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Presidential worldiness

Published
by
peter
on 2009-06-07
in History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads
. Closed

He was now, if not yet a man, then at least a youth of more than ordinary experience of the world.  He had traveled exhaustively in Britain, Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, visiting their great cities time and again and actually living in some for long periods.  He had plumbed the Catacombs and climbed the Great Pyramids, slept in a monastery and toured a harem.  He had hunted jackals on horseback, kissed the Pope’s hand, stared into a volcano, traced an ancient civilization to its source, and followed the wanderings of Jesus.  He had been exposed to much of the world’s greatest art and architecture, become conversant in two foreign languages, and felt as much at home in Arab bazaars as at a German kaffeeklatsch, or on the shaven lawns of an English estate.

Ed Morris’ description of Teddy Roosevelt at 15, appropos 44 and 26.

Reference:

Edmund Morris [2001]: The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York, USA:  The Modern Library.  Revised and updated edition.  First edition published in 1979.  Except is from page 47.




Commuting in the age of email

Published
by
peter
on 2009-05-26
in Argumentation, Corporate culture, Decision theory, Joint-Action Society, Planning, Post-Industrial Nomads, Project Management and Team working
. Closed

If you believe, as the prevailing social metaphor would have it, that this is the Age of Information, then you could easily imagine that the main purpose of human interactions is to request and provide information.   That seems to be the implicit assumption underlying Lane Wallace’s discussion of commuting and working-from-home here.   Wallace is surprised that anyone still travels to work, when information can be transferred so much more readily by phone, email and the web.

But the primary purpose of most workplace interactions is not information transfer, or this is so only incidentally.  Rather, workplace interactions are about the co-ordination of actions – identifying and assessing alternatives for future action, planning and co-ordinating future actions, and reporting on past actions undertaken or current actions being executed.    To engage in such interactions about action of course involves requests for and transfers of information.    To the extent that this is the case, such interactions can be and indeed are undertaken with participants separated in space and time.   But co-ordination of actions requires very different speech acts to those (relatively simple) locutions seeking and providing information:     speech acts such as proposals, promises, requests, entreaties, and commands.  These speech acts have two distinct and characteristic features – they usually require uptake (the intended hearer or actor must agree to the action before the action is undertaken), and the person with the power of retraction or revocation is not necessarily the initial speaker.   An accepted promise can only be revoked by the person to whom the promise is made, for instance, not by the person who made the promise. So, by their very nature these locutions are dialogical acts, not monolectical.   You can’t meaningfully give commands to yourself, for example, and what value is a promise made in a forest?  Neither of these two features apply to speech acts involving requests for information or responses to requests for information.

In addition, inherent in speech acts over actions is the notion of intentionality.    If I promise to you to do action X, then I am expressing an intention to do X.  If your goals requires that action X be commenced or done, then you need to assess how sincere and how feasible my promise is.  Part of your assessment may be based on your past experience with me, and/or the word of others you trust about me (my reputation).   Thus it is perfectly possible for you to assess my capability and my sincerity without ever meeting me.  International transactions across all sorts of industries have taken place for centuries between parties who never met; the need to assess sincerity and capability is surely a key reason for the dominance of families (eg, the Rothschilds in the 18th and 19th centuries) and close-knit ethnic groups (eg, the Chinese diaspora) in international trade networks.  But, if you don’t know me already, it is generally much easier and more reliable for you to assess my sincerity and capability by looking me in the eye as I make my promise to you.

Bloggers and writers and professors, who rarely need to co-ordinate actions with anyone to achieve their work goals, seem not to understand these issues very well.  But these are issues are known to anyone who actually does anything in the world, whether in politics, in public administration or in business.   One defining feature of modern North American corporate culture, in my experience, is that most people find it preferable to make promises of actions even when they do not yet have, and when they know that they do not yet have, the capabilities or resources required to undertake the actions promised.  They do this rather than not make the promise or rather than making the promise conditional on obtaining the necessary resources, in order to appear “positive” to their bosses.   This is the famous “Can Do” attitude at work, and I have discussed it tangentially before in connection with the failure of the Bay of Pigs;  its contribution to the failures of modern American business needs a separate post.

