SINACCORD                                                                            

 

August 27, 2014

 Williams College Class of ‘65 Bio for Torrey Orton

 

I am leading a life I have mostly chosen, missing some things on the way that being less devoted to choosing would have given me. Much of it has been composed of things I never thought of, nor knew of, at Williams - living in Melbourne (40yrs), Beijing (2yrs), Shanghai (1.5yrs) and Paris (1.5yrs) for starters. Some has been planned, like becoming a psychotherapist and organisation consultant in my 50’s. As a result of meeting Jane by chance on a smoggy July, 1970 NYC afternoon, I started learning deeply that there are other worlds than the American one(s), whence an eventual change of citizenship honouring the Melbourne home of my life.

 

Much of this life has been an exploration of different worlds, inner and outer, with a helping professions orientation which was emerging at Williams and confirmed in 5 years of HS teaching, and alternative school and commune building, in New Haven, moderated by 2 years of a Yale philosophy Masters over 1965-72. In the following 40 years I only once slipped outside the helping life to run a bank IT systems project 1989-91 – but even then it was an HR system help desk.

 

The bank was merged-over by a neighbour and I got an unexpected redundancy package jump start into consulting in 1991, which was where I meant to go next anyway. My consulting has always had an organisational focus and in intercultural flavour, with a personal development infrastructure (I started a small psychotherapy practice in tandem with consulting having gained licensing in 6 years of night school 1985-91). This combination produced my second biggest adult learning experience – partnering and coaching a Chinese partner in a start-up in Shanghai from 1998 til 2008. The third was living in Beijing in 1981-83. The fourth is a toss-up between fulltime therapist and part-time blogger for the last 5 years...taking both seriously, but not enough to step up or out a quantum jump. Aikido weapons work has been a background discipline for 10 years.

 

Jane has been accompanying me and being accompanied by me since that July afternoon in International House at Columbia Univ. The commitment to things Chinese has always been her lead. My following there has acquired its own momentum and valences, while adding my therapeutic and organisational tones to her linguistic ones. She stepped into the retiring time of life 5 years ago by launching a career-topping innovation in Chinese language teacher education, with about every complexity I can think of!

 

My first biggest learning will probably be what emerges from here on. One theme is rehabilitation of public life, which I have blogged for five years with special interest in ethics and public discourses about difficult issues – climate, science, thinking while in danger. Two mornings a week I have been a pro-choice witness to anti-abortionist harassment of patients at a local clinic for the last 3 years. It would be simpler if I could give up worrying about the world; I cannot.

 

The great unknown is resilience. I was reminded in January ’11 that I’m as prone as any to surprise attacks – that time acute pancreatitis and a year later a gangrenous gall bladder. 12 years ago a slow heart beat dropped me in a street. The beat has been picked up by a pacemaker since then. Along the way I enjoy more aspects of life than ever – many only accessible through the portals of age!

 

www.diarybyamadman.blogspot.com

 

“The worst class ever…”

"The worst class ever…"

Torrey Orton

May 31, 2011 Memorial Day

 

Taft School Class of 1961 50^th Reunion – 12-14 May, 2011

A Straight's View

 

We were the worst class ever we were told by the Headmaster at our graduation in 1961, or so I repeatedly heard from my classmates. I don't remember that moment 50 years ago. Nor did I remember a host of other events that came up in passing comments or explicit explorations by my classmates – even if I was centrally involved. Apparently, as JM regaled the diners on our first night, I was "killed" by a night time assault by HH in a 1959 precursor to Nightmare on Elm Street. Couldn't find the slightest trace of my death, then or now. So, maybe I should leave this summary effort to others with better neuronal qualifications.

 

Taft and me now

 

But, I can't. I have to write this for me on the way to creating my two continent 'home'. Some of that home is in the hands of you classmates of '61 who co-own my life from 1956 to 1961. I have to write to make sense of my now through the thens which underlie it. Taft was a home and I have to know it and them to know me. And anyway, I just have to understand. It's what I do. By fate's hand, my present home is also in the middle of a world historical event, I think.

    

What will be told here is mainly the story of my reunion. This better ring some bells for others of you, too, otherwise it's all in my mind (which is possible enough!). I'll try to structure the story through the main events – meals and associated functions. There are some themes which cross the whole domain, so they may be treated as such. People will be named by their initials. Fictionalising the real people who make the story what it is for me would seriously demean the reality. Initialising them should preserve privacy to the community of believers who can identify their owners.

 

Deciding what is really American is an important part of this reflection, so some of my choice of content will reflect what I think is really American, what is typical. That may be a matter of dispute for sure.

    

Paul C and us - The 50^th Reunion Dinner

 

Continuing with the theme of what can I say with some confidence to be true, I think KG noted that the kids at Taft now seem happy. This was on the bus on the way to the first event – the Thursday reunion dinner. He was contrasting their state with ours in our times. He brought into view the theme for the night – sadness, anger, disappointment – which I later characterised as "depressed affect" in the present group.

 

The intensity of speakers' feelings revealed a range of still present hurts which I had not noticed enough in their time to remember now. They were not my hurts at the time, which were strong enough to make it easy to say I hated the place for a few decades after leaving in '61 and to assure the Alumni office I would not be contributing ever and to stop sending me encouragements to do so. Some of the hurt – JH, JS and John S – arose from treatment by the school authorities (symbolised and sometimes personally fronted by Paul C) which branded them as misfits, defectives of some sorts. Their misfit was that their learning styles (kinaesthetic, tangible, etc.) and activity preferences (making and doing rather than observing and contemplating) and natural temperamental exuberance (throwing snowballs at plough drivers from open dorm windows, looking out to celebrate hits and getting caught forthwith!) did not fit the school mission: to produce college entrants on the way to professional or service (teaching, religion) careers housed behind white picket fences. How many of our classmates who got "lost" or chose not to return were also injured in the same regime?

