Mozart was a genius.  That’s something on which almost all professionals in classical music agree.  Outside of music, however, his acts, language, and behavior left, shall we say, something to be desired.  The same was also true of Richard Wagner.  Because my wife is a professional singer, as well as a professor of voice and opera, over the years, I’ve met a few renowned figures in the field.  Several, often described as outstanding or geniuses, have come across as boors, bitches, and self-absorbed bastards [no..I won’t name names].  In my years in politics, I went through the same experience, except that occurred in the back rooms, so to speak, because any competent politician, in general, is warm and caring in public… or at least careful in dealing with anyone who can vote or contribute or give good media coverage. 

Now… not all geniuses are uncaring, self-centered egotists, but from what I’ve seen, a disproportionate number are – especially in private or when they think they can get away with such behavior.  What is it about so many people who have great talent that makes them so indifferent to the feelings of others and so willing to tromp over others – even when it gains them nothing and often costs them far more than they realize? That might just be a reason why the career of pop music phenoms average 18 months.

Some have claimed that such egotistic behavior is one of the costs of or prices for genius.  I don’t buy that.  I suspect that people tend to excuse behaviors by those with great talent, wealth, or power that they would not tolerate in others.  I understand [but still find repulsive] such excuses when people feel they must ignore or excuse bad behavior by those with great power, as in the case of corporate subordinates of egocentric CEOs, because calling your boss on bad behavior is usually a career-limiting move.  And I have to admit that I’ve never understood the appeal of rock stars or popular musicians whose popularity seems to be enhanced by bad behavior.  That might possibly be because fans wish they could do the same and identify with it, but, elitist that I am, I much prefer quiet class to the openly displayed arrogance of power.

As I’ve noted before, in the corporate area, competent and quiet CEOs almost always outperform the egocentric ones, but both the public and the media seem all too willing to praise the egotists, at least until they fail… and most do.  As for Mozart, while his music lives on, he was buried almost without mourners in an unmarked grave.  Maybe that fact ought to be trumpeted a bit more.

The other day, my wife and I were discussing a basic change in music, one represented by the fact that very few of the younger generation can listen to complex music [anything that contains more than five non-repeating bars and a simplistic rhythm] and the fact that opera, musical theatre, popular music, and even music videos all now require elaborate and often excessive visual effects, and that so much music all sounds alike.  This goes beyond just music.  An ever-increasing proportion of the youthful population cannot listen to a teacher – or anyone else – for more than a very few minutes before tuning out. Just how as a society did we get to that point?

I’d submit that it has occurred as a result of the intersection of two factors.  The first is that sight is the strongest and most rapid of all human senses.  The second is the development of high-level, high-speed visual technology that reinforces and strengthens the dominance of human sight. What people hear, especially human speech, must be heard, translated, and then essentially reformulated. This takes more time and effort than seeing.  The same process exists with music lyrics, which must be heard and then felt.

All of this excessive reliance on the visual has a far greater downside than most Americans seem able to realize.  There’s now a huge effort to persuade teenagers in particular not to text and drive, for example, but so far, at least, the deaths from driving and texting continue.  The transit authority in Salt Lake has asked the legislature to make “distracted walking” a criminal misdemeanor because of the numbers of injuries and deaths involving people absorbed in cellphones walking into the path of light rail transit cars. Almost every school day, my wife has to stop or slow drastically to avoid hitting college students involved in texting crossing streets, oblivious to traffic.

Although a huge percentage of American teenagers have cellphones or the equivalent, comparatively few of them talk for long periods on them. Instead, they text. While there are text symbols for emotions, those symbols represent what the sender wants them to represent, not necessarily what the sender actually feels… and they make misrepresentation far easier.  Just look at how many teenagers, especially females, have been deceived through the internet and texting by people whom they would have dismissed instantly in person.

The entertainment industry has responded to the change in perception by emphasizing the visual. There are now very few if any overweight singers in opera, musical theatre, or popular music.  Popular music tour shows rely as much, if not more, on elaborate lighting, costumes, and pyrotechnics as on singing. Musical theatre has come to rely more and more on spectacle.  Music is becoming secondary to the visual, and complex lyrics are largely a thing of the past, unless occasionally accompanied by a monotonous beat in rap.

In a sense, even ebooks are a part of this trend – words on a lighted page that can be turned more quickly than a printed page, with speed skimming the prevalent and preferred way of reading, rather than an appreciation of depth. More and more, I see comments from readers that indicate that they don’t understand the innuendoes or the allusions in dialogue.  This isn’t surprising, since fewer and fewer young people can actually verbally express complex thoughts conversationally… or apparently want to, since in walking across most college campuses, no one is talking to those around them, but instead walking, hunched over, texting madly.  In fact, it’s so common that one scientific publication noted a new repetitive motion syndrome – “texting neck.”  It’s just my opinion, but when people are texting so much that it creates an adverse medical condition, it’s healthy neither personally nor societally.

