Last week, the American gymnast Ali Raisman tied for third place at the Olympics in the all-around competition… and lost the tie-breaker because she was a more consistent performer than the Russian gymnast with whom she was tied.  Yes… that’s correct.  The more consistent performer lost in a competition designed to reward the most consistent   I doubt that was what the gymnastics federation had in mind when they drew up the tie-breaker rule, but that sort of result was absolutely and mathematically inevitable because of the rule, which provided that, in the event of a tie, the lowest score each of the two gymnasts had, out of the four events, would be thrown out, and the one with the highest remaining score would be declared the winner.  The result mathematically is that when two gymnasts are tied, if one has a particularly bad single event, the winner will always be that one.

This is an excellent example of how what seems, on the surface, to be a perfectly logical “solution” created a result totally at odds with the goal of the competition.  Unhappily, this doesn’t just happen in Olympic gymnastics, but in all too many areas of society, business, and government. It occurs because too many decision-makers, from politicians to business CEOs, don’t think through the implications and ramifications of their decisions.  Sometimes, that occurs because they don’t think events will ever require contingency plans – as in the case of safety requirements at Japanese nuclear facilities.  After all, who could have predicted the freakish combination of earthquake and tsunami? And in gymnastics, what was the probability of a tie with that many judges and four events with scores measured in thousandths of a point?

Results at variance with what one might call common sense also occur when situations change and the rules or procedures don’t. Or they occur because everyone is so concerned about the moment that something totally predictable that occurs periodically, but at long intervals, is totally overlooked, as in the case of Delta Airlines forgetting to renew their online security certification at a time when they had cut commissions to travel agents and increased the fees required for telephone booking, thus increasing the percentage of reservations and payments made online.

All of these situations are the result of failure, in some way, to consider the implications of either certain actions or of failing to act… and all are preventable… but, given human nature, few will be.

Several days ago, a former student of my wife called, frantically trying to locate an original copy of music he needed – by the next day.  Last week, her department chair informed her that a special grant was available for her opera program, if she could submit the paperwork by Monday.  Now… he had been informed that she was leaving for a singing appearance the next day and would not be returning until Monday evening… and he’d had the information about the grant for almost a month.  And more than once I’ve had editors of periodicals [not my regular editor; he knows better] request corrections to proofs in a day or two.

What gives with people these days?  Now that we have instant messaging and email and networks, etc., it’s as though half the population, if not more, believes that everything can be done instantly… and that everyone is instantly available all the time.  Yet often these demands and requests involve material objects that can’t be produced or located instantly.  Electronic instantaneousness doesn’t translate automatically to instant physical production, especially of objects involving more than text, a fact that is increasingly lost on many superiors.  Nor is everyone always physically located where they can comply with such requests and demands.  Yet the creation of near-instant communications has created the illusion for many that everything is instant.

Even when someone is present and ready, these last-minute requests and demands create the danger of fast and shoddy work, often with little or no oversight and review. For the most part, speed is dangerous.  This fact is certainly recognized in areas such as aviation and various racing sports, where great attention to detail is the hallmark of those who are successful. There’s all too much truth to the truism that “speed kills.” But the dangers of speed appear far less well-recognized in business or education, or finance, despite such mishaps as the flash crash of the stock market several years ago, or the more recent mishaps dealing with a portfolio of stocks handled by a large market-maker, caused, incidentally, by the adoption of new trading software designed in part to speed trades.  And the use of fast electronic processing by shoddy mortgage firms has doomed many homeowners to unnecessary financial ruin.

There’s a huge difference between planned and careful use of speed and laziness, incompetence, and procrastination enabled by rapid communications… and it’s well past time that individuals, not to mention organizations and their leaders, recognized that difference.

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.