 

The treatment reflected, in turn, institutional assumptions about human potential which still dominate schooling and professional entry. A further turn is that the era of our passage thru Taft was the leading edge of a decline of traditional authorities and boundaries, an edge which overflowed with the multi-dimensional socio-political movements of the '60's. These institutional assumptions fed on our parents' history of Depression scarcity (or its threat) and the titillating rush of post-war recovery. Our parents, too, contributed for some of us to denials of real vocational preferences like 'if you choose Yale Art you pay; if you choose Penn business, I pay' as RL explained part of his early life course to me. 50 years later he's got his art studio.

 

Historical footnote: Some of us wondered what was happening in our times at Taft that warranted or encouraged the negative attitude which was emblematic* of those times. Was it some shift in the foundations of modernity (or last seismic shuffles of pre-modern structures), perhaps? Here are some '50's precursors with potentially high impact items in bold:

Art – Pollock, Smith, and predecessors back to Picasso

Music – Jazz, blues, R and R and predecessors back to the atonal, etc.

Theater – The Sandbox; Death of a Salesman and back to Becket….

Novel / poetry – Catcher in the Rye; On the Road; Lord of the flies; Lady Chatterley's Lover…Ginsberg's Howl

Social – Brown vs. Board of Education, Rosa Parks' Montgomery bus ride, Little Rock High School integration

Political – McCarthyism; Freedom rides (first in the May of '61); Fear of the bomb (Mutual Assured Destruction, and such)

 

And, we could acknowledge that post-modernity was previewed variously by Heraclitus, Zeno, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spinoza, Whitman, Einstein (relativity), Heisenberg (uncertainty), Berg, Cage, and the movement towards various personal freedoms (to be at the table, on the bus, in the school, on the job) which were denied / blocked for large parts of humanity by traditional thought and structures; and in tandem was the rise of new enemies: USSR and PRC, with boundary skirmishes starting from Korea and sliding into Vietnam under our noses as we left school.

 

*one of my brothers mentioned a week later that every second word out of my mouth in those days was 'duh', now rendered memorably in Homer's 'doh'. He was Taft '65; my brother, that is.

 

Undiscussables

 

All human organisations have undiscussables. These are sometimes fundamental assumptions like an organisation's justification for its existence or parts of its history which conflict with that purpose. They may be undiscussable because we cannot retrieve them easily from the depths of personal and collective consciousnesses. In addition, however, the undiscussable may be pieces of organisation history which compromise its justification and are undiscussed because we are implicated in the compromising. Such matters are often actively suppressed by organisation members.

 

Undiscussables ramble around in the foreground and background of life, appearing in moments like the Thursday dinner and then reappearing in voluntary, but personally compelling expressions like R, J and B's respective post-reunion emails about PC. I hope this access to each other (and indirectly to all the '61ers because the total email list has been used to carry the expression) will grow an understanding of our era, both what we shared and experienced differently!

 

Talking to HDL after the reunion raised another level of need at play in the PC discussion: that we all need a map for life, and suffer when there's none available or those on offer are felt to be corrupted – wrong guideposts, mismeasured distances, undisclosed dangers…you know what I mean. His wife recalled that her older brother had similar 'attitude' problems in his prep school times (close to ours) and that she heard similar reports of many schools like ours. We were living in mapless times led by people who had only worn options to offer. The new leaders were often to look like no map at all, and that's part of the story of our lives since them.

 

JC

 

For me an undiscussed event is around a now "lost" classmate – JC – who got disappeared in a flash of bureaucratic excess driven by now inconceivably narrow values (about drink and smoke, and not even dope). He doesn't appear in our public class records, but maybe lives in some minds because a couple of people told me bits of the story on the side. My own involvement is conflicted. At the time, I made it clear that I believed covert alcohol consumption should have been left where it was found – hidden among the co-drinkers. On the other hand, I believed that once exposed to the school's policing system, processes had to follow their course. I did not, I now can see, have the guts to confront the system's being based on a hypocrisy, even though a legal one (we were "under age" for drinking)!! With this issue we were engulfed in one of the longest standing contradictions of our culture – the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate intoxicants. This was a bit beyond my competence!! But…. it cost JC a price I still do not know.

 

Ethico-theological footnote: I wonder who decided I was the one for policing Sunday church attendance for 1960-61? I dropped into the stone church Friday morning on a wander around town for old times' sake, finding my seat in the balcony still available. From there I had ticked three hundred forty (??) boxes for attendance records every Sunday of the year.

 

At least one of our since "lost" classmates benefitted from sleights of my recording hand. I do not recall feeling the slightest compunction about this dereliction since the duty was merely formal and never audited. So, the missing member's benefit from my derelictions were never in public view, though how not is another wonder. In a similar vein (wonder at not being caught), I smoked in my monitorial suite, Level 4 Old Building, on out of hockey season evenings, using the ashtray facility of the steel frame bunks for butts. The floor master was a smoker, too, thus immune from detecting fellow travellers. As for the lower-mids surrounding us…thus were the young given their first training in institutionalised hypocrisies. Who compromised Taft values more seriously – JC or me? I vote for me.

 

Friday lunch at the golf club

 

One of the great things in life is when a group's conversation steps up to a different level of openness and vulnerability. This happened at lunch Friday at the table I was at with NP, BC, JBS, JH, and spouses, as appropriate. Obsessiveness was the subject and personal vulnerability the currency of participation. Somehow, S talking about husband JH's predilection for order elicited an unscripted opening by N about his own ADHD and the work of his foundation to support kids in developmental straits. Discussion flowed around the table from that start.

