Category: Digital Article

Change is not normally signaled by the stroke of a gong – but in this case it was. There was in fact a single set of events that gradually made it possible for suppressed and oppressed victims of sexual abuse to come out and speak out – the scandal that beset the Catholic Church.

The tipping point was January 2002, when the Boston Globe led with a headline, “Church Allowed Abuse by Priest for Years.” The article described how more than 130 persons had recently come forward with “horrific childhood tales” involving a former priest who had allegedly “fondled or raped” them over a thirty-year period. This single story set into motion a chain of events that tarnished the head of the Boston Archdiocese, Cardinal Bernard Law, and ensnared even the Pope, John Paul II. (Law was eventually forced by fed-up followers, primarily Catholic laity, to resign.)

It’s not too much to say that this particular scandal, which has since led to a slew of similar scandals in countries all over the world, changed the Catholic Church forever. The abuse itself, and then the persistent and pervasive attempts to cover it up to protect the church before the children, led over the last decade to 1) the diminution of institutional power (the church itself); 2) the devaluation of positional authority (the church hierarchy), and 3) the decline of personal influence (primarily papal).

Since then there has not been a torrent of related revelations – but there has been a trickle, and a steady trickle at that. Together they make clear that sexual predators are more ubiquitous and insidious a phenomenon than we had previously conceived, and that at least a partial solution to this widespread problem is transparency – victims who are empowered to come forward and tell the truth.

In the last week alone there were three related stories, each of which testifies to long years of silence, followed finally by a willingness to say what happened. First, Aaron Fisher, so-called “Victim Number One” in the trial of former Penn State assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky, now describes in detail how he was abused by Sandusky beginning at age 12 and continuing for three years. Second, one of England’s best known television personalities, Jimmy Savile, now dead, was finally exposed as a long-term predator. The number of people who claim Savile assaulted them has grown from 200 to 300 in just the last week – and the scandal has reached deep into the bowels of the BBC, which had tried briefly to save Savile from posthumous humiliation by scotching a program suggesting a problem. Finally, the campus of Amherst College, one of the nation’s elite schools, was roiled when a woman came forth saying that she had been raped by a fellow student – a charge to which college officials apparently turned a blind eye and deaf ear.

What’s most interesting about the Amherst story – and the most telling of the temper of the times – is what’s happened since. The woman who claimed she was raped was willing not only to come forward but, more importantly, to sign her name to her complaint. Further, Amherst’s still relatively new president, Carolyn Martin, has changed college policies on sexual violence, and hired some experts trained to examine and adjudicate cases of this kind. Finally, students themselves are willing no longer to stay silent. Several women have banded together to create a web site that explores issues relating to sexual violence and misogyny more generally. They are hoping to stop the silence – to end once and for all campus crimes that go unpunished because they are unreported.

I have argued elsewhere that changes in technology contribute significantly to changes in patterns of dominance and deference. (See my most recent book, The End of Leadership.) Every week provides new evidence that confirms the proposition.

Four recent examples:

— We now know that in August of this year the world’s most valuable company, Saudi Aramco, was brought to its knees by a hacker. According to a recent report in the New York Times, “a person with privileged access to the Saudi state-owned oil company’s computers, unleashed a computer virus to initiate what is regarded as among the most destructive acts of computer sabotage on a company to date.” My point of course is a general one: the degree to which in the 21st century a single individual, or even a small group, can wreak havoc on a group or organization that appears on the surface to be impermeable. Technology has changed the balance of power: the most apparently powerful are newly vulnerable to the most apparently powerless.

— Also in Saudi Arabia … the advent of Twitter. In this case technology is empowering not the few, but the many. Twitter is enabling Saudis – who up to were stifled – to express themselves in ways they never dared before. Women are taking on men, including clerics who limit their freedoms. Men, for example judges and lawyers, are taking on the government, accusing it of corruption. And both tend to use their real names – as opposed to hiding themselves in the cloak of anonymity. In fact, Saudi Arabia is the world’s fastest growing Twitter zone. What will be the real world implication of all this fussing and fuming remains of course to be seen. I would venture in the short term, not much. But over the longer term, it’s hard to imagine this new found freedom of expression will be devoid of social, political, and even economic impact.

— You keeping up with changes in learning? With the ways in which technologies are revolutionizing education, especially higher education? Suffice it for the moment to say that Professor Edward Hess, of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, had in the past in his class some 120 students. Beginning this January, his class on how to help private business grow, will enroll more than 26,000! As usual the medium is the message. In this case the medium is on line learning – and the message is hugely greater global access to education and educators, including some of the best in the world. This foretells democratization in the extreme – a far greater distribution of power and influence than ever before.

— In 2008 Barack Obama used Facebook in his presidential campaign, but only in a limited way, primarily to raise money and mobilize volunteers. But this time around social media are ubiquitous. They are allowing ordinary people to express themselves in unprecedented fashion, and they are obliging both Democrats and Republicans to re-frame their messages in ways that permit persuasion on-line rather than in-person.

Whoever said, “The more things change, the more they stay the same”? Don’t bet on it!

