Does anyone else see the relationship between Madison Avenue culture and values and the moral and ethical decline of America? I don’t think it is a topic that comes up often, with such juicy stuff as Iraq, oil, the economy, health care, the environment and transportation dominating the sociopolitical dialogue. The pervasive culture of advertising in America is probably more effective as a back burner issue than if people were discussing it daily. I believe that strategy is by design. Madison Avenue doesn’t want you to know just how much they effect your life.

It’s ok for men to lie to their wives and girlfriends in order to go out drinking with the boys. An expensive, hot car will help break the glass ceiling for women. Fast food is cool. Having gray hair means you won’t be getting any more sex. Go ahead and marry that trophy wife, you will still be able to satisfy her with the help of our pills (although you may have to invest in matching bear claw bathtubs). There is such a thing as clean coal and it is good for America. These are just some of the myriad lies, half truths and myths that advertising would have us believe. And I haven’t even addressed the female body issues which permeate our marketing landscape.

Advertising is such a deeply established tradition in America that we barely notice how ingrained in our consciousness the messages have become. I continually tell my teenage daughter that someone has spent plenty of money trying to get you to spend yours. She sort of gets it. I also tell her that if somebody is spending lots of money trying to convince you that something is good for you it probably isn’t.

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar business and much of our broadcast entertainment would not exist without it. I often wonder if paying for TV and radio would be a better alternative than being subjected to the constant brainwashing of ad after ad imploring us to buy stuff we don’t need. In any event, not everyone has the requisite will to resist the bombardment we are under over the airwaves and in print media, not to mention the supersized billboards that distract us on the highways.

Americans must change their lifestyles to adjust to the drastic changes they will experience in the 21st century. Madison Avenue isn’t helping one iota.

One metaphor I have often used to delineate the stark difference between conservative world view and progressive thought is the freeway analogy. In it one compares conservatives and progressives with drivers on a freeway. Conservatives champion individual responsibility and this is a good thing , make no mistake about it. But a world full of people practicing individual responsibility implies that responsibility is tied to individual self-interest. Humans naturally feel responsible for taking care of themselves and a focus on individual responsibility is only as valuable as the individual’s interests allow.

If someone’s self-interest goals are to make lots of money they will take the responsibility upon themselves to make that happen. If a person’s goals are to assure his family is safe their responsibility may take the form of buying a gun and learning how to use it. This, in and of itself is not a bad thing. It is when individual’s needs intersect with other’s needs that volatile situations can be created when self-interest goals clash.

It is for this reason that I have always felt that the progressive value of mutual responsibility is a more evolved form of commitment than simple individual responsibility. In mutual responsibility the individual tempers his own self-interest by considering the needs of others as well. They not only take responsibility for caring for their own family but recognizes that the needs of others also have value. After all they would hope that those others would be cognizant of their needs.

Most religions and great cultures have in their creed some form of the Golden Rule. We teach it to our kids and expect that society will run smoothly largely because of it. But a philosophy of individual responsibility can circumvent the Golden Rule in certain instances by narrowing ones focus onto their own interests and ignoring others. This is often not by choice but evolves out of the nature of single-mindedness that is essential to achieving goals. In order for society to function properly there must be some give and take between people with conflicting goals. Individual responsibility can exacerbate this conflict while mutual responsibility can temper it.

The freeway analogy is simple. While driving on a busy rush hour freeway who would one wish to be driving the other cars, persons practicing individual responsibility or ones using mutual responsibility? If you think about it for a minute those practicing individual responsibility might be thinking, “I have to get home as fast as possible because I was late getting out of the office and I have to take Tommy to soccer practice”. They may dart in and out of traffic, dangerously, in an effort to shave several seconds of their commute time. They may be hungry and eating a sandwich. They may have a big client on their cell phone. In each instance these people are doing normal things but they are self driven. They make no considerations for other drivers and therefore become dangers to everyone on the road.