Nor is it good for society when people are more interested in the visual appeal of musicians than in their musical excellence.  Nor is it healthy when fewer and fewer people can and will carry on face-to-face in-depth conversations.

But all those are symptoms of the curse of the visual, of overdosing on sight, if you will, fueled by the high-tech wizards of silicon cities across the world, more interested in the profits reaped from fueling the addiction than in the societal and physiological damage created.

The author Daniel Foster observed [in Wagner’s Ring Cycle and the Greeks] that an epic poet’s protagonist embodied the virtues and values of an entire society while the protagonists of a lyric poet embodied specific virtues accepted as exemplary traits for an individual. Foster also made the point that lyric poets whose protagonists’ values differed as society changed became less relevant and less widely read, as did those whose referents became less familiar. 

While Foster used the Greek poet Pindar as his historical example, his observation, it seems to me, also applies to novels today.  While some fantasy labeled as epic meets his definition, much of current large-scope fantasy presents values often at variance with the idea of a single unified culture represented so often in traditional epic works, and situations where the individual is pitted against the culture rather than acting as its champion against outsiders.

At the same time, over the past twenty years or so in my intermittent teaching and continual observation, I’ve seen that poets of the first half of the twentieth century have been read less and less, and, more important, when read, are understood less and less.  Part of that loss of understanding certainly lies in the loss of meaning of the references and allusions, because today’s young people are such a culture of the present that the majority of them know very little of the culture of as little as a single generation past, and without an understanding of what those references represent, the poetry loses much of its power. Most contemporary verse appears to appeal to shallow but universal feelings, interestingly enough, even as most novels pit an individual against at least some “universal” societal values. 

This trend in contemporary novels also exemplifies a change in basic societal values in the United States, or at least in the idea that there are some basic societal values that trump individual freedom of action. The belief held by many that the right to bear any kind of weapons is one example of this turn away from the idea that a society represents certain universals. Instead, we have ideological splintering, where various segments of society each believes that society should adopt its universals.

According to Foster, the composer Richard Wagner believed that the evolution of the poetic tradition ran from epic forms to lyric and finally to dramatic, where, in the dramatic form, the writer’s protagonists portray an out and out struggle against societal norms while still striving to live out individual virtues – in essence, a totally futile struggle because, in the end, without societal standards, there is no society.

I’m most likely overgeneralizing, but it seems to me that we’re seeing this conflict today in what is being published in current fantasy and, to a lesser degree, in science fiction.  One could actually characterize the fascination with zombies as a metaphor – with zombies representing a dead and somehow alien past that the protagonists are struggling against.  Vampires are a bit more ambiguous.  Are they the blood-sucking past drawing life from the vital present? Or are they the misunderstood new future nourished by the past?  Either way, both sub-sub-genres – as well as that of werewolves – represent a dramatic conflict embodying the premise that a society with unified and widely accepted common values is a thing of the past, and this represents a major change in western cultural values, largely among the younger readers… possibly another manifestation of both the generational gap and why the poets of the past no longer speak to the readers of the present.

The most disturbing aspect of the latest mass shooting in Aurora, to me, is the fact that, on paper at least, James Holmes was a comparatively privileged young man… as were both of the Columbine High School shooters ten years ago. We’re not talking about poor oppressed minorities, but about young people who grew up in moderately affluent family situations.  In the case of Holmes, he was even an honor student at the University of California, Riverside, but he couldn’t get a job better than minimum wage, and he entered a doctoral program in neuroscience at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, where he struggled and then dropped out.  Somewhere around that time, he began to buy weapons and ammunition.

So why would a quiet young man from a comparatively privileged background commit such a terrible crime?  I’d submit that one of the key factors was precisely that background.

As I’ve expressed more than a few times, the continual expression of the Lake Wobegon theme [the place where all the children are above average] is not only false, but has been incredibly damaging to the younger generations.  Because they’re not all outstanding.  By definition, only a small percentage can be well above average, and the perks and privileges and jobs are going to go to that small percentage.  Even if a greater number of young people are brighter than their parents – which I doubt, but even if it is so – it doesn’t matter.  The positions at the top are limited.  They are in any society, and more education doesn’t mean better opportunities.  It means that college graduates essentially have the same opportunities as high school graduates had two to three generations earlier.

As noted by Joel I. Klein, the head of the New York City School system in 2010, “In 1950 high school dropouts made up 59% of the United States workforce, with just 8% represented by college graduates. As recently as 2005, these numbers have nearly reversed: 32% of workers have a college degree, while 8% are high school dropouts.”

This change in work-force composition has several ramifications.  First, an undergraduate college degree is likely not going to be the passport to a high paying job that it was in past generations. According to initial reports, that was one of the frustrations expressed by Holmes, that even with a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience, he could only find McDonald’s level jobs.