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Ol’ 57 Varieties

Published
by
peter
on 2009-04-22
in Culture, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads
. 1 Comment

Yesterday, in a ceremony awarding prizes to a successful US Navy football team at the White House, President Obama greeted a fellow Hawaiian with a “hang loose” sign (aka the Shaka gesture), which was of course returned.  On the day before his Inauguration in January, an amateur video showed then-President-elect Barack Obama with his wife, greeting VIP guests at a concert held in his honour on the Mall, in Washington DC; many of these guests were black Americans, and Young Bazza spoke to them in a different accent, different tone of voice, and with different body language to his normal public persona.   As a state congressman in Illinois, he once remarked to an aide that the folks he met upstate were just like his Kansan relatives.  As is well-known, he was a big-city urban politician from Chicago, of a type that can be found throughout the North-East and in some cities elsewhere – think The Wire (Baltimore), or think larger-than-life city politicians from TR, Fiorello La Guardia, Richard Daley, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Tip O’Neill, through to Rudy Giuliani and Cory Booker.  He was also Editor of the Harvard Law Review, putting him into the intellectual A-league alongside people like Adlai Stevenson, Henry Kissenger, Sam Nunn and both Clintons.

Perhaps the key reason for Obama’s sudden rise to national prominence  in the US is his ability to identify with people from all over the map, to make people feel that he is “one of us” in lots of different communities.   In this he takes after “Ol’ 57 Varieties” himself, Teddy Roosevelt.   Obama, of course, takes this to a new global level, with his family connections to Kenya and to Indonesia.  

Two thoughts come to mind.  The first is that several successful politicians have had backgrounds or career experiences that enable them to connect with many different communities in their home countries:  Harold Wilson for example, who traveled the length and breadth of Britain in his 20s as a researcher for William Beveridge and for the Beveridge Commision; Eddison Zvobgo, another Harvard Law School graduate and Minister for Local Government in Robert Mugabe’s newly-independent Zimbabwe, who used the role to build a nationwide constituency; and Bob Hawke, Australian PM, who spent the main part of his career as first a researcher with and then President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions (the ACTU), a position which enabled him to travel widely, to meet people across the social spectrum, and to make connections internationally (eg, he negotiated with the USSR to allow greater Jewish emigration to Israel).  

My second thought is that this provides us with another way to classify the various US Presidents.  Some Presidents, like Obama, are post-industrial nomads,  either not from one specific place or from several:  TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41.   Other Presidents are firmly perceived as being from one specific place:  Lincoln, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Bush 43.  It is interesting that the only nomads before Obama were Republicans.

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Ol' 57 Varieties

Published
by
peter
on 2009-04-22
in Culture, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads
. 1 Comment

Yesterday, in a ceremony awarding prizes to a successful US Navy football team at the White House, President Obama greeted a fellow Hawaiian with a “hang loose” sign (aka the Shaka gesture), which was of course returned.  On the day before his Inauguration in January, an amateur video showed then-President-elect Barack Obama with his wife, greeting VIP guests at a concert held in his honour on the Mall, in Washington DC; many of these guests were black Americans, and Young Bazza spoke to them in a different accent, different tone of voice, and with different body language to his normal public persona.   As a state congressman in Illinois, he once remarked to an aide that the folks he met upstate were just like his Kansan relatives.  As is well-known, he was a big-city urban politician from Chicago, of a type that can be found throughout the North-East and in some cities elsewhere – think The Wire (Baltimore), or think larger-than-life city politicians from TR, Fiorello La Guardia, Richard Daley, John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Tip O’Neill, though to Rudy Giuliani and Cory Booker.  He was also Editor of the Harvard Law Review, putting him into the intellectual A-league alongside people like Adlai Stevenson, Henry Kissenger, Sam Nunn and both Clintons.

