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

Lessons from Italy

Everyone said Italy would be beautiful; and it was. When my wife and I visited this past summer, we were both in awe. The country looks like a Renaissance painting; utterly different from American landscapes. Partly this is because cypress trees and umbrella pines are everywhere. Partly it is because relics of the past abound.
One thing is plain however. Our civilization owes a great deal to the accomplishments of ancient Rome and Renaissance Florence. Their achievements are more than impressive; they are testimony to the durability of the human spirit. The plumbing system uncovered in Pompeii demonstrates that human ingenuity has a storied pedigree; while Michelangelo’s David proves that human artistic genius is not confined to one time period or nationality.
But there is another lesson to be learned; one that is not as sanguine. We nowadays are inclined to criticize the pedestrian ambiance in which we live. Commercialization is everywhere and we find it lacking in inspirational qualities. It does not have the panache of a Leonardo da Vinci or the gravitas of the Roman Coliseum. To us it seems ordinary and crass.
Looking upon the Roman Forum and the Pantheon, one cannot help but be impressed by the physical undertakings of our long dead ancestors. Nor can we deny the genius of those who invented the use of perspective in art. But there is more to be seen if we look closely.
Pompeii is a good place to begin. It is much larger and more technologically advanced than might be expected. But then there are the little touches; the ones that alert us to what life was like for the flesh and blood human beings who lived in Pompeii. For instance, there is the famous brothel. Most visitors are amused by its visual depictions of the sorts of sexual activity for sale. They listen to the tour guides explain how business was transacted, but they don’t pause at the observation that most of the working girls were slaves.
Nor do most tourists ponder the condition of the gladiators. When they walk through the town’s amphitheaters, they are impressed by their size and acoustics. Perhaps they also note that our term for “fornication” derives from the entrance halls where illicit sex occurred. What they probably neglect was that the gladiators were also slaves. They may have been the sports superstars of their times, but they were not free to live lives of their choosing.
We who are free take our circumstances for granted. We do not consider it special that we can—for the most part—do what we like when we like. Nevertheless, the fact that we do not have masters controlling our fate is an historical achievement of the first magnitude. It took millennia to accomplish and was won at the cost of countless lives.
Looking now at medieval Florence, one is impressed not merely by the ubiquitous sculptures, but by its domestic towers. The grandees of the Renaissance city lived in fear for their lives. Their homes were fortresses because they had to be. Families would literally attack one another in order to assert political precedence.
In some of these buildings the front entrance was a tiny crawl space accessed by climbing up a ladder. The goal was to prevent easy entrée by one’s enemies. But this meant that persons on noble stature had to scrunch themselves up every time they entered their own homes. Imagine how demeaning that must have been.
Even the art that we today admire was a tool in the internecine warfare of Renaissance cities. The Medici, for example, commissioned these works in order to elicit the good will of ordinary citizens. They wanted to make sure that they would come to their defense when folks like the Pazzi sought to assassinate them.
We, of course, don’t worry about such things. Yes, there are the occasional assassinations, but they are the exception. Poisoning people to get ahead is no longer a conventional means of achieving power. We instead resort to things like political spin and poisoning the airwaves against rivals.
The point is that our lives may seem boring compared with those of the generations that preceded us, but this monotony is an enormous boon. Our market economy is relatively predictable, and builds on the contributions of the millions who came before us, but it is also relatively safe and liberating.
The techno-commercial world in which we reside provides us with opportunities our ancestors did not have. We can make personal choices without having to worry that our master will put us in chains or that a rival will cut us down with a sword. We can innovate; we can grow rich; we can even take trips to Italy without asking anyone’s permission.
That’s not too bad.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University

