FDIC Thursday Halton
The spirit of today’s firefighters is just as strong as it has ever been and is growing stronger.
Are today’s firefighters really different, or, could it be that questioning the metal of our successors is just part of man’s normal evolution? Bobby Halton, editor in chief of Fire Engineering and education director of FDIC, raised and answered these questions at today’s General Session.
The examples of the sentiments of George Orwell and Socrates toward the young generation of their times suggested that perhaps it is natural for man to pass judgment on the next generation.
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it,” George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm.
Socrates, the Greek philosopher who died 400 years before Christ was born, said the following about the new generation of his time:
“Our youth now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for their elders and love chatter in place of exercise; they no longer rise when elders enter the room; they contradict their parents, chatter before company; gobble up their food and tyrannize their teachers.”
However, Halton pointed out, such evaluations need not be negative. He cited “a different, and perhaps more accurate view of the generational issue” espoused by Chief John Kenlon of the Fire Department of New York. In 1919, when the chief was asked whether the young men in his department were brave, he responded:
They have to be, or they wouldn’t be in the department. Every man is a quick thinker, something absolutely necessary in a firefighter. They have initiative, and yet not too much of it to be a good soldier firemen, and such a thing as cowardice, of course, is unknown among the fire laddies. Sometimes we find men too clever to obey commands, and then they make wretched firefighters. But bravery of the bravest? How can I say who is bravest when all my men are brave? It is merely a matter of opportunity that distinguishes the firemen, and if I were to say that such a one is bravest because of such and such a deed, I would be wronging his fellows.
“The chief nails the issue of experience, age, wisdom, and training” in the latter part of his response, said Halton:
But the firemen of today are professionals of the purest type, for firefighting has become the most scientific of propositions. They are a clean-lived lot, marrying early and raising large families. But despite the professionalism in the firemen of today, the spirit of the man is just as strong as in the old days when it was the risk, the adventure, the hard swift, danger-loving life that induced men to enter the department. [Italics added for emphasis.]
It seems to me to be “a particular sort of enthusiasm reborn in them from the volunteers of the old days,” Halton explains. “Chief Kenlon was absolutely correct in 1919. It’s as if he had said it yesterday: There is among the newest generation of firefighters today a particular sort of enthusiasm!”
“What we, Socrates, and others have failed to consider is that expectations lead to results,” Halton warned. “What we expect to find will be what we will reap as the rewards of our expectations.” How we treat, prepare, and–for lack of a better word–indoctrinate our future firefighters into this profession is very important. He cautioned against “the risk of building prisons of despair for captured firefighters rather than castles of inspiration for devoted firefighters.”
He reminded the audience: This is a profession that prides itself on its virtue, not on conformity. This is a profession that celebrates excellence, not mediocrity, and this is a profession that values service, not rewards. “When we allow for behavior that does not match our values, we are in for tremendous peril,” he stressed.
Halton cited examples of recent “awful firefighter behavior”:
• Several firefighters getting involved with prostitution in the firehouse?
• An entire crew amusing themselves by sexually abusing mentally disadvantaged people?
• The tragic reports of firefighters engaging in drinking while on duty, resulting in horrific accidents.
• The shocking recent report of multiple crews of firefighters destroying and defiling a fire station over a transfer?
Such actions shock us, Halton noted, “because universally we can find limitless stories of incredible kindness and unparalleled devotion in every fire service company. Therefore, it should come as a shock when we see behavior that goes directly against our firefighter moral sense.”
Halton posed the question: Are these the random acts of a few bad people, bad apples, or are they indicative of a bigger problem within that system–a bad barrel? The answer is both, Halton said.
The fire service knows that evil exists; we have to respond to acts of evil in our everyday duties, Halton explained. “The fire service knows that there are bad people, evil people, people who have no sense of right and wrong, of good and bad, or just and unjust behavior.” But, he noted that the bad rarely make it through the initial firefighter selection process. What, then, he asked, could possibly make good firefighters do evil things? We must understand it, or we cannot prevent it! Instructors must come to grips with what could possibly drive good firefighters to violate their oath and do evil.
He posed the question: Can a situation cause someone to behave in ways that are contrary to his moral sense? He followed the question with the statement: “Psychologists have concluded that situational power can overcome individual power in given contexts. This does not absolve anyone from personal responsibility for engaging in immoral, illegal, or evil conduct. Bad apples exist, and so do bad barrels. In one case, it is the person who chooses to do wrong. In the other, it is the system, and good people can find themselves acting in ways that defy their moral code.”