 

I imagine this kind and degree of openness would be very unlikely in a table of people who had met by chance on a cruise ship or walk in the park. Having history can block, but also open. For me the reunion was a quick opening to a wide variety of topics at significant depths. Whatever my relationships with individuals, having history of some kind with all of them allowed talking interesting / serious matters quickly. And, where there was unfinished business of various kinds it all progressed more quickly, often because I did not know there was unfinished business on others' parts with me!

 

A walk in the woods

Also contributing, as almost always, to fulfilling talk were activities like the walk in some woods near Washington, Conn (home of The Gunnery, if you remember) with NP and BC. This had been organised in advance to ensure some real exercise amid the reunion celebrations. It also allowed some more richly fledged discussion of matters raised earlier.

 

The old guard dinner Friday night

 

Some people came and went that night, visiting solely for that event. I missed them in detail, noticing them in passing. The same can also be said for the whole reunion. About this time I was beginning to get personal detail overload and re-explanation download. And my attention was directed towards what was coming next – this: saying goodbye with awareness that so much was yet to be said and done, and never could be within the time available formally. I was starting to rush conversations…

 

Proselyte's progress…KB and me

 

Talking of unfinished business, there was a promised engagement with KB which was announced to each other almost at first sight on the first bus Thursday evening. It took numerous re-enforcements and promises of continuing commitment to talk before we got to the after dinner bar bash Friday eve. Amidst a swarm of existing conversations we pushed aside the distractions and headed into our main act, which had been foreshadowed by KB's religious moments at the public lectern.

 

There followed an hour and a half nose-to-nose engagement around matters of faith and its possibilities to unfold with/for me – a question I am open to entertaining, but not driven to answering. There was a moment of feeling the engagement to be more than an entertainment, which led me to suggest some continuing virtual exploration. Three challenges of faith remained at the end for me as they had been from the start: that the Christian focus is individual profession more than collective; that Christianity is one of the religions of the Book with no greater or lesser claim than the other two on personal credibility; and, that expression of Christianity's message, like Judaism and Islam, is often perverted by the distortions of creating and, more impacting, sustaining its organisational forms – the denominations. These three are mutually reinforcing.

 

This was a classically American experience for me, offering direct access to a most distinctive American characteristic – religion and religiosity – with which I have never been comfortable, nor successfully completely indifferent. My failure to achieve confident indifference has repeatedly been fed by acquaintance with stunning personal models of faith like KB over my life course.

 

For me the main glory of this event was its basis in a mutual recognition more than 50 years ago of hidden talents, even though at the time we (KB and I) could not have seemed, to others and ourselves, to be on more different paths. These differences are the drivers of our actual paths (leaving matters of fate aside), yet are underpinned with a similar sense of truth or value or something like that. I am seeing now that this sense of truth exists with a number of other class members, though some were not visible to me in the past, notably NP and SM. I take this as a remark about me missing their capacities.

 

A class observed

 

Having tried Friday unsuccessfully, I pre-engineered a class visit for Saturday AM, which we actually got to near the right time. It was Upper-mid AP English with a focus on Whitman. Three thoughts: I wish someone had taught me poetry that way 54 years ago. It would have advanced my feeble grip of the form by a decade. Second, the class process was wonderfully flexible by offering space for individual contributions and reflection in balanced amounts and distribution across a small group. Third, the kids contributed freely and easily in about the worst setting imaginable: a bunch of short-term visitors ranging from age 8 to 68 hanging around their ears. Plus, I learned a fine point about the third line of the first stanza of Whitman's "I sing myself". What more can be wanted?

 

One counter-point: two or three times the teacher appended cautions to the room about not judging anything…as if a judgment were a moral failing…all the while expressing judgments himself implicitly in his directing students towards various aspects of Whitman (and correctly so, as far as I could tell; he both provided direction when pathways were fading in the process and when points of fact were abused).

 

Saturday lunch, after a walk to the quad

 

Publically joining the Old Guard

It's funny to be admitted to something I never aspired to join. I do not think of myself as old (more than once a day), though I do think of myself as guarding many things and people. Being formally admitted to the Old Guard by Wally MacMullen highlighted this conflicted condition. Guardians take care of things and people, and many guardians are not old. So, the 'old guard' is a special state reflecting our all carrying into age the guardianship of others and being recognised for this human service. While on the surface we are being recognised for surviving and showing up, more importantly we symbolise the worths that are to be guarded – nothing personal, of course!!

 

This reflection invites another – the guardian monitor me working in various ways like watching out for a little lower-mid who looked a bit like my brother who was to arrive at Taft the year after I left and I would not be there to watch out for him (he made out fine after thrashing a resentful types seeking to revenge his dislike of me on him) as I had not been for most of his growing up ever.

 

JS, and me

He was startling and striking from the first moment of the first night – a man realised in his release from life duties honourably sustained for decades (the family store) until able to step into the true shoes of his self: competitor and teacher/coach. I should have known all those years ago when his mother and mine somehow connected at a Mother's Day hockey game in'60 – a most unlikely pairing driven by mutual recognition. I'm sure I did not provide as much recognition to JS then and I am pleased I could amend for that somewhat now. Reunion is both of the old and the new.

 

JH the boundless

Finally, JH the boundless…I can express my extreme pleasure at being even in the vicinity of JH, but I am not sure why he is such a source for me. Well, I am sure: It is his mindless rambunctious lovingness, so unsuited to an IT design predilection he could (and can) no more change than he can his rambunctiousness; he who alone among us comes back to the place of his youthful humiliation with a gift which can only be made from one who has paid a high price for its acquisition. Aw shucks…I can't say it anywhere near so well as he did so long ago …Shucks!! And my thanks.

 

Closing openings

 

For me the reunion was confirmation that we belong to the first (?) generation of the unretired rather than our predecessors, the "undead". Many of us are still growing in different ways, some visible in encounters above. So, overall, a sense of only just having started conversations, with so long to go that will never, except in a few cases, be continued or completed. Sadness for that and gladness that I know this, which I did not before reunion. It complicates my life by anchoring my present as foreigner (in Australia) in my past as local (in USA), neither wholly resolvable.

