Re: Panic Stations

Ray Evans Harrell Sun, 20 Jan 2002 15:49:54 -0800

----- Original Message -----

Cc: Ray Evans Harrell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>

Sent: Sunday, January 20, 2002 6:49 AM

Subject: Panic stations

> Hi Ray
>
> Further reading of the inside pages Sunday papers reveals that the hitherto
> Oh-so-leisurely Department of Health which has caused scores of thousands
> of premature deaths over several years because of incompetent centralised
> management and inordinately long waiting lists in our hospitals and which
> has never -- ever -- had a medically qualified chief civil servant as is
> its head (Permanent Secretary) in over 50 years of the NHS, is finally
> understanding the degree of public anger that is now rising like a flood tide.
>
> It is called panic.
>
> The Sunday paper are telling me that the hitherto Oh-so-leisurely
> Department of Health is now in serious negotiations for scores of thousands
> of operations (heart by-pass, cataracts, hip and knee replacements, etc,
> etc) to be done in hospitals in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Sweden,
> Luxembourg, Switzerland, Turkey, Greece, Tunisia, Malta and perhaps even
> more countries in the next two or three years.
>
> Tony Blair is really keen to make sure that the Labour Party will be
> elected next time.
>
> The next panic will be the hasty privatisation of our State Education
> system because this can't continue for more than another two or three years
> without an almost complete absence of permanent teaching staff in something
> like half of all our secondary schools. (One school reported two days ago
> that one of its primary classes had had 14 different agency teachers in the
> last 12 months.)
>
> And Tony Blair is really keen to make sure that the Labour Party will be
> elected next time.
>
> The next panic will be the railways. But here, the civil service, which is
> trying to make something operationally sensible out of Railtrack, do not
> yet know what to do. When they do, then they'll do it in a panic because
> here is a public scandal which is climbing at an almost verticl rate. (The
> solution is staring the civil servants in the face, of course, but they
> haven't had the nous to realise it so far, after all the high-faluting
> messing about of the last few years. It is, quite simply, to scrap
> Railtrack and hand the maintenance of railtrack back to the operating
> companies -- the only bodies which actually deal with the customer.)

Let's think on this Keith,

The French are good at education and the Indians have a terrific group of computer programers and then there are those Japanese mono-rails. England sold out on their creativity in the Musical Arts somewhere around the time of Handel. They became collectors instead of creators although they have consistantly remained exceptional in the Art of Performing and Literary Arts but from Handel to Britten, Italian and especially German creative Artistic products were the rule in English concert and opera gardens. It did come back in England in the latter part of the 20th century but over here it is still an English desert with the other European cultures still being the identity of choice, except in the movies, i.e. the spoken word. Is it any wonder that Shakespeare is so revered?

Are we seeing the end result of that process where the pendulum finally swings completely back and England instead of colonizing and collecting from the world, gives up to it instead? Will there be a diaspora next, or a "third world Little Island Country" identity? Or is England becoming a state in the United States of Europe? Why else would such hysteria but raised about people going to the place where it is cheapest to get an operation? What is the difference between that and any other export situation? But obviously it is and that IS the point. But it isn't about distance or people being away from home.

I believe there was a comment on the list a while back, about Canada sending their sick to specialist centers much as we send our difficult cases to centers like the Mayo Clinic and Sloan Kettering here, some much further away than any country in Europe is to England. The Mayo Clinic is to New York what Sloan Kettering is to Oklahoma. Either way they have to deal with the costs of transporting families and giving them a place to stay since family is important in the healing processes. We do it and enjoy the holiday while we support our sick in their healing. In fact the "specialness" of the trip is a part of the healing. I would mention that the Stella Entertainment Corporation in Germany has done the same with establishing theaters in different cities for specific Broadway Shows. It may mean a trip but it also means a holiday. It makes it special. But it seems that there is something deeper going on here.

