droganbloggin - meanderings and musings
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Note on Posting a Comment: If your comment warrants a response and you wish it sent privately, please provide an e-mail address. Otherwise I will comment on your comment and it will be public.Entries from August 1, 2011 - August 31, 2011
In the wake of...
...the display of incompetence and dysfunction by the political elite and the punditry comes Neal Gabler's provocative opinion piece, The Elusive Big Idea, in today's New York Times.
It is no secret, especially here in America, that we live in a post-Enlightenment age in which rationality, science, evidence, logical argument and debate have lost the battle in many sectors, and perhaps even in society generally, to superstition, faith, opinion and orthodoxy. While we continue to make giant technological advances, we may be the first generation to have turned back the epochal clock — to have gone backward intellectually from advanced modes of thinking into old modes of belief. But post-Enlightenment and post-idea, while related, are not exactly the same.
For some time now I have opined that most Americans are satisfied with a beer, a boat, and a sound bite. We have ceded our rights and responsibilities to the aforementioned political elite and punditry. In the words of Gabler:
We are inundated with so much information that we wouldn’t have time to process it even if we wanted to, and most of us don’t want to.
The collection itself is exhausting: what each of our friends is doing at that particular moment and then the next moment and the next one; who Jennifer Aniston is dating right now; which video is going viral on YouTube this hour; what Princess Letizia or Kate Middleton is wearing that day. In effect, we are living within the nimbus of an informational Gresham’s law in which trivial information pushes out significant information, but it is also an ideational Gresham’s law in which information, trivial or not, pushes out ideas.
Gabler closes his piece by suggesting that we "Think about that." I echo his admonition.
Functional Reputation and Social Reputation
I tend to pass along a number of links to items in the blog of Irving Wladawsky-Berger. He has, in my opinion, very useful and provocatve insights on a broad range of contemporary issues.
Social Reputation in the Age of Globalization is just such a post and worth a read. It links well with the posts made on this blog concerning ethics (search on "ethics" to get a list of these posts) and provides pertinent material to the discussion of ethics I have each term with our incoming graduate students.
Without a stong ethical foundation not much else of what one possesses can be of value. The world seems to be increasingly littered wth examples of this.
I believe that we’re about to witness what may turn out to be the last competitive frontier business will see. It’s going to be a war over the one priceless resource. Time. And when it comes, trust may turn out to be the best investment anyone’s made (Jim Kelly, CEO of UPS, Remarks to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco & Oakland Chamber of Commerce, February 23, 2000).
Wladawsky-Berger underscores the value of this notion of trust (which must be based on ethics) as a prerequisite for reputation.
Changing Times
Per one of my students:
It's impossible now to board a plane to New York with 100K in cash without customs asking some serious questions.
It's no problem clearing customs with 100K in a bank account accessible via Smart phone in hand.
Jim