 

Undiscussables revisited – challenging opportunities

 

When I started writing this three weeks ago, what comes next I sketched shortly after starting. The questions just emerged seeming to suggest the last step of my explorations – a collection of guideline directions for continued living. I had not yet formulated my undiscussables discussion, but since they are all part of one consciousness, I am seldom surprised by what emerges, only its order, colours and weights vary.

 

Challenges arising from reflecting on who / what we are:

• What to "out" and what not to? This is the whistle-blower question, critical to open doors into spaces which otherwise are relegated to dreams and/or recriminations.
• Telling illuminating stories to the young (and still young old) – this is the offering of lived lives requirement.
• Who did we forget? Did we forget some because they were too hard to remember in their time? What would we have to do to ourselves to open ourselves to what was previously forgettable, and how could we test our openness??
• What of ourselves did we lose on the way from then to now? We only became ourselves by both doing certain things and not doing others; some we could never have done for lack of interest or talent; others were not open to us for reasons of fate or active refusal by greater powers, though talent and interest were available; others had to be let go but still could be recovered to some extent…like my putting some time into learning to sing (which I'm considering).
• What's the price of the losses and who's paying it? (the forgotten?) My analyst once suggested I had dues to pay to receive benefits I am seeking. If I figure that one out I'll post it. Something to do with seeking forgiveness and offering it to others??
• How can we learn the answers given the frailties of our grasps on our pasts, the demands of our commitments in the present and the growing limitations of our energies for understanding? Perhaps the hardest challenge to turn into an opportunity since it seems we are surrounded by unavoidable constraints guaranteed to increase with time! How can the prospect of weakness be a strength?

For once I am going to say these are challenges that should be framed as opportunities precisely because they are so easily heard only in their confronting configurations. Maybe not so worst after all….

My warmest regards,

Straights

Rectifications (25) – Inculcate, inculcation?
Torrey Orton– Jan 30, 2011

"Supporters of private school education argue that it inculcates students with values."

Chris Middendorp, The AGE 070111

I haven't had an opportunity for a literate rant for a while, and 'inculcate' gives it to me. It's one of those impermeable words which seem to signify or indicate a lot but cannot be parsed or scanned for concrete meaning. I inculcated them with…? Like 'instil', it suggests beating something into others by droning repetition, backed with implicit threats, occasionally explicated in some unavoidable way for the threatened.* A school, sports club or company will do fine, and as usual public politics provides the model for all non-physical violences with its occasionally revealed backdrop of more vigorous pursuits of branch leaderships.


Middendorp immediately debunks this assumed virtue of private schools with a reminder of the "antics" of their students at end of terms. Or, just partying. Since it's schools we're talking about, probably the inculcating takes place thru religious education classes, or even more advanced ethics for the entitled. The mantra obligations to 'give back' to 'make a difference' that they implicitly will not be making in their real adult lives make it clear that giving for a difference other than their own always comes second, or as a ploy for another first order (self-interested) advantage. In the US, this is formalised as entry requirements for the 'better' universities – x number of hours in community service. I wonder what kinds of giving that produces. It's no longer a gift; it's an obligation whose honouring dishonours the purpose it espouses.


Coming from households populated by the present role holders in leading industries and professions, or aspirants thereunto, and which can afford the annual fees, the kids will know what's the real world and what a religious or secular ethical proposition means in that context. Pro-forma moral positioning is not to be confused with the commercial-in-confidence rules of private sector and, increasingly, public sector life, the deniability of public actions, or if not deniable, the escape acts of leaders of many hues – sporting, commercial, political, spiritual.


What may be important to learn in schools is what the to-be-inculcated mantra of the times are so that appropriate deferences can be made to them when constructing spin for pollies, leaders and/or oneself. This is much easier now that we have two sources present at all times – the implicit value systems of public behaviour and it's school yard practice sessions, and the explicit values teaching stuff of positive psychology, anti-bullying principles, and the vision-mission-and-values statements which every up-to-date organisation must have these days.


I look forward to the school which checks ethics learning using the following test: two questions, (1) what values should graduates of this school display in public (and examples of that actually occurring)? and, (2) what values are the real values that are displayed by our graduates and some examples of those displays? The evidence base for the test should be easy to assemble, but dismaying to share with the world. And the marking could be done in discussion groups of 8-10 students.


This process would also give these emerging adults a taste of the organisational life most are headed for. This often demands active embracing of 'values' with a concurrent agreement not to discuss the realities of the contexts in which they are to be expressed. So, it may be more inoculated than inculcated they'll be getting, if not a belting of some sort for failing to recognise the difference between espoused values and those in practice wherever they are. Publishing the results in the school's annual report under a heading like "Proceedings with our values" could be fun and more attractive than the My School website.




*Let's have a look at the definitions.
tr.v., -cat·ed, -cat·ing, -cates.

1. To impress (something) upon the mind of another by frequent instruction or repetition; instil: inculcating sound principles.
2. To teach (others) by frequent instruction or repetition; indoctrinate: inculcate the young with a sense of duty.
   Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/inculcate#ixzz1AKfuvakt
   

Learning to act right (14)… Trusting Judgement

Learning to act right (14)… Trusting Judgement


Torrey Orton
July 21, 2010


Collecting individuals' learning stories is a constant source of wonder. This is not the exception. Rather it is almost a model. It would be a model but for the fact these wondrous works are always models of individual perspicacity and so what is modelled is the effort rather than the form of an action. It is a model perhaps of some problems of our times, seen through the eyes of a youthful participant in them.