Why I am Not a Feminist

As a sociologist, before I begin teaching most of my classes I make a confession. Because a majority of my students expect sociologists to be liberal, I explain that I am not. Moreover, because much of what I teach involves gender relations, I have to explain that I am not a feminist; that I am indeed an anti-feminist.
Before I continue, I must make something else very clear. I am not against women. I have no desire to see them returned to being “barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen.” If women wish to become the CEO’s of major corporations, that is perfectly okay with me. If they want to join the military, that is also fine.
No, I am not anti-feminist because I hate women, but because I love children. It is a desire to protect the young that initially impelled me to suffer the wrath of the politically correct. The problem, as I see it, it not the ambition of many women to be vocationally successful, but the implications of radical feminism per se.
Radical feminists paint a dire picture of heterosexual relationships. They regularly portray women has innocent victims and men as cruel exploiters. Although women are said to be every bit as powerful as men, they are simultaneously depicted as in need of protection from constant threats of rape.
Once upon a time, according to the feminists, the genders were on a par. If anything, women had more power than men. Then the advent of agriculture changed everything. The need for upper-body strength to propel a plow vaulted men into the lead. Subsequently, in order to maintain their advantage, men bullied women into submission.
Now, say the feminists, this male hegemony must be challenged. The rules have to be changed so that everything is fifty/fifty. Because the differences between men and women are sustained primarily by raising boys and girls differently, once this disparity is eliminated, the male advantage will disappear.
For the radical feminists, the ideal state is androgyny. All gender differences, except for the physiological ones, have to disappear. People must essentially become genderless. Individuals need to be judged as people, not men or women. The goal is thus absolute equality.
If this sounds fair, and perhaps democratic, it is anything but. It assumes that the differences between men and women are artificial. As a result, it demands that these be completely expunged. Women are required to become more like men and men more like women. Anything less is depicted as unfair.
Nevertheless, what is unfair is what has happened to many marriages. The voluntary intimacy necessary to sustain long-term heterosexual relationships is put in jeopardy when men and women are assumed to be the same. They are further endangered when women are regularly portrayed as the good guys and men the bad ones.
If men and women are to collaborate on developing strong relationships, they must be allowed to be who they are. More than this, if the parties to a marriage are to tolerate their inherent differences, they must accept these for what they are.
And there are differences, many of which are grounded in biology. Most men are more aggressive than most women, while most women are more emotionally sensitive than most men. There are, to be sure, exceptions but the trends are demonstrable in the different ways male and female brains function.
Mind you, these differences are not better or worse; they are merely different. If anything, they permit men and women to work together synergistically, so that the two can be stronger as a couple than they are individually.
Where children come in is that a strong relationship between their parents is to their advantage. It permits them to rely on two dependable parents who contribute different strengths to raising them. And this in turn makes them stronger and happier than they otherwise would be.
But the feminists interfere with this by turning men and women into enemies. They make marriages more fragile and therefore put children in jeopardy, for utterly imaginary purposes. There is no good reason men cannot be men and women, women, and the two still get along. As a result, I say, let them be themselves. In the end, everyone will be better off.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University

The New South Shall Rise Again

Times are tough. Unemployment is rampant and budget deficits stretch out as far as the eye can see. Here in Georgia the real estate market has been especially hard hit. Nevertheless, good times lie ahead.
What may be surprising to some people is that the New South is likely to lead the way out of our current recession. And what is more unexpected is that it will do so by combining the virtues of the Old South with the opportunities of modernity.
The Old South was an agricultural and economically isolated backwater. It was also poorer and less well educated than the North. Part of the reason was that southerners were stiff-necked individualists. They refused to relinquish the time-honored traditions that kept them down.
But times change. No one doubts that antebellum southerners, such as Robert E. Lee and Nathan Bedford Forrest, were courageous and innovative warriors. That they fought for one of the worst causes imaginable is also no longer in question. But now that overt racism has largely been put behind us, their former virtues have come to the fore.
What has emerged is a synergism between parts of the old with the possibilities of the new. It turns out that many of the moral commitments of the Old South are perfectly compatible with the requirements of a complex techno-commercial society. Instead of precluding success, they facilitate it.
Take the stiff-necked individualism that was a southern hallmark. Nowadays it translates into a stubborn sense of responsibility. A great many southerners take pride in living up to their duties. This includes a dedication to fiscal accountability. As a result, most southern states refused to sink into a debt comparable to that of states like New York and California.
As a result, Georgia and its neighbors are better places to do business than the Northeast or Rust Belt. This means they are likely to continue attracting business from areas where it is less secure.
The South is also more family friendly than other parts of the nation. In part, due to its religious heritage, its people continue to defend the traditional nuclear family. They believe it takes two committed parents to raise children to a happy adulthood.
In this, they are ahead of the social curve. Other parts of the nation have yet to realize that stable two-parent families are best at producing self-directed children. These support the emotional security needed to face the uncertainties of a volatile market economy.
To be sure, there have been challenges. Nevertheless, southerners have taken these in stride. They too realize that the modern family is not a male dominated dictatorship. They too understand that it is a partnership in which men and women cooperate to do what is best for everyone concerned.
All in all, southerners have learned from the past. Hungry for success in ways that complacent northerners are not, they are prepared to make adjustments their formerly more successful rivals are not.
The South is noted for its conservatism, but this is not a conservatism that resists change. To the contrary, southerners are much more likely to embrace innovation than northern liberals. They are ready to experiment and adopt practices that work. Tired of being second best, they are determined to do what is needed to win.
And this is why they are likely to be tomorrow’s winners. Many liberals, including Barack Obama, have become backward looking ideologues. This is the reason they favor Keynesian budget deficits and rigid unionism. They assume that what they have always done will continue to work into the indefinite future.
Southerners, however, make no such assumptions. They are therefore more flexible. Combine this with the dedication to morality that is a vital part of their heritage and their future looks bright.
And this comes from a Damn Yankee.
Melvyn L. Fein. Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology
Kennesaw State University