is accorded less space than any of the others.



What are we to make of this? Let’s start with Hanukkah. For many years, it has been celebrated alongside Christmas as if it were the Jewish equivalent, despite the fact that it is a minor holiday in the Jewish calendar. Last year, John Derbyshire at National Review Online shared these insightful comments (page down to December 22) from a correspondent: “[O]ne of the main reasons Christmas has been marginalized and even the word 'Christmas' is disappearing from public discourse is because Hanukkah has been elevated to a position out of all proportion to its traditionally minor significance. And the success Hanukkah has enjoyed in gaining public recognition has inspired the more recent success of Kwanzaa, Ramadan, and other winter festivals in gaining prominence in America, all at the expense of Christmas.”



While it’s customary to include Hanukkah in “Happy Holidays,” what about Ramadan? That was October 15, which seems to be really stretching it to include it in a December celebration. Diwali commemorates the “triumph of righteousness, knowledge and enlightenment over ignorance, sorrow and spiritual darkness.” One can’t help but think that for Hindus, belief in any of the other faiths included in the celebration is a sure sign of “ignorance, sorrow and spiritual darkness.” Then, of course, there’s a prime competitor to Christmas - Kwanzaa, an event celebrating not diversity but divisiveness, which as Derbyshire describes, "was invented out of whole cloth by a violent 1960s criminal-radical thug, employs a language spoken by the ancestors of practically no black Americans at all (and a language which owed its own prominence to its use as a lingua france for Arab slave traders), celebrates the fruits of harvest at a time of year when nobody in the world is harvesting anything, [and] promotes communistic values." Read this devistating review by Richard Rosendall for more details.



Well, it certainly is a diverse group, but it’s hard to see how honoring these five dates amounts to a celebration of diversity. In fact, most of these events commemorate a lack of diversity – Kwanzaa is an exclusionary event, limited to African Americans, and Diwali and Ramadan celebrate revelations that would seem to put believers at spiritual odds with non-believers. What we have here is a mini-United Nations of faith celebrations. It’s also like the UN in that it attempts to force these five into some kind of common ground. It’s like trying to mix oil and water.



There is one exception, of course. One event that is diverse, inclusive, meant for everyone, both inside and outside its given group.



The event, of course, is Christmas.



In the words of the “Holiday Luncheon,” Christmas “[c]elebrates the birth of Jesus Christ.” As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Savior was born for all, not just for a select group. While Christians understand that acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is essential for salvation, we don’t believe this message is only for Christians. It’s for the whole world, for anyone who wants to hear and believe. While the Jews were originally to be the initial beneficiaries, the ultimate plan was to extent the benefits to all, regardless of race, creed, sex, or national origin, and it becomes the duty of every Christian to spread the word, to make sure as many people as possible can hear it. The sacrifice to which this birth inevitably led was all-encompassing, the Blood “shed for you and for all (pro multis, for the multitudes) for the forgiveness of sins.”



A truly diverse group, in other words, and if this event alone doesn’t qualify as “A Celebration of Diversity,” I’m not sure what does.



And yet, the sole rationale for a “holiday” event, the only reason for its existence, is to deny the very mention of the word Christmas and to minimize, if not completely eliminate, its meaning.



Ironic, isn’t it?



Some will point out that Muslims, for example, also believe in one God. But they see that God as Allah – Master. Jesus referred to God as Abba – Father. And there’s a fundamental difference right there, between compelling belief and inviting it. Ah, but we could spend days discussing the implications of this. I’ll try to stick to the point.



I guess what really gets me is this continuing attempt to lump these events together and give them some kind of moral equivalence. They take such obvious pains to minimize Christmas to the point where it’s only considered an equal with the others (if that), as if they have the same meaning and significance, not only within each individual group but for all groups.



If individuals belonging to other groups or faiths want to celebrate particular events, well and good. There should be no attempt to prevent them – this country does believe in religious freedom (at least for non-Christians). But can we really, in good conscience, look at the numbers of adherents and their contributions to American culture and say that these days deserve equal billing with Christmas? As Derbyshire’s correspondent put it, “Neither Hanukkah nor the other winter festivals have anything to match even this very tiny portion of all the great art inspired by or associated with Christmas. However, once we admit that Hanukkah should be treated as the equal of Christmas, despite the fact that its significance in Western culture is close to zero and its significance in traditional Judaism is minor, we really cannot complain about Kwanzaa or Ramadan.”



I know what you're thinking. “It's only religious tolerance,” some will respond. No it isn’t. Tolerance doesn’t mean the same thing as equality. This is political correctness.



Compare this to a political convention, where the party has to make sure every faction has their say at the podium. The party may say they’re all “important.” But there’s no misunderstanding the pecking order – smaller, less significant groups get stuck on C-SPAN and go up against Regis Philbin, while the big names – Clinton, Ahnold, Kerry and Bush – they get the prime-time network coverage.