 

Trusting Judgement

by Troy

Let me begin with a story…

Here's a situation: you're out fishing in a speed boat. Your line trails in the wake as the boat speeds along. All of a sudden it gives a mighty tug. You are pulled in to the deep water. The boat continues to speed on. As you flail around under water you see that you have hooked something big, but your eyes are blurry in the water, you're not sure whether it's a dolphin or a shark. You're scared. Either way, you're always hearing that more people die from bee stings than shark attacks, surely you will be fine. You come to the surface spluttering and see the fin break the surface, yet you still cannot tell what it is. The creature gives no indication that it is dangerous. In fact it's playful, you see its shadow swimming around under you, doing loop the loops and all sorts of tricks. Underwater you feel it brush against you; there are scars on its skin. This scares you; however it still seems to be just swimming around, friendly… You start having lots of fun playing. Yet every time you feel those scars, your stomach drops. The boat returns and is bobbing nearby- you have the means to immediately extract yourself from the water… And now you have a dilemma. You're scared, but it seems fun. Can something with so many scars be safe? Your friends and family in the boat don't understand your fear; they can't see the scars and your descriptions can't quite capture what you feel as the creature brushes against you. Some are jealous and marvel at how lucky you are, and you feel guilty that you cannot fully appreciate it. The fear makes you tired. You start to worry that you will just drown…

This is a discussion on judgement. The above situation represents my experiences of being thrown straight in the deep end of the relationship game and provides an emotional context for my discussion…


We live in a postmodern society where relativism is highly prized for its ability to give one the freedom and excuse to do whatever one wants, providing you are not directly, or presently hurting anyone. The apparently archaic saying "Judge not lest ye be judged" has been embraced in wider and wider circumstances. People just shrug and say "Whatever floats your boat…" Morals are considered archaic, which is probably fair enough given their destructive use in the past to isolate, persecute and denigrate individuals.


Partner: "How many would you expect?"
Myself: "Well, I'd expect you to be able to count them on your hands…?"


A discussion with my then-partner about his sexual history yielded to me a surprising, and unsettling result- an apparently lengthy history of casual sexual encounters with a high number of different individuals (I say 'apparently' because only after the breakdown of the relationship, months down the track, would I be informed that he was insecure about a lack of sexual encounters and thought to up the number, despite my virginal status. So for all intents and purposes this was the number.) I was unsettled, even repulsed. Yet I was not sure whether I had the right to be:


Friend: "So he didn't actually do anything to you? So what's the problem?"


Good question. What does one do when you make an intuitive value judgement against the behaviour of another? Or, more specifically, the past behaviour of another? Is one allowed to act on it?


Society has tried to condition me to espouse the extreme, almost childish view of freedom- the ability to satiate the id within us. Yet somehow I managed to acquire a different ideal through my family upbringing. This one has a greater awareness of people as family, community, social beings, rather than as George Bernard Shaw says; "feverish, selfish little clot[s] of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy." There is a value structure in my upbringing that upholds respect and care of others as well as the self. Somewhere along the way this value structure began to much more resemble a moral stance. Behaviours that I considered self-destructive or disrespectful became 'wrong.' Engaging in numerous random sexual encounters fell in to this category. This left me floundering. I was already in the water, I'd been having fun, and I was committed. Yet I was confused at my feelings of revulsion. He hadn't done anything to me. It was all 'before my time.' Yet I couldn't shake it.


We discussed it. Over and over. For months. Discussions where we tried to gain an understanding of each other's feelings and positions. Circular discussions, often escalating to tears as we realised we were getting nowhere. Over and over. Tears escalated to convulsions of panic on my behalf. Fear cut at me, as real and as physical as a knife in my gut. The days turned gloomy. All the amazing trips, parties and nights out could never quite distract from the darkness lingering in the back of my head - a darkness that just seemed to take a life of its own, make the future hopeless.
This is the nature of depression. I was not able to recognise it at the time. I knew little about it. But after I got treatment and started psychotherapy, I gained an empowerment. I ended the relationship, a decision that was very difficult at the time, because I still didn't trust my judgement. The action was, however, validated by a confession of deceit by him the day after.


It became immediately apparent to me, the difference in my hope for the future. It really was like the sun had come out. I had a new honours course starting that I could be passionate about. Putting effort into self care, like cooking great food or having a bath with candles and quiet music, these kinds of things assumed an inherent value to me that lifted my esteem. I surrounded myself with friendly people and learnt to be thrilled with life.


Here is what I have learnt. We all make judgements. They are intuitive. They are evolutionarily required for the survival of the species. If a man runs at you in the street with a knife, you need to make the judgement that you are probably not safe, and should flee. Judgement is intrinsic, so we must recognise and listen to it. To not listen can have very damaging consequences. I hope this doesn't come across as me advocating the discrimination of people who have different values to our own. It's about self care and recognition. Likewise people also need to take responsibility for their actions and realise that a consequence of them may be that they will be judged by another in the future.

Learning to act right, and some right actions (2)… what’s a right action?

Learning to act right, and some right actions (2)… what's a right action?
Torrey Orton
February 24, 2010


Compare Tiger Woods apology and our government's apology to the Stolen Generations. Which one is a model of right action? The Woods event is the most recent of a series of high profile apologies in the US – a couple of governors, a mightabeen presidential candidate, a rapper - all remarked for their variable credibility. Rudd's statement was well received at the time, but the follow-up is seen to be patchy on various fronts. Which will we remember – the performance action or the action performance?


Acting right is where doing the right thing takes form and is turned into action out of right intention. Often the fulfilment of one's intentions depends on their recognisability to others. This is why understanding of one's own and others' cultures is essential.

For example, a Chinese laugh in a moment of seriousness may be a recognition of that seriousness by them while being felt as clumsiness, if not insult, by Westerners. It is a laugh whose other face may be anger at having been put without warning in such an emotionally unguarded position as exposure to others' anger, damage, hurt, etc.