The driver surrounded by people practicing mutual responsibility is aware that they also have things to do for themselves but they recognize that erratic driving is dangerous to others. They resign themselves to the fact that Tommy might have to be late for practice. This use of mutual responsibility principles also works to make the individual safer on the freeway. Tommy will never get to practice if dad is in an accident on the freeway. So we see that mutual responsibility serves individual responsibility too, just not always in the way the individual imagines it will. This also models the basic Christian principle that God’s plan for us is greater than any plan we can come up with.

The next time you are on a busy freeway try to model mutually responsible behavior. Remember the old slogan, “Drive carefully, the life you save may be your own”. And remember that when you do you are living out a progressive value.

I have lost two male friends to massive heart attacks in the last month. These men were the kind of close that meant regardless of how long it had been since we had seen one another there was always an implicit nearness, born of occupying the same cosmic space. We didn’t exchange daily e-mails, nor did we have to. There was an easy comfort that they were merrily leading their remarkable lives without needing to consult me. These were the type of friendships that time could not alter.

Each man was famous for being who he really was. One was a leading architectural voice in the sustainable co-housing movement. The other was a master luthier of other-worldly talent. One built, and taught others to build, housing complexes that were communities where neighbors developed familial relationships and lead lives full of meaning. The other built instruments played in major concert halls the world over. His innovations set a new paradigm of artistic capability. The music played on his guitars had meaning.

I have taken two important things from their passing. For perhaps the first time in my life my own mortality is painfully apparent and real to me. There is a hard liberty in this. Also, they each call to me to swiftly burn through any and all impediments to my own becoming, real or imaginary. My mother’s passing showed me the path and these two trailblazers have cleared the way for me to assume my true destiny, a road previously thickly grown over with the gnarled and impassable vines of my own self doubts. God brings himself to us in numerous forms and ways, if only to reveal that we, too, are in him.

I treasure these friends, in life and death. I will honor them by emulating their strong connections to the reality of existence with the truest memorial I can imagine by building a meaningful life of my own and for being famous for who I really am.

As Christians learn that they are not so much “educated” to become good Christians as they are “formed” so did the educational system of the past “form” good citizens rather than simply educate youth. This was a public/private collaboration between the school and the family. School provided the “Three R’s”; readin’, ‘ritin’, and ‘rithmetic and not much more. The family provided the moral and ethical foundation for good citizenship, they “formed” the good citizen. Why? Because the family felt a moral and ethical obligation to produce good citizens. The civic “honor” of the family demanded it.

The “greatest” generation is a perfect example of this partnership. Men and women with mostly an eighth grade education defeated two dictatorships and became the world’s primary superpower. How did they do that with such a “meager” educational experience? They had a well developed sense of moral and ethical certitude. Their parents had insisted on it.

Unfortunately, modern parents are too busy with this that and the other thing, don’t have the same cultural imperative or simply lack the requisite skills to impart those same values to their own children. Perhaps becoming the “best” has made us lazy. Whatever the reason today’s children are not taught through a public/private collaboration that “forms” them to become good citizens. Rather they are “formed” through the needs of private business for worker bees. This has manifested an educational system that has been given the tacit task, through parental abrogation of duty, of making their sweet young ones into complete citizens without their own input. Educational systems nearly always fail at this task. It is not what education is meant to do. Failing that, the system is capable of turning out good, pliant and unquestioning workers with little conscience or ethics in their stead.

Without the checks and balances of a moral education in the home or with the imbalance of one with a marked agenda, these kids are thrown into the workplace with technical skills but little critical thinking abilities. They are easy to pressure and manipulate and they think nothing of eagerly participating in the cruel and unethical tactics of modern corporate culture. They backstab and step on their associates with ease. They push ahead for profit at any cost without compunction.

Perhaps we should just stop financing this type of “education” altogether. We can just vote away any and all public funds for education. It is certainly not serving the republic. Let corporations fund education if they want to create a specifically skilled but mindless workforce. The homeschooling crowd is onto something. Unfortunately most of them are into forwarding their own personal agendas as well. After all, who but ideologues have the time and energy to educate their own kids.