System's Models

I register your concern but frankly I'm more interested in the underlying mental models that seem to be emerging for the unconscious of the people around issues like health and education. We could be looking at the results of 300 years of class chauvinism with the resultant emotional swing back in the opposite direction. Or maybe it is something more common such as the traditional structures of authority breaking down in the face of fashionable, but not necessarily correct, new ideas (like Enron here). In the face of such a breakdown, the "young" and the "opportunistic" often use it as an opportunity to "separate and individuate" in an irresponsible way based upon their inexperience or venality.

That unfortunately becomes the excuse for the rise of a Hero Tyrant to take over responsibility and rescue them from their fears. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot. Capitalism tends to have more Petty Tyrants since it is less centralized, like the joke about Kenneth Lay the CEO of Enron, on our TV. (The chaos wrought by this Nice Guy Tyrant Thief is now being called "getting Laid", a serious joke coming from fundamentalist pistol toting Texas or the reduction of George W. Bush to "Shrub." Those are not the jokes of a tyrant aristocracy or a dictatorial socialism. Each culture and system has their own ways of dealing with Tyrants petty or grand.)

Evolutionary Processes:

Every organization goes through the child, youth, adult, Old Age processes. Maybe the English system is just old and will now be renewed in a new way. Or maybe all of those "progress" myths from your Imperialist phase have now played out and a new cooperative model is evolving as a result of European Union. Come to think of it, England's complaints do sound a bit like the individual states in the US who have lost their old centers of power and are now in the "complaining adolescent" phase as something new is emerging or a local factory is moving somewhere else for better "productivity." Either way it is stressful and contains a feeling of loss and failure of some kind whether that is reasonable or not. Something important is "lost", the same terminolgy used by Evangelical Christians as they raid other churches searching for the "lost souls."

It is always a problem to retain the foundation of the "traditional" while participating wholly in the contemporary. Organizations that reject the traditional, in working with the new, resemble the "sturm und drang" of the adolelscent that rages as a result of having no traditional or cultural bulwarks to give them strength. (Like the old Broadway show ballad:

"Everything's up to date in Kansas City, they gone about as far as they can go. They gone and built a skyscraper seven stories high, about as high as a building ought to go."

Societies, like the US with a large degree of ongoing culture shock, from new immigrants, have a rather constant experiece of this kind of arrogant ignorance on the part of the culturally stressed. In fact we call these people the "Tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to be free, i.e. the "walking wounded." Only the Russians get really ticked off at being considered this way. But New York in particular has become masterful at recognizing such things and simply learning to accept and work within these culture shock processes.

The Problem?

There are many magnificent ruins around the world made from civilizations that were invaded and pillaged while in other places it seems that they just, again like Enron, imploded as they couldn't "morph" into a new phase of development because the fashionable new models were not up to the real "Brave New World." That, in the words that I say almost in every post, is a failure in the artistic "profession", or "function", in the culture. i.e. a breakdown in the perceptual pre-analytic structures of the society.

It is a failure in the learned unconscious, and now "habitual intuitive", functions of the society. One could compare it to forgetting how to walk, or the adolescent's common mistake of breathing only from the lungs since they don't know the function of the rest of the body in the autonomic action of breathing. (That is why singing teachers "teach" breathing to people who have it as an autonomic function that keeps them alive, but doesn't work for the art of singing.)

I realize you read this "Art Stuff" from me on a regular basis. The question arises as to whether I should just say it once and then be quiet? Repetition, especially in writing is boring, and as I said a couple of days ago, is sometimes the reason people, like the magnificently successful Egyptian culture, give up a good thing for a very obviously bad thing (Monothieism) and never quite got back from that dalliance.

But why do I keep repeating myself in different ways?

It is grounded in my profession. In singing, where we must organize and practice the same scales until absolutely pristine perfect, there are certain stories that are told again and again as pillers of the rituals of learning this very difficult skill to be practiced in the most brutal fiscal world of any profession on the planet in any culture. Those young students who believe that they can hear it once, "get it" and it will be "learned" are the victims of our public school education that substitutes the "sound bite" for mastery and the process of "understanding" for "knowledge." Teleology rather than Pedagogy.

"Knowledge" in my profession, means mastery, ie. the development of an instantaineous response through habit raised to the level of intuition. Singing, dancing, playing the piano etc. must become as automatic as walking, eating or talking. Something works and is built upon -- or something worked and now doesn't work and the whole thing stops, fails.

