Month: August 2017

I have strong evidence that I lacked a certain worldliness when I was 9. I’m sure I’ve written about this story before. We had moved from Seattle to San Diego, and I missed my friend, Dan. I can’t remember if I asked Mom or Dad if I could call him: probably not.

I was smart enough to know that, in Mom’s address book (People of a Certain Age remember when these were actual books, not electronic files) was Dan’s parent’s phone number. Somehow, I managed to be alone long enough to place a long distance call to Dan (People of a Certain Age will also remember per minute charges for such calls). It must have been great to hear his voice.

Not so great was my father asking me one day if I had called Dan. I lied. Then he produced the telephone bill, and my worldliness quotient rose. He was not pleased. He said he didn’t care about the call. He cared about the lie.

That happened sixty-one years ago. The lesson of that day—about not lying—stuck.

I have been thinking about why people lie since Judy, in one of our lanai book reads, read about how the War Department in World War II flat-out lied to the press, and hence to the citizenry, about the ineffectiveness of a campaign to use the new B-29 bombers for specific bombing missions inside China.

One specific lie was to contend that a munitions factory run by the Japanese had been put out of commission because of bomb damage when no bombs had hit the facility at all. Of course, the citizenry had no way to check out that story.

My present worldliness quotient allows me to understand that, during wars, all sides are prone to lie if the fabrications sustain morale. In the U.S., the temptation to lie in such circumstances for such reasons might have been tempered by the experience of Vietnam, but I am skeptical.

Since 1972, two Presidents have faced impeachment because they were caught lying. Cigarette companies lied to the public about the dangers of smoking for a long while, asserting that a good smoke could even energize athletes. A manufacturer of air bags has been forced into bankruptcy because their lie was found out.

Didn’t they know about Pinocchio’s nose, how it grew longer with every lie that he told? Weren’t they in class when we were taught that, when George Washington’s father confronted him, asking whether or not George had chopped down the cherry tree, George replied, “I cannot tell a lie. I did it?”

(The worldlier me wonders how many cherry trees there were on the farm and why George was moved to hew one to the ground. But then I also wonder about George throwing a silver dollar across the Rappahannock River, a far distance. I have not even tossed a coin in a fountain. I value cash too much.)

Our hero-makers might be forgiven for creating morality lessons that show people doing the right thing. They are making myths, and myths are central to any civilization.

Someone denying responsibility for something, or making claims about safety that aren’t true, or shifting the blame so as to remain, they hope, blameless, are not in the business of myth-making. This kind of lying makes you want to point fingers and sing “Liar, liar, pants on fire, Your nose is longer than a telephone wire.” (Thank you, Castaways, 1965)

Once you tell a lie, does that condemn you to be branded a liar forever? If so, tough luck for me with that lie about the call on my record. Are there degrees of seriousness of lies; lying about the health hazards of cigarettes versus not telling the truth about Dan? I think so, but wonder when a lie passes from being a “little white” one to a lie about one’s actions to a lie that costs lives. There surely must be a hierarchy.

Then there is lying to oneself. V.S. Naipaul once noted “the only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.” “To thine own self be true…” is the beginning of Polonius’ speech in “Hamlet.” That must be a starting point.

What is worrisome is how easily folks become inured to lies or assume that anybody who sees things differently than do they must be lying. There is a danger in passing off lies as expected behavior from certain kinds of people. There is equal danger in assuming that certain kinds of people always lie.

How would our nation be different if, in the 1950s, when some people knew there were issues, cigarette manufacturers would have put their own warning on packs? What might President Nixon have accomplished had he said in 1972, “some of my supporters committed a burglary, and I knew about it shortly afterwards. I have fired the people responsible.” What if President Clinton had said, “yes, I engaged in sexual activity with Ms. Lewinsky?”

I’m sure there are folks in public life and the corporate world (Warren Buffet comes to mind) who tell the truth, take responsibility, and consider their word their bond. They could become our 21^st century stories about telling the truth, supplanting stories about cherry trees.

It does not take much worldly wisdom to see how much better our world could be with less lying.

