A Professionalized Society: Our Real Future

When I asked my wife, she suggested that most people do not want to become professionals in the sociological sense. She was not even sure that a majority of persons are capable of it.
When I brought the subject up with Dan Papp, President of Kennesaw State University, he replied that he thought a great many people did aspire to become professionals. That’s why they came to college.
When my literary agent referred my manuscript “A Professionalized Society: Our Real Future” to a publisher, she wrote back that she didn’t believe there was a market for the work. According to her, it was “too intelligent.”
As for myself, I remain convinced that we are headed toward a more professionalized society. We may be getting there slowly— at an almost glacial pace—but I think we are inexorably moving in this direction.
Professionals are “self-motivated experts”. Almost everyone agrees that doctors fit this definition. They spend many years learning how the human body works and studying what is needed to fix it when it stops functioning. But more than this; when they apply their knowledge, they are expected to do so of their own accord.
When a physician arrives at a diagnosis, he or she is supposed to get it right because he or she is personally committed to helping patients. Doing so to please a supervisor would be considered a dereliction of duty. So would prescribing a particular treatment merely because this is demanded by an insurance company.
Doctors are supposed to pursue competence because they care—and by and large they do. To engage in shoddy work, or to make a particular choice solely because they were ordered to, would violate their sense of professional integrity. It would reduce them to the level of a manual laborer, which would cancel out the many years of effort expended to achieve their exalted status.
Nowadays, this attitude also extends to nurses. Where once they were the dutiful handmaidens of physicians, they have risen to become semi-independent practitioners. Although still less prestigious than doctors, they are often delegated tasks that require both substantial competence and personal responsibility.
To illustrate, last year I suffered a lung infection that required the insertion of a PICC line (that is, a peripherally inserted central catheter). This thin plastic tube was introduced into a vein in my upper right arm and then threaded down into the center of my chest. The procedure, though delicate, was entirely entrusted to two nurses.
Fortunately, the nurses who attended me were experts in what they did. At no time did they require a physician to directly supervise their activities. Moreover, they were professionally dedicated to getting the procedure done correctly—which they did.
This greater professionalization of nurses is reflected in the training they receive at colleges such as Kennesaw State University. Before being accepted to one of these programs, they must demonstrate academic abilities and a personal maturity much in excess of the average student.
So challenging is KSU’s nursing program that, as with physicians, our graduates take pride in their accomplishments. They feel like professionals because they have indeed become self-motivated experts; experts who are perfectly capable of independent courses of action.
I contend that this is becoming more the norm for business managers, accountants, police officers, architects, air conditioner technicians, engineers, educators, computer programmers, and social workers. All have become more professionalized and therefore more capable of supervising their own work.
If this is true, then we as a society are becoming more capable of true democracy. We can literally be more self-governing in our daily activities because we are better able to make high-quality choices—for ourselves and others.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University

A Third Great Awakening?