In the performance of a society, whether in the activities of Health care, Education, the Law, the Arts or just about anything else other than monetary speculation or retail activities you must be concerned with competance and the sacrifice of short term gratification to long term habitual intuition, i.e. Mastery.

The genius of the West was the ordering of disciplines into a working series of professions that each fitted together to create a whole that was greater than the sum of the parts. That made schools and universities possible where the mentoring/apprentice processes were the rule in most of the rest of the world. That was less expensive, since teaching 35 students at once is cheaper than teaching one at a time but it was also, and most importantly, creating a new pedagogical form that used the value of classroom dynamics to stimulate and encourage student growth through external enthusiasm. You produced more students and more motivation due to competitive enthusiasm within the class. Much the same as writing created a new poetic art form that was totally different from the old verbal form. Film to the Theater. TV to film, CDs to the concert hall, etc. etc. these were each evolutionary processes that expressed a time and place and added to the past without throwing the past away in the process.

Eventually, with the advent of economic theories and reasons for existance being tagged solely to monetary logic, this was turned into an upward step process. Why? because it was too expensive to maintain theaters with acting and stage labor when Movies could be so much more cheap to maintain and vary. Eventually we became the throwaway culture and the quality of work began to decline in all but the very new. In time, even that became degraded in the name of "simplification" ("first cause" in science and "original intent" in law) and science became the high priest of it. I'm not saying that it is "truly" scientific to be "over simple" but it is cheaper or in the words of Adam Smith "more productive" to be so. I'm not even saying that Smith, Locke, J.S.Mill, Marx or Keynes or any of the other great economists would have agreed with how this has worked out in the present.

J.S.Mill especially, found the simplification of science to be so inadaquate in life that he had a nervous breakdown and it was the complexity of the poetic method being taught by Wordsworth who brought him back from the edge. Art is difficult and the complexity of mastery is often beyond all but the very few. Those who have tried to understand and catalogue the philosophical snake pit of Aesthetics will know what I mean. It would be far easier to conquer most any other difficulty than to explain the meanings of artistic realities across the world. The best they can do is come up with questions rather than answers. Most would rather blame the subject but complexity is not to be found in the subject but in the inadaquacy of the minds of those confronting it.

The great economists recognized this, not the least, because some married artists. But the second rate ones did not and their fear of questions and the regidity of their answers is what we have been stuck with. In the law, that is why I posted my questions yesterday about Posner. No bites on that one yet. (Must we always be reduced to complaints with no questions or pursuit of answers that fail to maintain at least the status quo? )

The discipline of art, the hard rather than the fun part, is one of the primal disciplines that we have as humans. It is the conquering of boredom and the sublimation of the pleasure of success in the immediacy of difficult repetition, for the ultimate goal: mastery. It is the sublimation of the short for the ultimate control of the long. The sublimation of the unconscious "quick" for the ultimate pleasure of "reflection in action" that can only come through the mastery of complete awareness at all speeds. It is "driving the race car" rather than "thinking about driving the race car with never having been in one." One could compare it to having the "complete conscious sensory observation" of the slow, leisurely walk up a mountain but while flying in a jet plane instead. Complete Attention and Reflection in spite of the density or tempo of the action.

So if you are going to give up your body's health to the other cultures of Europe, then are you sure that they won't "collect" you in the same way the English shamelessly "prove" their superiority there, here in America and around the world, by taking credit for other people coming here to do things they can't do in their own countries? Art begins with "Know Thyself completely and then Pay Attention." That IS a delemma. What is it that you lose by sending your people abroad to be operated on? Know thyself and then pay attention! The same thing you lost by being better at Chinese Lacquer Painting then the Chinese but forgetting how to write music and words like Campian or Dowland. You may very well lose your soul this time to those "other collectors". There are many Messianic religions both sacred and secular that collect souls themselves in their Empire building. You have reason to fear these foreign "body snatchers"! But there has to be another answer, if we can get past the excuses and the complaints.

Ray Evans Harrell

Re: Panic Stations

Reply via email to