Manners and politenesses are traditionally the facilitators of respect for ourselves and others. As such, they are the leading edge of right action in many situations. Some of us disregard them for their repetitive and unimaginative forms, justifying our disregard by the ease of their dissimulation in formalities. In multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-racial societies like ours, the opportunity for misinterpretation of actions is large, and the underlying awareness of this is part of what fires worry about foreigners, whoever they may be for us.



Social formulas of ethical competence


Acting right is doing what we should do under certain conditions – the 'right thing' we all know about implicitly, though often through its absence. Right actions are the media of doing the right thing. They are social formulas of ethical competence, failing which we may not actually do the right thing. These formulas provide the clarity (its specific object(s)) and credibility (the intent) of action(s). Their authenticity arises from their personal character expressed in tone, pace, rhythm and volume.


We now know anew what's always been known – that humans have a capacity for being in the minds of others. This is a capacity for a kind of action at a distance by intrinsic understanding of another's situation and the typical intentions and reactions that are humanly appropriate to it. This is the neurological foundation of ethics and observational learning. While exciting to the neuroscientists, and re-affirming to other humans, this discovery has always been implicit in the basic ideas of individual and social formation, deformation and reformation. We need action models to embody our collective understanding of what's right. This includes, of course, when the models are wrong, which is where this venture started for me.


'How do we learn 'right action'?'


The main source of right actions is the live or virtual (theatre, film, TV, etc.) modelling of others, mined by observing them in action. We have a two-handed word for this - witnessing – through which we express the possibility that to witness another's action is also to give witness to it. Witnessing partners with giving an account to make a complete version of events. Giving an account of oneself provides deep interpretive meaning through thorough picturing of the context(s) and complexities of an event. From this fact arises much of our constant dissatisfaction with the two dimensional reporting of many public media.


The flight simulator training standard revisited

 As I said recently, we live in times where it is regularly proposed that ethical lapses or outrages can be prevented by training courses for companies and ethics units in MBAs. Consider by contrast what training really means for serious skill acquisition – the flight simulator in which pilots are regularly and persistently grilled in high pressure challenges. Perhaps learning to act right can be speeded up with some simulator-lite training. But to the level of automatic competence which must underlie ethical reliability? …that's another thing.


Or, consider how much video time it takes to represent one man's ethical growth in late life arising from the pressure of his standards on his prejudices – see Gran Torino if you haven't yet. The exposure to models required to build our standards and prejudices is a lifetime's task for all of us. And then we have to field test them in unpredicted, as well as foreseen, conflicts of appropriate (and, eventually, inappropriate) degrees of difficulty. The learning cannot be done if we are protected from potential failure. The fact that there's a legal distinction between adult and child reflects our society's minimum expectation of the learning required to be held fully responsible and accountable for our actions – about 18 years.


Important and discretionary rule actions – times they are a changing


For a view of how what's right is changing, and how that change occurs, a look at current TV shows and films is a good starting place. These reflect and promote emerging changes in what's right, especially at the manners and protocols level of life – the points where fashion and propriety run together. Body coverings from clothing to tats are a steady study in this run.


But it is not only fashion that's changing. Foundations are, too, as we discover that ethical options are conditioned by material circumstances. Tsunami and earthquakes are type immovable circumstances. Another is shifting material resources. These lead to a kind of general social triage where life critical and sustainable (as defined by those in command) criteria are applied. We can see this happening in health care and education most obviously.


Invitation to share…again.

 Learning to act right, and some right actions will be a host to investigations of actual ethical learnings across generations, genders, cultures and a full range of classical ethical dilemmas, great and small. The following pieces in the series will be devoted to single ethical learning events. I welcome your participation by offering pieces or suggesting domains which you would like to see explored. If the theme develops I see a publication not far off. In the interim, thanks to a discussion with one prospective contributor, I may start a new blog, or wiki, devoted solely to ethical learning matters and resources. Or, we may start it!

Enough, already!?

Enough, already!?
Torrey Orton
January 31, 2010


We certainly have enough, already, of almost everything conceivable, and an agreed excess of quite a few – foods, houses, cars - come to the public mind almost daily in one scandal of indulgences (obesity?) or another (Macmansions?) or another (exec remuneration?). These are remarkable for all being material excesses. We do not suffer an excess of probity, transparency, honesty, ….pick a virtue and we ain't got it much, in public at least, except for celebrations like Australia Day rituals of reward which are not media magnets for the rest of the year. So much for virtuous role modelling.


And we know we cannot constrain greed (because it's somehow incentively associated with the virtues of private enterprise and personal choice), but we will "quarantine" some benefactors of the public purse from spending their meagre takings on the needs and indulgences of their choice. They are to be quarantined for not knowing enough to buy right (see Our public moral base below for the thinking which sustains this discrimination). Can the alleged ingrained bad buying habits of the poor be any different, as habits, than those of their material betters who flourish in the greed slaking disciplines of high finance and corporate leadership?


The argument
That we over-provided for many parts of our society is undeniable, except by those who believe that there is no such thing as greed or excess – that is, that there can never be too much of anything. Many of us are confused about this. We know that people who should know better ("the best and brightest"), are unable to control reaching for luxury and that there are no objective performance constraints on them from doing so if they can put out their hands towards them. The very public case of Cherie Blair is analysed here. Further UK background is here in a report called "Sinking and swimming: understanding Britain's unmet needs". An Australian approach is outlined in The Road Home.


We also know that continued lifestyle improvements and increased acquisitions do not raise perceived life value (i.e. happiness and its affiliates like self-esteem). See AC Grayling for the insides of this apparent fact. Meanwhile, executive remuneration remains uncontrolled by performance outcomes and increasingly distant from workers' pay. It can no longer be argued that these levels are required for competitive reasons, since those have been scorched by the GFC. In addition, They are sustained by spinoff 'industries' (for example, luxury car, boat and golf club) sales. This pattern is not an artefact of the last ten years. The insights can be found in Keynes (below) and pre-configured in Adam Smith's full works which constrain the economy to a supporting cast of the human story, not the star.

