Scott Cawelti

Here's a short piece published in the Courier on Feb. 19, 1987.  Seems to connect to a timeless human foible:  contradicting ourselves.  Is it dated?  Only the reference to communists--which seem to have disappeared as world-class villains to be replaced these days by terrorists.  

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Two of America’s greatest poets, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman, still offer comfort to millions of Americans. It has to do with self-contradictions, which Emerson and Whitman saw as being part of the human condition.

“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” said Emerson. And Whitman snorted, “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”

Both poets offered those thoughts as replies to critics who rub their hands gleefully every time they discover some belief that doesn’t match some other belief held by the same person.   “Didn’t you just contradict yourself?” they’ll ask, looking down their noses.

And we all do, daily, if not hourly. The human personality is much like an old house, full of rooms, closets, and basements containing all sorts of mismatched junk.

The basement contains buckets of toxic cleaners, paints, and poisons. Upstairs, the kitchen counter sports a water purifier. It’s designed to remove the very poisons found in the basement – though, of course, the house’s owner senses no contradiction. The poisons he/she’s worried about come from other people’s basements, sooner or later.  

And on a bedroom wall, maybe, hangs the slogan, “ABORTION IS MURDER.” And the wall on the den: “BETTER DEAD THAN RED.”

Do they contradict themselves?

According to last Sunday Register’s Iowa Poll, half of all Iowans insist they’d rather be “dead than Red.” That means they’d choose death rather than life as supposedly lived in a communist society.

Now, by  “communist society” we mean that society as depicted in the Western media for the last half a century. It’s clearly a totalitarian, bureaucratic, corrupt, vicious police state.

 “Amerika,” the ABC miniseries showing every night this week, portrays that state with a vengeance. It’s a powerful depiction because it’s superimposed on our beloved homeland.

We recognize the people, the towns, the language – except that now they’re all stereotypically “communist.” As I say, half of all Iowans would choose to die rather than live in such a state.

According to the poll, such people tend to be Republican and conservative. And very likely many of them are also anti-abortion.

But surely if one is pro-life, one must continue to be pro-life no matter how rotten that life might be. Whether it’s capitalist or communist, it’s still life. The quality of life can’t be an issue for pro-lifers without a raging contradiction.

The other problem:  The depiction isn't true.We’re heavily propagandized in this country, as are all media-oriented countries.

 Most Americans have trouble imagining happy, well-fed Russians, concerned with their careers, raising families, with aspiring to make a better world. Such Russians appeared all last week on the “Donohue” show, by the way, direct from Russia.

Such a view doesn’t serve the military, which needs an enemy to justify its weapons contracts. It doesn’t serve politicians, who need to rail regularly about the communist threat. And it certainly doesn’t serve television, which needs visually exciting melodramas to hype its ratings.

It’s all part of the largest contradiction of all: love your enemy on Sundays, and hate them during weeknight miniseries.

Emerson and Whitman would have understood.

Published this morning in the Waterloo Courier.  Graduation season 
provokes long, long thoughts.   

Finally it’s May, graduation month.   Time for ending and beginning. 

Ending, meaning getting certified with a degree. That’s the first half.   

Hearty congratulations to certified graduates.   If you’re renting a robe and flat hat this month, you’ve completed half of your graduation. 

The other half?  Beginning the rest of your life.  That’s what “commencement” means, after all. 

Graduates, you’re now supposedly ready to begin.  And if you’re not a tad 

terrified, you’re not paying attention.  

Truth is, your formal schooling cannot have made you ready.  Not even close.  

Nothing that formal education offers, and I mean from Ivy Leagues to taxpayer-supported all-purpose schools—has given you enough knowledge and skills for the churning world you now enter.  

This is not due to grade inflation, rewarding mediocrity with high grades for little work.  Nor because states have cut back radically on financial support for academics, downgrading education in favor of sports for entertainment.   

The problem lies deeper and is more insidious.   

The fact is, our lives and times no longer can be prepared for.  We’re living in an evolving world of utter unpredictability.  A world of black swans, to quote from Nassim Taleb’s book of that title.   

Events erupt for which no one could have prepared or predicted. 

Make no mistake: More black swans wing their way toward us.  

Examples:  Superbugs capable of inflicting pandemics that make past plagues look like rehearsals.  Weather gone wild, with climate change creating challenges beyond our capacity to accept. Widespread “Colony collapse” of honeybees that pollinate a third of the world’s crops. 

A major religion hijacked by fringe elements ready to die and kill for their beliefs.  Nuclear weapons and other WMDs likely to fall into the hands of fanatics/lunatics.  North Korea’s there now.   

More positively, breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology that will create or clone humans who live virtually forever, if they can afford and endure it.  Humans who are more machine than human, as Ray Kurzweil explores in his book “The Singularity is Near.”  

Machines that outthink, outlive, and outmaneuver us at every turn.  Siri, anyone?

And other events too bizarre to even imagine, but that will cause us all to rethink everything.   

That’s the world you inherit, graduates, and must somehow negotiate.   

You will wake up any number of mornings and face calamities and/or breakthroughs that not even sci-fi writers have conjured, at least in any accurate detail. 

You think I jest?  Imagine a columnist writing in 1961, the year I graduated, and 

offering some version of what actually happened from then to now. 

Instant fingertip knowledge, 500-channel media, digitization of media, Facebook and Twitter with billions (yes, billions) caught up in seeking and finding their 15 seconds of fame for capturing anything bizarre enough. Passenger jets turned into missiles by fanatics.   Bottomless oceans of self-expression that engulf us all in shameless narcissism. 

Were 1961 grads  “ready” for any of this?  Writers from that era who foresaw what actually did occur would have been reviled or ignored.  Of course none did. 

I was no more ready for those shattering decades than sleepers are ready for a sinkhole to swallow them whole.  

I would have chosen to stay in my little early sixties comfort zone of electric typewriters, secretaries who did the paperwork, women who stayed home and cooked and cleaned.  Tiny televisions broadcasting three channels. Three-chord pop music with great melodies and nonsense lyrics.  

Most of what my classmates and I thought and did before our commencement 

no longer makes sense.  I had to reinvent my worldview and myself several times, and only partially succeeded. 

The times are not just a-changin’. They’re exploding—in every field, in all directions, at speeds beyond comprehension. Compared to the last fifty years, the next fifty will be on steroids.  

So forget about being “ready.”   Rather, be teachable.  Malleable.  Flexible.  Curious.  Humble.  

In short, become a human learning center, ready to be taught by anything and everything as it occurs.   

That’s the beginning—commencement—of real readiness.