In addition, the dumbing down of both high school and collegiate undergraduate curricula and requirements has resulted in an entire generation of young people, of whom only a tiny percentage have been truly tested, and who have been told time after time how special they are.  In general, they’ve been shielded from failure and told they’re wonderful. In essence, not until his mid-twenties did Holmes discover that he really wasn’t that special and that the world didn’t care. The fact that our culture also values “personality” over technical and subject matter excellence, no matter what anyone says, adds even more fuel to the fire for those who are bright and socially awkward, as Holmes was said to be.

The pattern manifested by Holmes – and others – is familiar to forensic psychologists.  While not all young people who are alienated, depressed, and angry are violent, it appears that almost universally the violent are alienated, depressed, and angry. In the case of Holmes and the Columbine killers, and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, it is highly likely that a key motivating factor is anger by those from a privileged background who couldn’t deal with failure and wanted to blame others for it. They believed they deserved more, and the fact that they hadn’t gotten what they wanted must have been the fault of others.  Hadn’t everyone told them how special they were?

Now… there will be years of study, and debate and counter-debate, but I’d be very surprised if anyone actually discusses the issues I’ve raised.  After all, how could we go wrong as a society by telling our wonderful children how special they are?

Although business/economics has become the foundation of western culture, its practitioners have circulated and tend to believe a number of myths and truisms, many of which are in fact half-truths.

You get what you pay for.

No.  You can’t get what you don’t pay for, but between over-inflated prices of certain goods (ranging from luxury products to certain prescription drugs and other aspects of health care), counterfeits, and cheap knock-offs, you often don’t get what you pay for.

 High pay is required to assure competence, especially in upper management.

High pay attracts people who are motivated by money, and higher than average pay is required for people with specialties that require long and expensive training, but there’s an upper limit, and this half-truth varies greatly in different segments of society.  More than a few studies have shown that comparatively lower-paid CEOs who are not “personalities” in general out-perform the highest-paid CEOs.  In addition, a significant percentage of the highest-paid money managers actually lose more money over time for their clients than gain it.  Likewise, money-motivated competence varies tremendously across fields.  A professional academic musician generally has more education than any MBA, but makes a fraction of the income of those MBAs in business and usually at least 30%  less than a business professor with an MBA and more like 50% less than a law professor with a J.D.  The same salary differentials apply to other academics teaching “humanities,” as well as most teachers.

Supply and demand always works better than regulation.

 This is a half-truth because it’s true as far as it goes, but doesn’t consider the implications, or what is meant by “better.”  Supply and demand is indeed the most “efficient” way to determine the allocation of goods and services, but that efficiency doesn’t take into account other values.  In a total free-market economy, in a famine, those who have money will pay higher prices for food… and will survive.  The poorest would not.  In addition, in a high-tech society, as noted above, even the most sophisticated consumer cannot determine the quality of certain goods, such as drugs, some beverages, even some foods, and therefore may well pay more for goods than “true” supply and demand would require. We’ve seen a similar issue in health care, where the “supply” of certain health care services costs more than many people can afford, which is one [but not the only] reason why tens of millions of Americans cannot afford health care.

The greater the risk, the greater the reward.

It is often true, in the case of dividend-paying stocks and bonds, that higher-risk issues have to pay out more than less risky ones, but this analogy truism breaks down in society.  Fire-fighters and police officers certainly face far greater risks than hedge fund managers, but they make a small fraction of the income that financial professionals do.  In professional sports played by both genders, such as basketball or golf, the risks are the same, but the males make more.  Now, this is justified historically by the argument that the demand for watching males is higher, and that can’t be disputed, but that points out that all of these myths/truisms are anything but absolute, even though they’re all too often dragged out as absolutes, especially by business people in pursuit of the bottom line and more of everyone else’s money.

The business model works better.

This half-truth has recently been promoted as the answer to virtually every ill in public institutions ranging from schools and universities, to municipalities, charities, public hospitals, and prisons. And, of course, the question is, again, what is meant by “better.”  In education, the business model has been applied in terms of teacher-pupil ratios or in higher-education, what disciplines are most “cost-effective.”  Unsurprisingly, the hard sciences and the performing arts are the least cost-effective educational disciplines, because the sciences require expensive equipment and additional laboratory sessions and the performing arts require intensive one-on-one training, especially in vocal music. While good financial management is clearly a necessity in any organization handling significant resources, the bottom line of the business model is to cut unnecessary expenses, and services/products which do not cover their costs, and to maximize revenues.  The business imperative is to look out for the business, and only to look beyond the business as necessary to assure its profitability and survival.

Public institutions, by their nature, provide goods and services that society has deemed necessary, even if not “profitable” for the specific institution.  That is why they are public institutions. Public hospitals are mandated to provide health care to people who will never pay their bills.  Schools must handle problem students and disabled students whose education is anything but profitable or cost-effective from the business standpoint.  Fire-fighters will often spend more time and effort putting out a fire than a structure is worth, even when no others are threatened.

So… the next time someone starts spouting these economic “truths,” it wouldn’t hurt to think about just how “true” they are in the case in point, especially if it’s a politician doing the spouting.