I knew a guy in Toronto who was a one-man wrecking crew when it came to creativity.

We were obliged to include this guy in the “brain storm” but he could be relied upon to introduce the forces of entropy to every debate. His techniques were many and highly effective: questioning every term, doubting every premise, refusing every potential moment of departure. This guy was the dark star, the collapsing sun, of idea generation.

We all know people like this. We have all been obliged to work with him. We have all suffered his intellectual predations.

The question is “why?” What’s he doing here? Why does the corporation, the academy, the organization put him with him? Why do we not have permission to murder him in his cubicle?

One chilling possibility comes in a splendid comment from Steve Postrel. Steve suggests that all corporations generate more ideas than they can possibly use. Perhaps, we might surmise, they need Oak trees that poison the ground around them. Say it ain’t so. Surely corporations need all the good ideas they can get. And surely those of us who work for them find our real joy in thinking these up. Let’s hope it’s not an Oak tree effect.

The trouble with these guys (and gals) is that once they get in to a corporation they begin to use its resources to defend themselves against reproach. They know they are without talent, but they can spot it in others. And then they dedicate their careers to making sure that opportunities for comparison are few and far between. Thus does bad drive out good.

Here’s the really weird thing. We all know these people exist. We all know what they look like. We all know the damage they create. But we do not have a term with which to call them, a diagnostic with which to identify them, or a HR method of with which to extract them.

When are we going to name the elephant? How much longer may these enemies of the state continue to operate with impunity? I would be grateful for comments that offer names for the elephant. We need to arm those people sitting in committee meetings with a term that can be whispered in the hall way, written on notes, smsed to colleagues and otherwise pressed into service. Only thus can we hope to name them and shame them.

Cribbing from Hollywood, I wondered if we could do something with Gods and monsters. We would of course be the Gods. They would just as evidently be the monsters. Dark star, as above, might work. Anti-matterers? Anti-mutterers? Idea jammers. Right wankers? For God sake, help me.

References

Postrel, Steve. 2004. Last comment. Here

Yesterday, I went to my first Thanksgiving dinner in the US. It was crowded with relatives, groaning with food, noisy with children, animated by football on TV and in the yard, lively with table talk, and pretty darn joyful.

On the table sat a plate (as above). The internal oval itemized some of the things Americans are thankful for: love, family, peace, friends, hope, health, wisdom, comfort, home, happiness, success, bounty, and freedom. A platter piled high, as it were, with thanks.

Canadian thanksgivings are less inclusive. In 1957, Parliament declared Thanksgiving “a day of general thanksgiving to almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed.” No platter called for here. By and large, Canadians are not thankful for “everything.” They are thankful for harvest, defined literally or somewhat more broadly. Family, health, home and bounty might come into it. Love, peace, friends, hope, wisdom, comfort, happiness, success, and freedom probably not.

I think the plate would be out of place on a Canadian table. I would bet that, in many Canadian homes, it would draw comment, even derisive comment, if not at table, then in the car on the way home. “Did you see that plate? She is really overdoing it.”

So what’s the diff? I think it’s that Americans tempt fate more often. They risk more, as individuals and as collectivities. They generate more “outcomes.” In any given year, there is more “in play.” Happiness is, as they say, pursued. Freedom exercised. There is less grey middle. Less “same old, same old.” Love, peace…and freedom are, in a dynamic world, hard won both in the long term and the day to day. So at the American Thanksgiving, more thanks are called for.

Much of Canada has locked itself into a kind of stasis. Things change under protest. To drag out that old psychological stand by, it’s a matter of the “locus of control.” I think more Americans than Canadians see this vested in the individual and the moment. Canadians are accustomed to having the world act on them. They respond as they must. Thanksgiving day is not a time to celebrate outcomes, so much as survivals. You can hear them thinking at the dinner table, ‘the world missed again.”

This could very well be the turkey talking. Or it may be simple gratitude. But freedom, that’s something to be thankful for.

Wow, I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to host a blog that gets comments as good as the ones that came in yesterday. Yes, I can. It’s thrilling. Thank you.

Somewhere in the big book of rules, I think it says that a man may not blog on his wedding day. And this is my wedding day. Plus, I have a hangover the size of Baffin Island. (Note to self: you cannot replace all your bodily fluids with red wine. Stop trying.) So I will keep this brief.