The third presidential debate has come and now gone. Dispiriting. For all the verbiage that has been cascading forth for far too long, from both Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, there has been precious little substance in what they had to say.

Can you conceive of a serious, sustained discussion on American foreign policy with nary a reference to, say, Europe, or Mexico, or the political, military, and moral implications of dropping drones? Similarly, can you conceive of a serious, sustained discussion on domestic policy in which the subjects of immigration and climate change and banks-too-big- to- fail are avoided altogether, and no reference is made to how entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and even Social Security will have to be cut if they are not to go broke? Hard to believe, right? Well… that’s exactly what happened. What happened is that after all these many months and after all that fulminating we still steered clear of subjects of critical importance, and tolerated generalities where specifics were required. .

Clearly the fear of failure is what drives the two candidates. Better to be a lame leader than a loser. But what exactly drives us to tolerate a presidential campaign so lacking in lucidity is more elusive. The consequence in any case is obvious: Beginning November 7th we’ll be forced to follow the winner – wherever he may lead..

The differences between the Russian writer Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and the Chinese painter, sculptor, and photographer Ai Weiwei are great – but not so great as the similarities. They include:

• Both men’s claim to fame is as an artist – and as a political dissident.
• Both men railed against the Communist systems of which they were an inextricable part.
• Both men were for brief periods tolerated by their otherwise autocratic and even dictatorial governments.
• Both men were for far longer periods persecuted and even imprisoned by their governments.
• Both men interwove art and protest in a way that made the one indistinguishable from the other.
• Both men were – in Ai’s case are – courageous in ways the rest of us can scarcely contemplate.

More, arguably, than anyone else, Solzhenitsyn exposed the cruelty of life under Stalin, in particular the life of the gulag, a system of internal exile, incarceration, and forced labor that from the 1930s to the early 1950s brutalized some 14 million Russians. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature – “For the ethical force with which he pursued the indispensible traditions of Russian literature.” What more precisely is this “indispensible tradition”? One in which the writer serves as voice of the people – a people oppressed by their government, whether led by tsar or commissar.

Ai Weiwei is probably the best known of a number of Chinese artists that in the last decade or so have played the role of gadfly, or political dissident, or fed-up follower. In the West certainly, Ai has been an object of interest for several years – as political artist and as artful politician.

But now, as a result of what New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl calls his “spectacular retrospective” (October 22) at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum, Ai is under renewed scrutiny. Since in his review of the exhibit, Schjeldahl skillfully weaves Ai’s work as an artist with his work as a political protester, I quote him directly.

“Ai could not attend the show’s opening, because his passport was impounded by the Chinese authorities last year, when he was jailed, without charge, for three months. He has braved periods of house arrest, a beating that caused a brain hemorrhage, prosecution for tax evasion, the shutting down of his popular blog, the revocation of his design firm’s license, the demolition of his newly built studio in Shanghai, and around–the-clock surveillance. Does admiring his work enlist you in his struggles? And if you consider him a victim of oppression, should the works’ quality even matter?”

The artist as bell-ringer is a theme to which I will return. For now suffice it to point to these two men, so different yet so similar, each an artist who carried fed-up followership to a heroic extreme.

This week the German government sought to end months of protests by endorsing a new law legalizing circumcision. Circumcision had been allowed in Germany until this summer, when a regional court (in Cologne) effectively banned the practice, ruling it amounted to assault.

The government moved so quickly only for one reason: fed-up followers, in particular Jews and Muslims who protested to protect a practice that to them was sacrosanct.

This story is notable on two counts. First, it joined Jews and Muslims. Together they attacked the German government for intruding on their freedom to practice religion as they saw fit. Said Alman Mazyek, president of the German Muslim Council: “Circumcision has been a way of life throughout the world for thousands of years …. Only in Germany, unfortunately, does this become an issue.” Echoed Dieter Graumann, president of the German Central Council of Jews: “The ruling [in Cologne] is an unprecedented and dramatic intrusion of the right to religious freedom and an outrageous and insensitive act. Circumcision … has been practiced worldwide for millenia and is respected in every country around the world.”

And together they engaged in a public display deliberately redolent of historic resonance. In an unprecedented move, Jews and Muslims held a vigil last month in, of all places, Bebelplatz. Bebelplatz is the Berlin square that in 1933 was the site of the notorious Nazis book burning – the burning of some 20,000 books the Nazis considered un-German, including works by Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, and Thomas Mann.

The second reason this story is significant is because it so strikingly exemplifies the temper of the times – a time in which those who apparently are powerless are willing to take on those who apparently are powerful.

Think of how dramatically different was Germany, were Germans, in the 1930s, in the years after Hitler came to power (1933). Yes, some were at the extremes: a few had the temerity publicly to protest the Nazi regime. And a few were Hitler’s acolytes, eager slavishly to follow his every dictate. But, overwhelmingly, Germans were what I elsewhere called Bystanders. (See my book titled, Followership, Chapter 5.) Bystanders are observers, not participants. They make a deliberate decision to stand aside, to disengage from their leaders and from the group of which they are members. This withdrawal is, in effect, a declaration of neutrality – which amounts to a tacit endorsement of the status quo.