Daniel E. White

August 28, 2017

Beginning in 1984, through 2013, except for three years, I was a headmaster. Because of so many pertinent examples in schools around the world, headmaster is a position often parodied, sometimes vilified. Mr. Chips and Professor Dumbledore are exceptions to the image of the autocratic, tradition-bound, punishment-prone power in private schools of various reputation.

I’d like to think that I was different. But, in fact, the way schools like mine worked, the headmaster was expected by the Board of Trustees to be fully in command, the final arbiter of any issue involving faculty, students, parents, vendors, the media; you name it.

Within a private school, the head of school is the person of power. Now I have learned, if the research is right, that those 26 years in “power” might have damaged my brain as badly as if I had suffered a traumatic brain injury.

I will resist the temptation to say “great, now I have an excuse for all of the dumb decisions I made.” That ignores the fact that I chose to become a headmaster and stayed in the job for so long. I could claim ignorance—who knew that power was bad for you? But there had been subtle warnings. (“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Lord Acton)  Power is “a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” Henry Adams)

Jerry Useen might say that Henry Adams got it right. Useen, writing in the July/August 2017 “The Atlantic,” cites the research of Sukhvinder Obni, a neuroscientist, who found, through using a transcranial-magnetic-stimulator machine, that “power…impairs a specific neural process called ‘mirroring’ that may be a cornerstone of empathy. That gives a neurological basis to what [psychology professor Dacher] Keltner has termed ‘the power paradox.’ Once we have power, we lose some of the capacities we needed to gain it in the first place.”

If you are interested in further validation of the thesis, read the article. There are, though, suggestions of hope for those in power. One who is, by nature, resolutely and unfailingly other-directed might have the necessary armor to deflect constant adulation and incessant reminders of her or his power. The movie, “Patton,” ends with a tale from Roman times about the slave who is charged with whispering in the ear of returning war heroes “all fame is fleeting.”

Useen notes that psychologist Keltner suggests that people in power regularly remind themselves of times and situations when they were not powerful. He continues his suggestions by noting powerful people who have had advisors who constantly reminded them of their humanity (Louis Howe and FDR) or spouses intent on keeping an expanding ego in check as much as possible (Clementine Churchill).

Distill the various suggestions of hope and what emerges is empathy. There is much to be gained by walking a mile in the other person’s moccasins, to paraphrase Native American wisdom.

One of the greatest privileges I have in these PPP (post-power-position) days is to work with students on their dissertations prepared in pursuit of the Ed.D. degree in Professional Education Practice at UH Manoa. I have worked with five students in the most recent cohort, each one writing about a topic drawn from their individual educational practice.

One of the topics has been innovative teaching. Through interviews, focus groups, and review of relevant literature, the student has explored manifestations of innovation in teaching and catalogued the characteristics of those teachers who are acknowledged to be innovative. The research led the student to make a number of insightful observations that could be helpful to those who hire teachers or, for that matter, workers in other endeavors as well.

What surprised him was that the common characteristic in people seen to be innovative was empathy.

There are some of you People of a Certain Age saying right now, “Duh. How obvious is that?”

Perhaps so. This would not be the first time, however, when the obvious has been overlooked in favor of more complex or “deeper” explanations, or the internal emotion downplayed in favor of external technique.

Why is your favorite teacher your favorite teacher?

Would the architects of the financial crisis of 2007-08 acted differently if they had empathy for those who might be harmed by their risky, perhaps even illegal, behavior? Would policy makers act any differently if a regular part of their deliberative process was to consider whether their constituents feel served or served up, made vulnerable to the economic or political advantages of this group or that?

The student’s research has led to another question; can empathy be taught? He thinks there are ways to bring out whatever empathic tendencies one might have. I hope he is right.

And I hope that those responsible for the selection, care, and feeding of leaders—in education, politics, business, wherever—will accept the power of empathy to reduce the brain-damaging effects of power.

How many times can one hear “you’re the greatest” without ultimately believing it? How many of the powerful employ the whisperer to remind him or her that “all power is fleeting?”

Daniel E. White

August 14, 2017