SomeCallMeTim, yesterday in a comment, accused me of conflating the Left and the Democratic party, and he is of course right. Many dems regard the corportion is a tolerable thing or a necessary evil. But I am not sure you can run the country if that’s all you think it is.

As Gabriel points out, the state now defers to the corporation because the latter can do things a) that must be done, and b) that the state is demonstrably bad at doing. Indeed, we might see the diminished regard with which “waitresses in Wyoming” regards the state as a cold eyed recognition that the state grows worse at doing anything as the corporation gets steadily better at doing everything. The faster and more dynamic the world becomes, the more this is so.

I have sometimes wondered to myself whether the tax revolts and reticence that have done so much to advance the Republican cause are not so much a refusal to “share,” as they are unwilling to fund incompetence (or programs that have a way of funding the problem they are supposed to fix). Or, to put this another way: if governments were more efficient, I think every tax payer would be prepared to be more generous.

To return to my point (and I believe I have one): Achbar’s zany view is the strong form of a Democratic disability. It is, to this extent, symptomatic of a larger inability to reckon with what others take to be straightforward. The much vaunted state is not very good at what it does, and as long as this is so, those who would be its champion put themselves in a awkward spot. They must fight their way up-stream against a current that grows ever stronger. We used to be talking the Hudson River. Now it’s the Mississippi.

The Democrats are inclined to see the corporation as cruel, opportunistic, and when it can get away with it, exploitative and abusive. In this view, only the state can make the world a kinder, gentler place. But as the economists are good at showing us, it is out of the dispassionate and interested play of the marketplace that good comes, first individual, second, corporate and third collective. To vilify the corporation or merely to regard it as a necessary evil, so misses what others take to be unexceptionable as to put the Dems badly out of touch. (Or, this could be the hangover talking.)

Could I end on a related point that emerged last night when I was trying to replace my bodily fluids. We were talking about the recent election and at some point, a truth descended. If you could have only one phrase with which to identify the characteristic difference and difficulties of the Democrats and Republicans, it would be this: the Democrats are the party of principle and the Republicans are the party of pragmatism.

No doubt, this is well known, perhaps well worn, but with all that wine it carried the force of a revelation. It did so because it showed how difficult is the Democratic position at its heart. The party of principle must be “big tent,” attracting and accomodating many causes. This means you will be “steered” in part by people driven by righteousness and this is never the road to the center. Still worse, every time the Party fulfills its purpose, and stands for principle, it must necessarily take a counter-hit of sometimes equal proportion. Now that both sides are mobilized, there is no “silent majority,” no red state quiescence in the face of coastal presumption. Your principle will bring out your people and your opponents, sometimes in equal measure.

Republicans (setting aside the religious Right, who are, of course, all about principles of their own), have a vastly easier row to how. They merely insist on what is necessary. They act, that is to say, in the spirit of the corporation, out of the spirit of pragmatism that does not displease quite as necessarily as does principle. The world may grumble, but it will sometimes go along.

The upshot here, again from a strategic point of view, is that the Democrats must find someway to make the necessary world the agent of the desirable world. They must find a way to make the real an engine of the ideal. I believe this cannot happen when they continue to hold the corporation, that preeminent agent of the necessary and the real, in disdain. (John Deighton, Cheryl Swanson, Debbie Millman and Wodek Szemberg were party to this conversation. I don’t mean to suggest that they all subscribe to this view. And I don’t know to whom the credit goes.)

Ok, now to get ready for the wedding. That’s the McGill University chapel above. In a couple of hours, it will be filled with 100 people and a whole lot of joy. (Thank you, Pamela.) Now to figure out how to do a bow tie. Why the heck didn’t I buy a clip on? Apparently, principle still sometimes wins out over pragmatism.

In the last few days, we’ve been talking about the differences between Left and Right, and the great chasm that exists between. One strategy proposed for a rapprochement was to look at the assumptions of the two groups, that they might cultivate a clearer idea of the one another.

In today’s post, I want to examine an artifact from the Left that help illuminates one of its characteristic point of view. Let’s consider the recent documentary called The Corporation.