"... Here I think Keynes comes closest to answering the question of why his "enough" will not, in fact, be enough. The accumulation of wealth, which should be a means to the "good life," becomes an end in itself because it destroys many of the things that make life worth living. Beyond a certain point – which most of the world is still far from having reached – the accumulation of wealth offers only substitute pleasures for the real losses to human relations that it exacts."

Robert Skidelsky - "How much money is enough?" Sunday 22 November 2009

The proposition
I believe that any human organisation of sufficient wealth to over-meet the basic needs of most of its members owes the remaining members the guarantee of a minimum sustainability – a basic needs fulfilment platform. This should be available without any implicit reproach like over-zealous policing of access or controlling of use of services provided. This would be more than a safety net. It would also be a 2 or 3 generation program, since recovery from many of the embedded deficits of intergenerational poverty are social system change matters, not individual enterprise and guts ones. This is to some extent implicit in current approaches to homelessness in Australia. A concurrent supporting argument comes from An Anatomy of Economic Inequality in the UK
.


I don't think this proposition is a covert Nordic nostrum, a snowbound socialism converted for our sandbox, but maybe it is. That we under-provide for noticeable populations like the homeless is certain. A similar domain of human obligation negotiation is the climate change accountability/ability to pay equation. The Australian's "Ask the Philosopher" column proposed:

This is becoming all too apparent as the Copenhagen conference enters its second week. Developed countries may indeed have historical outcome responsibility for climate change and its effects.

Yet do they bear a special ethical burden?

Before we can allocate remedial responsibility, we must first determine whether countries have exceeded their fair quota of natural resources. This is, for many reasons, a much more difficult proposition.

A work program for such an ethic would cover the systematic glitches and lacunae in our basic human services – health, education, and accommodation. One obvious step would be to mandate job creation until there is no gap between employed and demand for employees – everyone has a job of some kind.


Our public moral base
The 'enemy' of such thinking about accountability / responsibility is found in many places. I'll look at two recent examples and a public counter-example next.


One, John Armstrong recently argued in the Australian Financial Review that "It's OK to be wealthy - the trick is to also be worthy". For a philosopher this is a disgrace. He conflates the question of exec remuneration into a "value for money" principle which he characterises as "a question of efficiency, not of ethics". There are two muddles here: first, no one in business (except perhaps money managers) thinks that efficiency is a standalone criterion of value. Electricians (his example) and their clients certainly do not. Effectiveness is usually the second term of the value equation. Second, the powers of electricians and executives to influence the terms and the interpretations of their respective remuneration agreements are near to wholly incommensurate!


Further, he later concludes: "A person is morally entitled to exactly the quantity of resources they can use for their finest flourishing." A kind of aesthetic ethics - notable for its patent individualism, or, slightly better, familism. Armstrong mentions beautiful houses and interesting holidays as soul nourishing intrinsic goods it is morally right to buy if you appreciate them properly (who's the judge?) Matters of taste have not long been a core capacity among well-being needs. For him there is no in principle limit to acquisition, and the moral case for right to acquire is subordinated anyway to his version of the value for money principle.


I can barely imagine the enjoyment corporate leaders will get from quoting a philosophy professor in residence at Melbourne Business School in defence of their reapings of our realms.


Two, a similar line is taken by Michael Keane in "Lifestyle-altering strategies more likely to reduce liberty" where he takes an ethical hammer to efforts to manage the debilitating health side-effects of late modern living. Here we are presented with the choice/legitimacy argument, a variation on Armstrong's. The field of play is bigger – the whole of health provision – than executive salaries. And the underlying interpretive assumption is the same as Armstrong's, expressed by Keane thus: "..our society is built on deferment to the fundamental ethical principle of autonomy" which is expressed in individual choices.


Strangely (?), the Armstrong/Keane thesis never recognises that people are differently able to decide sensibly. The first among these differences is pre-programmed expectations ("top of mind" choices for which billions are spent yearly to sustain automatic, thoughtless choosing in the major domains of required expenditure – food, health, clothing, transport…). I guess the advertisers, and marketers directing them, know they are getting something for their money and it isn't what Keane/Armstrong mean by rational choice.


Three, a coincidental counterpoint comes from Catherine Bennett discussing bariatric surgery as a public health offering in the UK. Working a corner of the terrain Keane commands, she explores the complexities of the boundaries between disease and social undesirability in the case of obesity – a classic case of 'consenting' adults making decisions which are guaranteed to make their lives shorter, less fun, more oppressive, less comfortable…the list is terminal. Why should the public subvene their indiscretions? She doesn't have refuge in an ideological distinction between individual and social responsibility.
My Australian readers may notice an excess (from our viewpoint) of foreign sources in my proceedings. I noticed it myself just now. The reason, I realised, is that the key terms of the discussion of these issues derive from elsewhere – notably the US and UK, with parts of the euro zone in attendance. The ethical and political arguments are framed in the big economies and traditional sources of Western life. Take a look at the lag and inappropriateness of recent citations of Joel Klein as a model for Oz school reform – a man speaking from a place where local control is not even mentioned because it's the only thing there is in education in the USA!! Translate that for our local and what have you?

Appreciations (14) – Loyalty?

Appreciations (14) – Loyalty?

Torrey Orton

September 25, 2009

Loyal is never something I would have said about myself. It's not even a word I would have ever said in its own right at any time in my life…unless I was reporting someone else's speech or reading their writing. It is a word, even now, which I don't think I know the meaning of. It doesn't resonate, have feel or body, occupy space. It's almost a non-word: one of those I know but don't like and have banned not from memory or recognition but from acceptance and use.