Perhaps the key reason for Obama’s sudden rise to national prominence  in the US is his ability to identify with people from all over the map, to make people feel that he is “one of us” in lots of different communities.   In this he takes after “Ol’ 57 Varieties” himself, Teddy Roosevelt.   Obama, of course, takes this to a new global level, with his family connections to Kenya and to Indonesia.  

Two thoughts come to mind.  The first is that several successful politicians have had backgrounds or career experiences that enable them to connect with many different communities in their home countries:  Harold Wilson for example, who traveled the length and breadth of Britain in his 20s as a researcher for William Beveridge and for the Beveridge Commision; Eddison Zvobgo, another Harvard Law School graduate and Minister for Local Government in Robert Mugabe’s newly-independent Zimbabwe, who used the role to build a nationwide constituency; and Bob Hawke, Australian PM, who spent the main part of his career as first a researcher with and then President of the Australian Council of Trades Unions (the ACTU), a position which enabled him to travel widely, to meet people across the social spectrum, and to make connections internationally (eg, he negotiated with the USSR to allow greater Jewish emigration to Israel).  

My second thought is that this provides us with another way to classify the various US Presidents.  Some Presidents, like Obama, are post-industrial nomads,  either not from one specific place or from several:  TR, Hoover, Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 41.   Other Presidents are firmly perceived as being from one specific place:  Lincoln, Taft, Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, FDR, Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton and Bush 43.  It is interesting that the only nomads before Obama were Republicans.

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White House Cosmopolitanism

Published
by
peter
on 2009-04-13
in History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads
. 2 Comments

Following the first seder ever held in the White House, The Guardian’s US correspondent, Michael Tomasky, has a post arguing that the Obamas “are our first cosmopolitan first couple.”  Like the widespread myth that Barack Obama is the first urban US president (he is in fact the third), this is not the case.   Before the Obamas, Presidents John F. Kennedy (mentioned briefly by Tomasky, albeit grudgingly), Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt were as cosmopolitan as the Obamas.  

TR was born into a family that had already lived in Manhattan for over 200 years, and his grandfather was arguably the richest man in New York City.  Roosevelt spent his 10th birthday in Europe, as part of a year-long Grand Tour his father had organized to educate the Roosevelt children, visiting Britain, the Low Countries, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.  He married his second wife in London, while staying in Brown’s Hotel, perhaps the most expensive hotel in the city.  While Governor of New York state, his dinner table included guests such as the Governor-General of Canada and a young English journalist named Winston S. Churchill.  That TR traveled west to the Dakotas to find himself after the death of his first wife, and so gained a reputation as a courageous frontiersman (a reputation fully deserved) is only evidence of a wider cosmopolitanism, not a provincialism; for instance, his western experience reinforced in him a respect for others according to their values and achievements, regardless of their social status or ethnic origin.  TR was the first US President to dine at the White House with a black American guest, Booker T. Washington in 1901, and he appointed the first Jewish-American to a Cabinet post, Oscar Straus as Secretary of Commerce and Labor in 1906.  And TR had such a tendency to claim ancestry from different ethnic groups (Dutch, German, Irish, among others), he was nick-named “Old 57 Varieties”.

Hoover, too, had travelled widely before he became President, working in the mines of Western Australia and in China, and seeking to alleviate the suffering of refugees in Europe during World War I.  His fortune may have been ill-gotten, but he declined Lloyd George’s offer of a place in the Imperial War Cabinet during WW I in order to devote his efforts to raising money for war relief.  Whatever he was  – a scheming, get-rich-quick merchant before WW I, a do-nothing President paralyzed by ideology during the Great Depression, and full of self-righteous sanctimony afterwards – Hoover was certainly no provincial.   Indeed, both Hoover and TR were geographically restless – people we’d call Post-Industrial Nomads if they had lived a century later.