It was customary in another time to speak of the king’s ‘two bodies.” One of these was the actual, corporeal form of the monarch, his Body natural. The other was his “Body politic,” consisting of “Policy and Government.” A literal rendering of this notion appears in the frontispiece of Hobbes’ Leviathan which shows the ruler in his Body politic, a monarch made up of the many bodies of his subjects.

This notion that an organization is a kind of body comes down to us in the present day in the term “corporation.” The Coca-Cola Company, Proctor and Gamble, IBM, these are bodies, too.

Mark Achbar and his colleagues had the nutty, but original idea of taking this notion one step further. If the corporation is an entity in its own right, a body fashioned from the bodies, ideas, Policy and Government in which it consists, we may see it as a person. (This is the monarch re-membered, as it were.) And if the corporation is a person, might it not be judged as a person? Achbar and his crew decided to assess the corporation according to the diagnostic supplied by the World Health Organization and the Manual of Mental Disorders.

To more precisely assess the “personality” of the corporate “person,” a checklist is employed, using actual diagnostic criteria of the World Health Organization and the DSM-IV, the standard diagnostic tool of psychiatrists and psychologists. The operational principles of the corporation give it a highly anti-social “personality”: It is self-interested, inherently amoral, callous and deceitful; it breaches social and legal standards to get its way; it does not suffer from guilt, yet it can mimic the human qualities of empathy, caring and altruism. Four case studies, drawn from a universe of corporate activity, clearly demonstrate harm to workers, human health, animals and the biosphere. Concluding this point-by-point analysis, a disturbing diagnosis is delivered: the institutional embodiment of laissez-faire capitalism fully meets the diagnostic criteria of a “psychopath.”

This undertaking demonstrates several of the characteristics of the Left. It shows an imagination and intellectual agility. Whatever we might think about the outcome, as a thought experiment, this is kind of fun.

It also shows, I think, a kind of desperation. Here is the Left in its characteristic search to find some way to bring capitalism under control.

In the 1950s, American intellectuals rose up to declare suburbs bankrupt, TV a waste land, and commercial culture an abomination. The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit came under particular attack for his moral failings. In this view, post-war prosperity was a trick. Corporate man lived a lie.

A couple of decades later, a death certificate for “the subject” was issued by leading European intellectuals. The certificate, written in haste and triumph, reads something like this:

place of death: Paris
time of death: 1972
attending physicians: Foucault, Derrida, and Lacan

This was a patent challenge to the notion of individualism on which capitalism depends. The Smithian view of the marketplace depends on rational individuals engaged in acts of exchange. Vaporize the individual, and we vaporize the great presupposition on which the state depends. Corporate man was a fiction.

Several decades later, the ecological movement declared corporations the villain of the piece. A fragile, blue planet was now being “raped” for profit. Corporate man was a sexual criminal.

Achbar’s latest foray suggests a new, more dramatic undertaking. With the help of the DSM-IV, Corporate man (make that Man) was a psychopath.

This vilification of the corporation and its occupants is, of course, at odds with the more conventional view of the corporation. According to this view, corporations are extraordinary creatures, capable of things that states and their governments cannot do. Indeed some would say that as corporations become Complex Adaptive Systems they are the only creatures capable of contending with the new dynamism of the world. (Fed Ex would be merely one case in point. Dell, another.) In sum, the Right and the center are now inclined to look on the corporation as one of the instruments that helps make a difficult world a manageable place.

There is a deep difference here that needs examining. Please forgive my impatient treatment of the position of the Left. (Please also forgive my supposing that Achbar speaks for everyone of the Left.) My sympathies are clear.

But I think this treatment does help to clarify how deep are the differences between us and how much we have to do.

References

Kantoriowicz, Ernst Hartwig. 1957. The king’s two bodies : a study in mediaeval political theology. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Website for The Corporation here.

In about 2 weeks, Skype has made itself indispensable. I use it to talk to my fiancée, a couple of brothers-in law, colleagues and friends.

But it’s also anthropologically illuminating and raises questions about what will happen to the self when we are truly ubiquitous.

Skype takes us one step closer to have electronic access to everyone we know with a minimum of interference. The telephone was a big step here, replacing hand written letters and telegrams the content of which would cool quite distinctly as the message inched its way to the recipient. The cell phone took the telephone one better. It means we can make and take calls anywhere.