Not this time. This time neither Germany’s 140,000 registered Jews nor its nearly 4 million Muslims stayed silent in the face of what they experienced as unwanted and illegal government intrusion. Their refusal to keep quiet explains why the government beat a hasty retreat. This was, after all, a case that threatened to remind the nation and the world of Germany’s dark but not so distant past.

“Binder-gate”?

Is this what it comes down to? Is this particular turn of phrase so reprehensible as provide a basis for judging Mitt Romney? Is this particular turn of phrase so obviously symbolic of a larger problem – of a presidential candidate who cares scarcely a whit about the well–being of women?

Do we women really want to associate ourselves in any enduring way with so silly a social media phenomenon?

Do we not have bigger fish to fry?

I started this blog in April – and in April I named my first Lame Leader of the Week. It was Vikram Pandit, CEO of Citigroup.

Pandit received the dubious distinction for his “inability or refusal to read the writing on the wall – to forestall outrage at his out-sized compensation.” As a result of his ineptitude, he was publicly humiliated by his shareholders, who rejected a pay plan that would have awarded him $15 million.

The crisis passed – or seemed to. But half a year later, it became clear that memories are long and that whatever Pandit’s assets, his deficiencies had come to outweigh them. After a further series of missteps, the board was fed up, and so yesterday it fired him. Well, that’s not exactly right. Exactly right is that Pandit tendered to the board his “surprise resignation.”

“Surprise”? Not really. We live in an age in which leaders who fail to cut the mustard are not long for this world – unless, of course, their control is complete..

Hard on the heels of Russia’s recent regional elections, which provided President Putin the assurance he needed his power was secure, he did what autocrats are wont to do in such a circumstance – he went a step further. He took another step toward squelching completely his opposition.

Russian authorities yesterday arrested Sergei Udaltsov, one of the best known figures in the anti-Putin protest movement. Udaltsov, unlike other protest leaders, is a radical leftist. So the government concluded it was safe – it did not risk widespread public opposition – to charge Udaltsov with threatening to organize mass riots and even to seize power. (The more serious charge of terrorism might yet follow.).

My intention is not to praise Utaltsov but to blame Putin. He is increasingly emboldened – increasingly ready, willing, and able to take on and stamp out anyone who opposes him. (He also just sacked one of his own ministers, who had dared publicly to criticize him.) Unless his followers speak up and out, this is one leader who will not hesitate to do what he feels he must – tighten his grip on power.

The second of three presidential debates is now history. Barack Obama did what he had to do – return from the dead. And so did Mitt Romney – maintain his credibility as candidate for president..

But for most of the 90 minutes both men resembled nothing so much as two tots, strutting, blustering, and posturing their way around a sandbox. Both men assiduously avoided the heavy lifting that would have elevated the debate beyond politics as usual. .

Neither man discussed in any serious way the danger of the so-called fiscal cliff. And neither man had the temerity to take on the national debt. It was downright disheartening – watching these two grown men, ninnies both, both too frightened to lose to tell the truth.

Expenses will have to be cut – especially entitlements – and taxes will have to be raised. To do otherwise is to doom Americans to fail at every single thing we try collectively to do, at home and abroad. And it is to doom our children, and their children, to a future less bright than the past.

Why leaders like Obama and Romney are so scared to take these subjects on, remains something of a mystery. Unless you think they think we can’t handle the truth.

— A Lame Leader of the Week has finally come out of hiding! Hillary Clinton has finally said – albeit only to CNN and albeit only in Peru; there was no more formal statement made on American soil – that she “takes responsibility” for what happened in Libya, including the death of the American ambassador. Whatever the reason for her silence on this issue until now, it was not a good one. To have the Secretary of State mute on a calamity clearly in her bailiwick did no one a favor. All it did was to start the blame game and to prolong the agony of culpability. What’s interesting about all this is the degree to which Hillary Clinton has escaped being tarnished by the Benghazi brush. Everyone somehow protected her, the people and the press and even the Republicans, who kept the issue front and center, but who did not target her in particular. Maybe it’s because she’s a woman.

— This week’s regional elections in Russia brought comfort to Vladimir Putin, as if he needed it. Notwithstanding the low voter turnout, and notwithstanding the charges of fraud, Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, prevailed. For the moment the opposition, which six months ago was organized and energized, is demoralized. For the moment Putin is as I recently wrote – sitting pretty at sixty. Too bad.

— Likely now there’ll be a lull. The gravely wounded Pakistani girl, Malala Yousafzai, has been moved to Britain, where she will receive intensive medical treatment. But the Taliban’s attempt to assassinate the 14-year aroused widespread outrage throughout Pakistan, expressed in part on the street. Tens of thousands marched in Karachi in protest against the terrorists, a rare display of public support for moderation and against extremism. Some have speculated that for Pakistan this will be a turning point, a watershed moment. Likely this is a stretch. Still, whatever her future, Malala’s name will not be forgotten. Nor will her cause – education for girls – which will be helped not hurt by the hurt that was done her.