But imagine the Republicans had Bush speak at 3 a.m., while giving the prime-time network coverage to some obscure county commissioner running for re-election. See what I mean? When push comes to shove, political parties don’t try to pretend all groups have the same importance, carry the same weight and significance. And neither should we.



I know these rants of mine against Corporate America might strike some as odd, coming as they do from a conservative. Believe me, I’ve never forgotten that, as a friend of mine put it, “corporate America does produce jobs, after all.” And I still prefer capitalism to the other kinds of –isms out there.



But you notice that I always capitalize the word Corporate. I’m talking about an ideology unto itself, a way of group thought and group speak that I believe is extremely damaging to this country. It’s companies that don’t care about using pornography to advertise their products as along as people buy them, and television networks that don’t care what they show as long as people watch. It’s calling deviant behavior normal in order to court favor from special interest groups and make a buck off them, using corporate funds to support the abortion industry, and providing benefits to “domestic partners.” It’s all this and a hundred things more that call to mind the words from the Book of Wisdom, “But he considered our existence an idle game, and life a festival held for profit, for he says one must get money however one can, even by base means. For this man, more than all others, knows that he sins when he makes from earthy matter fragile vessels and graven images.” (Wisdom 15:12-13) And recall also the words of our Lord Himself, Who said, “Woe to the world for temptations to sin! For it is necessary that temptations come, but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes!” (Matthew 18:7)



There are a lot of them out there, and they are the worst enemies that capitalism has, because they turn people against them, and the people start to wonder if there’s a better way. They force governments to regulate them because they can’t or won’t regulate themselves. And for all of us who do believe in a Christian form of capitalism, who think it’s better than the alternative, it’s up to us to do something. That’s why we speak up, we boycott, we call attention to the fact that something is not right. We run the risk of being mocked – called old-fashioned, fundamentalist, intolerant, mean-spirited. We may not be able to do much, but we do what we can – do it with love and charity in our hearts and words – and leave the rest in God’s hands.



It’s also why sometimes we don’t go to “free” lunches. We know the price of a free lunch can be too high a price to pay.

MH - The Indignity of Work

One of the challenges of being a conservative is being expected to defend the occasionally indefensible idiocy of Corporate America. A case in point is this entertaining Human Resources document given to me. For obvious reasons, both the employee and the company will remain nameless. Anyway, what we have here is a manual on career orientations, specifically a section regarding being a “balanced-oriented” employee (meaning, I suppose, that you have a life outside the workplace). The following paragraph is called “Entitlement Mentality:”

Work/life balance is not their birthright. Sorry, but the company’s shareholders probably aren’t concerned about their hobbies or outside interests. To carve out a job role that doesn’t interfere with their other life needs, they should find a way to achieve their balance that has positive (or at least neutral) impact on business results. Encourage them to be a top contributor, to stay at the cutting edge of their profession. This will give them some bargaining chips for the flexibility they crave.

Well. I’m not quite sure what bothers me most about this paragraph – the condescending nature of it, or its sheer stupidity. After trying to figure out just how to address this mess, I finally decided the best way was simply to go step-by-step.

Work/life balance is not their birthright. Sorry, but the company’s shareholders probably aren’t concerned about their hobbies or outside interests.

There is such an arrogance about this statement. Oh, I suppose technically they’re right. In my pocket copy of the Constitution I don’t see the right to a balanced life anywhere (unless it’s next to the right to privacy that guarantees you the right to an abortion).



But look at what the words are saying. You don’t have the “right” to a balance between your home life (hereinafter referred to as “real” life) and your work life. We all suspected that most employers felt this way, but you seldom get to see it printed in black-and-white like this. The Catholic Church has always affirmed the dignity of work, as far back as “Rerum Novarum (On the Condition of Labor)” by Pope Leo XIII in 1891. And yet it’s hard to see how, when you’re confronted by an attitude like this, you can find much dignity in what you do.



For an opposing viewpoint, let’s take a look at what Pope John Paul II said regarding the dignity of work in his 1981 encyclical “Laborem exercens (On Human Work)”

But above all we must remember the priority of labor over capital: labor is the cause of production; capital, or the means of production, is its mere instrument or tool. (#12)



Yet the workers' rights cannot be doomed to be the mere result of economic systems aimed at maximum profits. The thing that must shape the whole economy is respect for the workers' rights within each country and all through the world's economy. (#17)

As Pat Buchanan once said, America needs to worship at a higher altar than the bottom line. When an employee is viewed merely as a statistic, an economic commodity, rather than a human being, then the system loses moral credibility. I’ve often thought that one of the turning points in capitalism came when we started moving away from “Personnel Department” towards “Human Resources,” turning the employee away from his personhood and instead into a resource, like a roll of Scotch tape.

To carve out a job role that doesn’t interfere with their other life needs, they should find a way to achieve their balance that has positive (or at least neutral) impact on business results.

