My Organizational Behavior Course

My Rutgers MBA program was largely a waste of time: but not my Organizational Behavior Course! It was wonderful! It triggered an intellectual conversion! This discipline studies systems of behavior in a sober, objective, scientific, non-moralistic and unemotional manner to identify and scrutinize their various consequences. I found this SO refreshing! Coming of age in the 60s, I was thoroughly indoctrinated in the emergent leftist obsession with systems of injustice: racism, militarism, chauvinism, and imperialism. In Catholicism we understand this as "structural sin," what we always referred to as the "world." Surely there are such: racism in the USA before 1970; the culture of contraception/pornography/abortion after 1970; Islamic misogyny evident in polygamy, honor killings, and aversion to education of women. However, there is also, especially among liberals, an exaggerated indignation, moralism, judgmenalism and emotionalism around policy issues that are best considered with sobriety. So we have recurrent personal attacks: if you support ABC you are racist, misogynist, and so forth. There is shrillness, a heaviness of spirit such that disagreement on some issues makes you a bad person. My Organizational Behavior course largely lifted that burden off my spirit. I came to see that practical, prudential judgments allow for a range of opinion and do not always carry the grave moral significance that concrete personal acts do: voting for or against food stamps is not the same as feeding or not-feeding your neighbor; there may be negatives about the food stamp program and better ways to feed the hungry. I read about a soup kitchen that opened and destroyed the business of local, inexpensive Hispanic bodegas and diners. Yes there can even be a social justice case AGAINST soup kitchens! This is why churchmen need to avoid pontificating on social policy! This is why we need to avoid personal, emotional judgments against each other on policy matters! This is why we do well to lighten up a little about our political ideologies!