Phone and cell phone give instant, ubiquitous access, but a certain interference or mediation persists. There was lots of hunting and pecking required, made more difficult by every smaller cell phone. And of course it was necessary to remember phone numbers and to find people when they were “in” or “packing.”

Skype is better still. Forget the fact that its free. What makes Skype a killer app is the fact that it allows us to get in touch with one click. Once it too is wireless there will be virtually no cost in time or effort to make contact. We can imagine a time when we are effortlessly in touch with anyone anywhere. The little microphone in our ears will stream with the voices of the people we care about, as they let us know what they are up to, how they are feeling, and “just stay in touch.” We will then be in possession of a detailed, pretty intimate, daily knowledge of friends and family. Phat-ic!

But there are other benefits that are becoming evident to me as I use the technology. One is the kind of calls you end up having. A couple of days ago, I had an interesting conversation with my future nephew. He was in Connecticut. I was in Montreal. I was talking to Pam, my voice issuing from her iBook. Once he got over the fact that he was being listening to a box of white plastic, he announced, over the general hubbub of voices in the room, that his father’s name is Steven.

We all stopped. “That’s right, David, your father’s name is Steven!” And we had a long conversations about names. (David and I agreed everyone should have an absolutely distinct name and not have to share. We also decided it would be simpler if our first, middle and last names were all the same. He would be David David David. I would be Grant Grant Grant.) Now, this is a conversation David would never have joined were it not for Skype. His aunt would have been holding the phone. He couldn’t have got “in.”

Furthermore, telephone conversations are hard for kids because they are bad at the set up and the sustaining talk needed to make a conversation. They pace badly. They speak out of turn. It is much, much easier in person. But with a roomful of people at Pam’s end keeping the conversation going, and with a microphone to capture anything and everything being said, it was easy for David to just shout out. And, presto, he was suddenly very much a part of the conversation. Now, I have access even to the worst conversationalist in the family (and he to me).

Today I’m watching Saskatchewan play B.C. in a Canadian Football League playoff game. Emmet, my brother-in-law and I will no doubt be Skyping throughout the game. (“Nice catch!” “Great hit!”) We will in effect be watching the game together despite the fact that we are 3000 miles apart. We will not have to talk later in the day or next week about “the game.” We will know exactly what the other thought.

“What,” I found myself thinking over breakfast, “does this mean for personhood?” David, Emmet and I now have something like instant, costless access to each other and the family. Our lives are more porous to one another. We are, as Goffman would say, much more a “we” than we used to be.

Plainly, this is a job for the likes of Judith Donath, the MIT expert in the social consequences of computing (as below), but I would like to take a crack at it. It means that we go back to the kind of face-to-face (now voice-to-voice) proximity that used to exist in the West until quite late in the game. Most of the people Westerners cared about existed within the range of their voices. It is one of the staples of the literature on individualism that people who lived in these little audio ambits had very porous selves indeed. Living in close proximity, they had “blurred boundaries.” Their lives were so overlapping and interpenetrating that it was hard to tell at any given moment were the “I” left off and the “other” began. Social life and personal identity were one large soup of mutuality.

So what happens when we use Skype and its successors and begin to get instant access to everyone all the time? Do we return to that soupy world in which the boundaries of personhood begin to blur? Do we return to an intimate little world in which we live out of one another’s pockets. Does the self become much more a node in a net than a pebble in the stream. And would this mean that individualism, (and the notion that selves are relatively speaking pretty well bounded), end up being a relatively brief period in the history of the West?

I raise these questions only. The rest of up to Dr. Donath.

References

For more on Skype here

Bell, Daniel. 1976. The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York: Basic Books.

Bellah, Robert N., Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton, editors. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Carrithers, Michael, Steven Collins, and Steven Lukes. editors. 1985. The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Davis, Natalie Zemon. 1986. Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France. Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought. editors T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, and D. E. Wellbery, 53-63. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Donath, Judith. Forthcoming. Sociable Media. The Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction and here.

Dumont, Louis. 1986. Essays on Individualism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

La Fontaine, J. S. 1985. Person and individual: some anthropological reflections. in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History. editors Michael Carrithers, Steven collins, and Steven Lukes, 123-40. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.

Lukes, Steven. 1969. Durkheim’s ‘Individualism and the Intellectuals’. Political Studies 17, no. 1: 14-30.

———. 1973. Individualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.