Walter Lippmann: Drift and Mastery

Walter Lippmann wrote a column in the Washington Post, which my parents read faithfully and I read quizzically, growing up.  He was writing when I was getting to draft age and Vietnam beckoned, and I began to read him with more interest. He turned against the war, and so I liked him. 
But I never realized he had a history.
The man I was reading in the 1960's published a coming out book, Drift and Mastery, in 1914. We are talking World War I. 
But it was not about World War I. It was about democracy, and America and class, and the economy and psychology and ethics.
He says some stuff which seems so modern, so obvious and yet so uncommonly spoken it just stops me in my tracks:

"We say in conversation: 'Oh, no, he's not a business man--he has a profession.' That sounds like an invidious distinction, and no doubt there is a good deal of caste and snobbery in the sentiment. But that isn't all there is. We imagine that men enter the professions by undergoing a special discipline to develop a personal talent. The business man may feel that the scientist content with a modest salary is an improvident ass. But he also feels some sense of inferiority in the scientist's presence. For at the bottom there is a difference in the quality of their lives--in the scientist's a dignity which the scramble for profit can never assume."

In these days when Liar's Poker and Mitt Romney of Bain Capital are exalted as the pinnacle of aspirations, it seems quaint to think of the days, when I was growing up, when you dreamed about going to medical school, or maybe becoming an engineer, or even a lawyer, but you didn't dream about growing up to be a business man. Anyone could be a business man. Business men were the guys who couldn't make it in the professions.  "Punk organic chemistry--kiss med school good-bye," our classmates warned us. "You'll wind up selling insurance."  Or stocks. What horror. What an embarrassment. 

Maybe this was not a widespread American set of values. Maybe it was peculiar to growing up in Washington, DC.  But to my crowd, businessmen were Willy Loman, a failure in a cheap suit who thought the best he could ever hope to be was to be well liked.

Years later, a surgeon friend of mine mentioned he had gone to medical school in 1969 because it was either that or Vietnam, but what he really wanted to do was go to business school. I thought he was kidding, but he was not.  And he was a good surgeon. He was from Ohio. I don't know, maybe in the mid West going to business school was thought to be a higher calling than going to medical school.
 Ultimately, he retired at age 58 and moved to Florida and started a lawn mowing business. He became a lawn doctor. He pursued his lifelong dream of starting and developing a business. 
Maybe he was just ahead of his time.
Now, the people we hear revered are the capitalists--Mitt Romney who built a company which made tons of money, mostly by borrowing money, using that money to buy struggling companies, borrowing against the collateral those companies represented and then leaving those companies to die. 

I'm no business guy, but the whole story sounds like that episode of Blue Planet about the spider wasp, which is this wasp which lays its egg inside a spider's belly and when the fetal wasp grows it gradually devours the spider from the inside (sort of like the Alien movie) and it gradually eats its way through the spider until there is nothing left of the spider but this empty shell and the wasp emerges, spreads its wings and then flies away, looking for a spider in which to lay its own egg.

                                       --image courtesy of Wikipedia

My older son watched this episode and reacted as the rest of the family did, with growing horror as we saw this horrific life story play out and he turned to his family and said, "This proves there is no God."
Or at least no benign God.

But I digress.
Or not.
I mean, the idea of the vulture capitalist is to make money, not to sympathize with the employees of the company he will eat up from the inside.
The idea of the spider wasp is to reproduce, not to sympathize with the spider.
It's all in the values you live by.
Personally, I can live with the values of the doctor. 
The basic value taught in medical school is actually not Primum non nocere (First do no  harm) but "Put the patient first."  
Which most often during internship meant, "Draw the patient's blood and run the EKG before you go to the bathroom or go to lunch."

So now, in the 21st century, I guess we have new heroes. 
(Or not. See my earlier blog on "Heroes.")
I guess the new hero should be Norman Litz, who is right up there with Mitt and the spider wasp. Get yours. Don't worry about the other fellow.