Nobel prizes and virtual accomplishments

"They make money the old fashioned way, the earrrrrn it."

That was John Houseman's famous pitch line for the investment firm Smith Barney. You can still see it on YouTube.

Houseman hammers home the fact that earning money the old fashioned way involves work, hard work. The point is that working hard is not only the surest way towards achieving one's goal, it also gives that achievement a seal of authenticity. The one who finally succeeds deserves any rewards he has coming to him.

Nowadays it seems that Houseman's maxim is itself old fashioned.

That's because we live more and more in a virtual world where the distance between wishful thinking and actual achievement -- at least in an illusory way -- is not as far as it used to be.

Rather than working years to achieve your goal -- and in the process expending your life for it -- today we have the convenience of the click of a mouse. Click that mouse and benefits come immediately: banking, schooling, shopping, entertainment; you can belong to an entire community of friends without physically being with any of them.

But the recent financial collapse should suggest to us that making (or spending) what turned out to be artificial quick-money has its problems.

All of that wealth was illusory.

Houseman's point should still give us pause. To make real money, you might still have to do it the old fashioned way. You might still have to work hard to earrrrrrrrn it.

But market-savvy advertisers today probably wouldn't run the ad because they know that a generation used to getting instant results at the click of a mouse may not be attracted to the notion of hard work.

They may not even recognize the idea. Hard work? You mean I actually have to sweat for my highfalutin ideas? Wow.

Having been in the education business for several decades now, I have noticed that student achievement is less and less measured by hard work. More and more it is measured by how students can express their feelings. Or by how "sincere" they are.

Education used to be about preparing folks for the work and sweat of the real world. And that real world rewarded those who worked and sweated and succeeded -- fully accepting the real world fact that not all will.

Education today is more about creating a virtual world, a world of feeling rather than labor, a world of instant product rather than the gestation of process, a world offering an illusory equality for all because it is a world offering an illusory lack of need for any.

A world of make-believe depths and virtual accomplishments.

And if you can talk about it all really eloquently, you might even win a Nobel Prize.

Logos2Go

Genesis 3.19 By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.

2 Thessalonians 3.10 ... If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.

Luke 9.23 And he said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me...

James 2.18 But someone will say, "You have faith and I have works." Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.