And even some other recent Presidents, although perhaps not as cosmopolitan as Obama, were not as provincial as George W. Bush or Ronald Reagan.  Eisenhower had seen overseas military service, in Europe during WWII, as had JFK, LBJ, Nixon and George H. W. Bush,  in Australia and the Pacific.   Bush 41 had also been the US representative in China before becoming President.   Obama is certainly exceptional, but he’s not unique.

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Urban Precedents

Published
by
peter
on 2009-02-23
in Culture, Heroes, History, Politics and Post-Industrial Nomads
. 2 Comments

In the excitement over the USA’s first black American President, some people have become over-excited.  An example is Marbury, who claims Barack Obama is also the nation’s first urban President.  This is simply not the case.    Although most US Presidents are creatures of the countryside or the suburbs, there have been at least two Presidents with as much claim to be urbanistas as does young Bazza.   Most recent was John F. Kennedy, raised in Boston and a sophisticated habitue of London, Washington and New York City before becoming President.    Of course, as all rich kids of his time did, he spent summers sailing on the Cape or vacationing in Florida, but JFK was as urban as they come.

And before JFK, a century ago, there was Teddy Roosevelt, born and raised in Manhattan, and urban to the core.   Of course he loved Nature (he could justly also claim the title of the country’s first Environmentalist President), and he decamped to the wilderness of the North Dakota Badlands to find himself after the death of his first wife.    But this was a man who was such an urban-dweller that he took the job of President of the Police Commission of the New York City Police Department – the NYPD! – literally running to his office on the day of his appointment, according to the account of his friend, the journalist Lincoln Steffens.    While in that post, Roosevelt spent his evenings walking the streets of Manhattan to meet his policemen on the beat:

T.R. went about  at night with [journalist Jacob] Riis as his guide to see the police at work.  He had some bizarre experiences.   He caught men off post, talking together; he caught them in all sorts of misconduct and had funny, picturesque adventures, which Riis described to all of us [journalists] (so fair was he as a reporter) and which we all wrote to the amusement of newspaper readers.  But what T.R. was really doing – the idea of Riis in proposing it – was to talk personally with the individual policemen and ask them to believe in him, in the law, which they were to enforce.  T.R. knew, he said, the power they were up against, the tremendous, enduring power of organized evil, but he promised he would take care of them.”

Walking the streets of Manhattan at night is not the behaviour of a President Cornpone.     Obama is the third urban President the USA has had, not the first.

Reference:

Lincoln Steffens [1931]:  The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens.  (New York, USA:  Harcourt Brace and Company.)

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A cosmopolite in a cafe

Published
by
peter
on 2008-05-03
in Globalization and Post-Industrial Nomads
. Closed

One of O. Henry’s short stories has a character who refuses to say where he is from:

“I’ve been around the world twelve times,” said he. “I know an Esquimau in Upernavik who sends to Cincinatti for his neckties, and I saw a goat-herder in Uruguay who won a prize in a Battle Creek breakfast food puzzle competition.  I pay rent on a room in Cairo, Egypt, and another in Yokohoma all the year round.  I’ve got slippers waiting for me in a tea-house in Shanghai, and I don’t have to tell ‘em how to cook my eggs in Rio Janeiro [sic] or Seattle.  It’s a mighty little old world.  What’s the use of bragging about being from the North, or the South, or the old manor house in the dale, or Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, or Pike’s Peak, or Fairfax County, Va., or Hooligan’s Flats or anyplace?  It’ll be a better world when we quit being fools about some mildewed town or ten acres of swampland just because we happened to be born there.”

Of course, this being an O. Henry story, the guy later gets into a fight because someone criticizes Mattawamkeag, Maine, the dorp where the guy is actually from!

O. Henry: “A cosmopolite in a cafe”, pp. 11-15, The Four Million. The Complete Works of O. Henry, Volume 1. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1953.)

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