There is a segment of conservative thought that is deathly afraid of alleged “ultra liberal” bias in higher education. They claim that super liberal professors pressure students to see things their way. College students are not dumb. They play along with the liberal profs, knowing that the realities of life are much different from that which they have been told. They are already aware of the dog eat dog nature of the world from the caustic text messaging and judgmental stares of high school. Not much in the way of liberal thought can pierce that veil of ignorance. Only the truly empathic remain liberal in the face of these “cold, hard facts”. They accept that they will never be effective cogs in the machine of private enterprise.

So to change education maybe we need to change who benefits from it. Educational processes need to stop serving business alone and start serving society once again. And the way to do that is to return to the sharing of responsibilities of the past. Parents need to reacquire the civic pride they once cherished and become responsible for “forming” their children to become quality citizens. Quality citizens are the engine that drives democracy.

Our slavish devotion to commerce is a strong and vicious circle to break but we must place our efforts there instead of spinning our wheels on adequate funding formulas, class sizes and mainstreaming. It is a monumental task but one that must be done.

Are you ready to go back to the future?

I had the opportunity several weeks ago to listen to an ostensibly “fair and balanced” presentation about global warming. They even showed a major portion of “An Inconvenient Truth”. It was, however, followed by “The Great Global Warming Swindle”, a British shockumentary that contends that dramatic global climate change is a scam and has several allegedly important scientists backing up it’s claims.

The whole thing was sponsored by the Heartland Institute, plus a plethora of local Republican legislators, and featured James M. Taylor, the Institute’s featured writer on environmental matters, as host and chief naysayer. Mr. Taylor came armed with lots of “facts” that asserted that: 1. The earth is not warming and is in a natural cycle of climate fluctuation, probably going colder than warmer. 2. If, indeed, the planet is warming it is definitely not anthropogenic (caused by man). Notwithstanding that these are mutually exclusive statements this scenario was interesting to me in that the Heartland Institute is considered a free market think tank. Here is their mission statement, quoted from their website.

” Heartland’s mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. Such solutions include parental choice in education, choice and personal responsibility in health care, market-based approaches to environmental protection, privatization of public services, and deregulation in areas where property rights and markets do better than government bureaucracies.”

Reading through this mission statement it is clear, to me at least, that the Heartland Institute is by no means a free-market advocate and is instead a sock puppet for preserving the status quo in major corporate interests and promoting new age conservative ideals. All of their stated missions have more to do with maximizing corporate profits and undermining government than simply advocating for free markets. They reveal a worship of the University of Chicago School of Economics championed by Milton Friedman. According to Friedman the free market is better than government in providing public services. In that sense the Heartland Institute is a free market advocate. However, new age conservative politicians have co-opted Friedman style economics to suit their own global domination politics. To them Friedman’s economics means that only profit is moral and that government is always bad. It is these folk who use the Heartland Institute to forward their own purposes.

One must remember that Freidman was also a strong social libertarian and had an extremely narrow view of government intervention in people’s lives. This viewpoint informed his economics and has led new age conservatives to the distorted contention that all that is needed to save the world is to give all the money to private corporate interests. This is what the Heartland Institute is really advocating. If they were truly champions of the free market they would recognize the solid science behind global warming and favor economic development of alternative energy sources and means of delivery as the natural shift in paradigms that they are, and allow the market to adjust as is normal.

Instead they advocate for the obfuscating statement “market based approaches to environmental protection”. According to the film “The Great Global Warming Swindle” and Mr. Taylor’s rhetoric this simply means continued use of carbon based fuels for energy. Their denial of global warming in the face of overwhelming scientific information is not a call for a free market solution but support for an old paradigm in the face of a natural switch to a new one. By denying that global warming exists they claim that carbon based fuels are cheaper and therefore better than wind, solar, safe hydroelectric and other alternative fuels. This position could only arise from abject monetary support from the oil and coal industries and does not represent the spirit of the supposed mission of the Heartland Institute at all.

It is a sad world where anyone with enough money can buy scientific support for their agendas. This means anyone, on either ends of the various political spectrums, can buy junk science and claim anything. As a result science is being cheapened as we move away from a rational world into one where things are true simply because someone says so.