I think it's a word which I don't trust; it seems almost intrinsically unworthy of anyone, though I know it is meaningful for others. My problem with it is that I always see/hear 'blind loyalty' when I hear/see 'loyalty'. This much attention to it means it does resonate, of course. That's what I'd say to a patient client doing to some other word what I'm doing to 'loyalty' here – extolling it with implicit denigration.

Visceral vocabulary
There are some other untrustworthy words for me I'm sure, but their protective covering is keeping them out of my sight at the moment. In my youth I had an aversion to simple intimate feeling language in a relatively typical boy's way for my generation. It arose in part from stereotypical gender socialisation. Then I added to it my aversion to linguistic enticements like claims of love and caring which I too often had seen used as covert manipulations, or so it seemed at the time. I distrusted their intent automatically.

Age has it rewards
My loyalty seems to be increasing with age. It was first noticed 25 years ago by others as a clear attitude of mine towards my wife. It seems I radiate a protective aura about her when I feel others are disrespecting her, especially figures with notional power and too much sense of the primacy of their needs over hers, even where there was no obvious or slight conflict between them. That instance is still definitely present. Others have to do with a small group of male friends to whom I feel connected, and persistently, though episodically, wondering about their welfare, not merely their work. There's not so much cause to radiate defensively on their behalf…probably not appropriate in anyone's masculinity??

But I doubt I really am loyal (not knowing what it is makes doubt easy to raise and hard to allay). I don't pay much attention to my siblings in their various USA places, nor to in-laws here. And I'm somewhat disrespectful of both wife and friends in various ways, but maybe that's not disloyalty, just attachment avoidance. I even get into trouble where my loyalty to someone involves attacking their organisational context. Institutions harbour mongrel twits who actively, though mostly passively as one would expect, disregard out-of-their-league contributions by their fellows to various futures they can't even imagine). It's hard to defend the leading lights without attacking the twit(s). Catch 22's latest incarnation.

Theory of loyalty?
So, I guess this is the beginning of my theory of loyalty. This is the kind of theory I have for most things I think matter. It is an account of the word, the value, the behaviour. I use them to give an account of something to others, either because it is important in a moment of my professional practice (as therapy clients will tell you, I bet) or because it is important to others but somewhat opaque to them – a mystery with attachments raising doubt instead of admiring wonder.

I can see I've got a ways to go with it. I couldn't convince anyone else what I've said is very defining of anything they might do or feel in life under the 'loyalty' title, while leaving my initial sense of its unworthiness as a sentiment and motivation mildly relieved. This is a funny position to be writing from because I can really say I don't have much of an idea about loyalty. Sometimes starting out with little more than an inkling in mind leads somewhere. In this instance the some is small and the times and where are fleeting and far. Loyalty clearly matters to others, so it warrants my further attention.

Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Rectifications (11) – It’s all about..…

Torrey Orton – June 29, 2009

“It’s about trying to find out what it’s all about – life that is – without sounding like a generation-X navel gazer. Is this possible?” This is Sarah Wilson, THE AGE Sunday Life‘s new A Better Life columnist, (June 28, 2009 pg. 6) blurb for her new column. I suspect that she may succeed in finding something life is about but not what it is. Her initial steps in the first column provide a skate around a variety of ‘about’ sources - pop-cultural with handles of deep culture (Asian religious terms, get-a-life coaching mantras and such). That’s her method for finding out I guess.

There’s a market for everything, and everything relentlessly is found by a marketer and transformed into product. I’m sounding bitchy to myself and I want to be clear it doesn’t derive so much from this example. It’s just the one which punched the following button. In the discourse of our public figures “it’s all about…’ is among the commonest sound bites to be had. In those cases, particularly the political speakers, the territory covered by ‘about’ is exactly what saying ‘it’s all about…’ cannot cover.

For example, our Premier, John Brumby, on the latest effort to deflect accountability for public transport by changing the guard without changing the task: it’s about serving the public, the community, which is just not what we the public think they are doing. We do not think so because the government traipses these platitudes (see organisational values below) around with decreasing public accountability, responsiveness or effectiveness in the performance the platitude addresses – transport in this case. Try planning for another.

What is it?
By linguistic nature, what something is about is not what it is. If it really is about something, then what that is is the matter of interest. The ‘about’ part is speculative, aspirational, at best, hopeful. It’s nice to know that the speaker has an aspiration, a hope, but not to know that that’s all they have.

In common usage, for example, we are asked ‘what was the film about?’ We answer it’s about crime, or love, or destinies… And our questioner, if interested in the leading line will ask something about what happens, the story. That’s what it is.

For pollies and CEO’s to ‘about’ things is to attempt a dog-whistle appropriate to their intended listeners – the public or shareholders or bankers. The result of effective aiming is the listeners don’t ask for more because they know what the story is supposed to be. They are playing a historical tune in peoples’ minds.

About values
Our leaders, for instance, say of their organisational values ‘we are about inclusion, transparency’, etc. (they all use a selection from a list of 10 or 12 I guess, for which they’ve originally paid Mckinsey and would-be’s $5K/day for top level consulting inputs, and now everyone can borrow them at the price reduction which comes from market penetration and copycat consulting). This can be found across the full organisational spectrum now.

To the extent such terms are proposed as a leader’s aspiration, they are already twice debased. Once by being potted priorities, and twice by being repeatedly proven (within the science accepted by such leaders – business effectiveness) to be unimplementable, or badly implemented, faultily understood, non-transerable and so on.

Take action
So, what to do? Try this: suppress your next use of ‘it’s all about’. Do it in normal conversation where the habit lies entrenched in standard usage. When you’ve done that 4 or 5 times you may discover that you have developed a capacity for saying what things are or are not. Often the missing material can be supplied be telling someone what struck you, what effect the performance, discussion, activity had on you. This will be the beginning of a short story which others can join through their stories of similar things. It’s for making the world closer to us and us to each other as a result. What it’s about is relationship.