First of all, it’s clear that in the mind of whoever wrote this atrocious paragraph, “other life needs” are optional – something that only a few of us have. Furthermore, it’s a pretty distasteful thing to have other needs, isn’t it? How dare you! Don’t you know that you should only live to work? Again, the Holy Father writes:

We must pay more attention to the one who works than to what the worker does. The self-realization of the human person is the measure of what is right and wrong. Work is in the first place "for the worker" and not the worker "for work." Work itself can have greater or lesser objective value, but all work should be judged by the measure of dignity given to the person who carries it out. (Laborem exercens, #6)

Not to this company, apparently. Let’s look at that last sentence again:

“To carve out a job role that doesn’t interfere with their other life needs, they should find a way to achieve their balance that has positive (or at least neutral) impact on business results”

Hmm, that’s what I thought it said – your work life takes primacy over your personal life, and your personal life must be adapted to cause the least possible interference with your work life.



See how easy this is? Let’s continue:

Encourage them to be a top contributor, to stay at the cutting edge of their profession. This will give them some bargaining chips for the flexibility they crave.

Boy, you have to hand it to the author – writing something like that really takes guts. The best way to achieve a balance in life is to become a workaholic! That may not be what it actually says, but let’s read between the lines. How many companies are enlightened enough to realize that “top contributor” is not synonymous with “long hours”? In response, let’s look at an excerpt from the Labor Day 2001 Pastoral Message of Bishop Michael Saltarelli, Diocese of Wilmington:

Workaholism is a specifically American form of spiritual lukewarmness rooted in the consumerism of our culture. Seeing our careers and work life as a way to holiness prevents us from turning our work into an idol that alienates us from our faith, our spouses, our families and ourselves. Workaholism results in a damaging fallout. Marriages fail or are strained. Children do not receive the attention and nurturing they need. Families experience little or no time together. Family meal times rarely occur. Family celebrations are few and far between.

Ironically, I heard of a company that recently had an internal promotion asking everyone to make a commitment to spend one day eating dinner with their family. This while the same company specializes in producing food products designed to make it as easy as possible to eat on the run without being bothered by such annoying things as “family time.” This chicken-and-egg question – whether companies are responding to or creating such needs – is something we can pick up another time.



It doesn’t have to be this way, of course, and there’s encouraging evidence that some companies are breaking out of this mold. Best Buy is in the process of rolling out a new way of looking at productivity and the workplace, as was pointed out in a November 8 Minneapolis Star Tribune article about ROWE, which stands for Results-Oriented Work Environment.

"Most employers should be able to say, 'All right, this is your job. This is the value created by your job. It is a full-time job, but if you can get it done in 25 hours well, mazel tov, congratulations,' " said Paul Rupert, a workplace flexibility consultant in Washington, D.C. "But the number of companies in which that scenario happily plays out could be counted on one hand.”

According to the author of the article, ROWE came out of Best Buy’s attempt to answer the question: How can we be the employer of choice?

Workers responded with a chorus of "We want to be trusted to do our work the way we feel is best for us, that can get the best results," said Cali Ressler, who leads work-life programs at the consumer electronics retailer. "They also said, 'We want to be able to balance our personal lives with that work.' "

This coincides nicely with the following comment from the Holy Father:

Workers not only want fair pay, they also want to share in the responsibility and creativity of the very work process. They want to feel that they are working for themselves -- an awareness that is smothered in a bureaucratic system where they only feel themselves to be "cogs" in a huge machine moved from above. (Laborem exercens, #13)

Don’t get me wrong – the employee has definite obligations to the employer, many of them found in the Ten Commandments. When you’re at work, your time belongs to the person who’s signing your check. If you’re getting paid for work you’re not doing, that’s stealing. As the Pope says, “Work remains a good thing, not only because it is useful and enjoyable, but also because it expresses and increases the worker's dignity.” And therein lies the rub. The employer has responsibilities to the employee as well, the responsibility to treat him with the dignity befitting a person, not simply a resource. Part of that dignity is to create a workplace in which the employee can deal with what it means to be a person – problems at home, problems with loved ones. Even, heaven forbid, problems in maintaining the proper balance between work and home. Bishop Saltarelli:

By contrast, workers find the connection between faith and work more difficult to make when they feel that management lacks integrity or does not respect the opinions and ideas of the workers. In those cases, people are more apt to see work as a means of economic survival and not as God's gift.

Well, why shouldn’t they? I had a boss tell me once that the only thing the company owed you was a paycheck, and that if you weren’t willing to play by those rules you were free to leave, because that’s all you owed the company as well.



In conclusion, there’s an important message here, one that, however unintentionally, this particular Human Resources document brings up: Just because the company owns your time, it doesn’t mean it owns your life or your soul. That’s a message all too often lost on Corporate America.



For the complete text of the Holy Father's encyclical, click here.