Glenn Beck is a wonder!
Who else, on his own hook, could have attracted over a half million Americans to the Washington mall to celebrate the nation’s heritage? Who else could have convinced so many people to travel so far to listen to message promoting honor and character?
And no wonder. Beck has done some of the best investigative reporting in recent memory. His exposes about Van Jones, Jeff Jones, and Acorn alerted many millions of television viewers to the radical fringe surrounding Barack Obama. Similarly, his defense of the American Constitution awakened a love of country in many more.
But Beck is wrong about one thing. He believes the nation is about to undergo a Third Great Awakening. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the United States was swept by two massive religious revivals. All up and down the East Coast, ordinary people renewed their faith by attending mass rallies led by inspirational preachers.
Beck may himself be inspirational, but the religious fires that fed these earlier conflagrations have long since died down. Thus, although efforts to renew our moral fiber are undoubtedly worthy, they cannot depend on restoring a comparable religious fervor.
Mind you, religious principles have been essential to creating our nation and maintaining its core values. No doubt too, they will continue to hold many of us to honest and virtuous standards.
Even so, religion cannot supplant the secular practices that have become the norm. It can supplement, but not displace them. I see evidence of this daily in my classrooms.
When I ask my students at Kennesaw State University if they believe in God, between ninety and ninety-five per cent assert they do. This is in line with surveys that show the same for the nation at large. Indeed, the United State is probably the most religious large country in the world.
But when I ask these same students to identify the first or last of the Ten Commandments, most cannot. The few who do are almost always among the oldest in the class. Nor when I ask how many of them are Protestant do any hands go up. Amazingly, though a majority are Baptists and Methodists, they have never heard the term “Protestant.”
Meanwhile, if I ask how many students are on facebook, every hand shoots up. Similarly, were I to spy on their laptops, they would likely be watching youtube, not reading passages from the scriptures.
Like it or not, ours has become a secular country. Though most people have faith, few are seriously devout. They believe in a loving God who created the world. They are also sure He will eventually save them and that they personally will go to heaven. That, however, is about it. Ask them about the specific tenets of their own churches, and they are flummoxed.
None of this bodes well for another Great Awakening. Exhortations to do what is right may be met with enthusiastic applause, but this does not presage a return to an old time religion based on fire and brimstone.
Nevertheless, Americans are by and large good people. Most want to do right. They are merely less likely to seek direct guidance from theological sources.
If Beck himself is motivated by strong religious commitments, the rest of us are apt to benefit from his courageous integrity. Nonetheless, we are unlikely to join him. We too may be distressed by the low standards set by politicians, but our response will probably be less spiritual.
So what lies ahead? Maybe there will be a “conservative” awakening. Perhaps there will be a “democratic” restoration. People may even become better educated about the need to defend the Constitution or reign in astronomical budget deficits. Expecting more, however, is only a remote possibility.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University

Correcting Mistakes

My father was very strict. He did not allow his children to make mistakes. We were supposed to get things right the first time and every time thereafter. He also insisted that we learn from his mistakes. We were to do as he told us so that we did not have to repeat his errors.
As an adult, I have discovered that Dad was wrong on two counts. First, mistakes cannot be avoided. If we are to learn new things, we must expect stumbles along the way. Second, almost no one learns from the mistakes of others. We seem to have a need to learn from our own. Only these drive home the lessons that must be internalized.
Which brings us to President Barack Obama. His spending binge has been a colossal mistake. Whatever his aspirations, he is in the process of driving the nation into bankruptcy for the sake of economic and social policies that are destined to fail.
He could, of course, have realized this had he looked back to the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s Keynesian programs, far from lifting us out of The Great Depression, extended it for nearly a decade. Millions remained persistently unemployed until WWII came along.
But Obama did not look back. So convinced is he of his left-liberal ideologies that he continues to celebrate the creation of millions of non-existent jobs. But neither does Obama learn from his own experience. He continues to blame George W. Bush for our economic woes a year and a half after he passed his own stimulus bill.
The question is how bad do things have to get before the president recognizes he has made some blunders. How many people must remain unemployed for how many years? Likewise, how high do health insurance premiums have to go before he acknowledges that ObamaCare will not bend the cost curve down?
Given the president’s demonstrated obstinacy, the answer may be never. But what of the Democratic politicians who walked over a cliff on his behalf? Couldn’t they have foreseen a downside to voting for an unpopular health care program or an equally disliked energy program? Wasn’t what happened to Bill Clinton during his first term sufficient warning?
Then too couldn’t they have recognized that they might be mistaken by observing the political tempest aroused by their actions? The anger of the tea party crowd was there to be seen, but it was dismissed as Astroturf. It was declared artificial and therefore unworthy of being taken into account.
For many congresspersons, this is a mistake from which they will not recover. It is likely that dozens of them will be forced to take an early retirement come November. For the sin of keeping their eyes closed because they wanted to believe their party leaders whatever the evidence showed, they will be denied reelection.
Finally, we come to the public. Millions of people trusted Barack Obama when he touted “change you can believe in.” They assumed he was a moderate who sometimes exaggerated his promises because he was a politician. They could have looked back the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter for proof that too much idealism can be dangerous, but they didn’t. They too wanted to believe.
Many moderates are beginning to regret their choice, but a majority of Democratic voters have yet to reach this conclusion. The fact that taxes are going up, not down, isn’t yet on their radar screens. That the president’s energy policies will result in exporting jobs, not in creating millions of good ones that remain here at home, continues to strike them as implausible.
People cannot learn from mistakes they do not perceive. Some moderates have had their eyes opened, but many members of the president’s party have not. Their aspirations continue to be governed by their hopes rather than by the evidence of their senses.
Let us hope that this does not apply to the electorate at large. Obama is an expert at rationalizing his errors, but let us keep our fingers crossed that most voters can see these for what they are. Unacknowledged mistakes have a way of making things worse, whereas those that are admitted can be fixed.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University

The Mosque, the Politicians and the Jews

To be or not to be, that is the question about building a mosque in the shadow of ground zero. During the dog days of August this issue has ignited a minor firestorm. Nevertheless, it is very revealing of the state of relations between Americans and the Moslem world.
Those who propose building the mosque claim their goal is to build bridges between Islam and Americans. Moreover, they insist it is their right, under the constitution and laws of New York State, to build where they desire.
Politicians such as president Barack Obama and Michael Bloomberg have since weighed in on their side. They stress our need to uphold freedom of religion. According to them, no one should be denied the ability to pray just because he or she belongs to a minority denomination.
So far so good. Even opponents of the mosque admit its proponents have a legal “right” to do what they are doing. These critics, however, question the wisdom of doing so. Why, they ask, when there are so many other potential sites available, do Muslims need to desecrate the hollowed ground of 9/11?
President Obama’s motives seem fairly clear. Once more he is pandering to Muslims in the hope of healing the breach opened by terrorist assaults. His goal is to foster reconciliation by being mindful of their sensibilities. In other words, he bends over backwards not to offend them.
That this reveals a double standard does not seem to trouble the president. He asks us to be respectful of Muslim sensibilities, but why are they not supposed to be respectful of ours? Why, if the intention is to build bridges, are they kicking Americans in the groin?
More perplexing is the attitude of mayor Bloomberg and assorted New York politicians. They too have insisted on maintaining the legalities in the face of significant public opposition. What do they have to gain?
The answer is tied to another curious fact. Obama has been tilting away from Israel and in favor of Islam for his entire presidency. He demands that the Israelis stop building settlements in Jerusalem, but makes no comparable demands of the Palestinians. He makes a half-hearted defense of Israeli efforts to prevent arms from being imported into the Gaza Strip, but says virtually nothing about rocket strikes into Israel. And, of course, he makes an obsequious speech in Cairo during which he apologizes for imaginary American offences against Middle Eastern countries.
Obama is clearly not pro-Israel or even pro-United States. What is especially curious is that American Jews have not been offended by this performance. They continue to support him despite numerous actions that would seem to be against their interests. Even Jewish politicians in the New York, New Jersey area are tongue-tied when it comes to criticizing him about matters such as the mosque. But why?
The answer lies in deep-seated Jewish commitments to left-liberal politics. Yet this too requires explanation. Why, when so many American Jews are so prosperous, and so patriotic, do they endorse anti-American and anti-Jewish policies?
The solution is to be found in history. The roots of most American Jews go back to Eastern Europe, where they were systematically discriminated against for centuries. They could not buy land; they could not enter politics; they could not even live where they desired.
Given these handicaps, salvation seemed to lie with a then new political innovation: socialism. It promised to end discrimination by turning all of humanity into a single extended family. If everyone were equally valued, then they too would be liberated.
Unfortunately, this attitude has been carried forward to influence decisions where it is no longer appropriate. The ground-zero mosque is an offence against common decency and deserves to be opposed. Likewise, president Obama’s waffling encouragement of people who are not our friends does not deserve to be countenanced under the false assumption that this reduces international or inter-religious tensions.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University