Halton said it is important for the fire service to recognize “that systems can promote good and heroes or evil and villains so we can build castles that inspire, not prisons that destroy.” He suggested the fire service could learn much about firefighter behavior from the results of the Stanford Prison Experiment of the 1070s. It illustrates how people live up to the expectations of the situation and their perceived role in it, whether it be hero or villain, Halton explained. This study helps us to understand how Hitler was able to control and manipulate the good people of Germany, how good soldiers went bad in Abu Ghraib, the evil that occurred at The People’s Temple in Guyana, and the most recent ethic horrors in Rwanda and Darfur, Halton said.
Halton related the study’s scenario:
In 1973, Dr. Phil Zimbardo randomly recruited a group of young men in the Stanford area to participate in an experiment. The young men were divided into two groups, prisoners and guards. A mock prison was established in the basement of a university building. The young men were told that for two weeks, half of them would be the prisoners and the other half would be guards.
Without giving them any specific directions as to how to behave other than that violence was not to be allowed, the exercise began.
Within one week, it had to be shut down. Two of the young men role-playing prisoners had emotional breakdowns. The young men role-playing guards had become sadistic monsters, and the young men role-playing prisoners had become pathetic abject hopeless prisoners. The young men role-playing guards, who were all good men, had expectations about the role of a guard in a prison, and the young men role-playing prisoners had expectations about what it means to be a prisoner in a jail situation.
Understanding the effect of expectations helps us to understand how firefighters who knew better found themselves participating in behavior they would never even have considered possible, Halton explained. “The key in changing behavior or preventing unwanted behavior requires that we teach and model the virtues, qualities, and the skills we expect from our firefighters. We must understand what situational forces–training, habit, and example–bring out of firefighters and how the system forces create and maintain situations,” Halton continued.
Halton said that all firefighters start out with a clean moral slate, an overwhelming desire to do good and serve their fellow man, but they become “disengaged”? He proposed that this process often begins by “dehumanizing potential victims, giving groups of people disparaging and dehumanizing names such as “retard”; “loser”; “frequent flyer.” The list goes on and on.
Agreeing to go down the wrong road, Halton said, has much to do with the need to belong and obtain social approval. Those leading the dissident behavior, Halton noted, often help foster an us-vs.-them mentality, referred to as “groupthink.”
“The very system we live in sometimes can be the enemy of our moral sense,” Halton proposed. “The institutional authority that allows us to operate on the fireground can be misused off the fireground in evil ways.” Halton cited other conditions: “Often, a misguided superior will go unquestioned because of rank. Then, there is the evil of inaction, the fear that we all have of standing up to power, of standing up to bullies, of being the lone voice in opposition. We want to fit in. We want to belong and be liked. We want to be part of the team. And so, tragically, sometimes we just go along.”
All is not negative or hopeless, Halton emphasized. The good news, he said, is that a situation can as easily create a hero as it can a villain. The Positive Psychological Movement, a relatively new school in psychology, studies the positive in human nature and minimizes psychology’s long-held obsession with the negative, Halton explained. The positive psychological movement highlights how situations can create heroes.
Halton charged the instructors, the teachers, the leaders, to teach firefighters the following:
• To always be self-aware, to always remember who we are, and what our position means to others.
• Behave in ways that show that we are sensitive to the situation to those involved and how it is affecting them.
• To rely on their inner senses, intuition, or the gut feelings they get when something is not right.
Educators should instill in firefighters the four virtues American philosopher James Q. Wilson has identified as the marks of quality individuals:
√ Sympathy. It is kindness, understanding, and heroics. Sympathy proves to the world that you care for the feelings of others and that you can be empathetic to another’s suffering. Sympathy drives us to our most noble endeavors. It enables us to enter burning buildings to search at tremendous personal risk; to volunteer for dangerous duty such as high angle, confined space, and hazardous materials; to fight to be members of rapid intervention teams to march into hell to save another firefighter; and to intentionally give our lives for others.
√ Duty. Duty separates the servant from the worker, the merciful from the mercenary, and the devoted from the opportunist. A sense of duty encompasses punctuality and being sober, alert, and aware at all times when we are at our stations.
√ Fairness. It is about respecting others, their accomplishments, their possessions, and their humanity. We model the virtue of fairness when we develop systems of promotion that reward hard work and merit. Fairness means we must be completely impartial regardless of who calls for help. Everyone gets treated the same way, with kindness, with sympathy, and with due regard for their humanity.
√ Self-control. Tell stories of firefighters who were frightened yet forged on, who wanted to run away yet continued on, who were fearful yet controlled their fear, who were emotional yet controlled their emotions, and who were human yet did super-human feats. We must make sure our firefighters have the ability to subjugate their self-interests. We must make sure our firefighters have the ability to refrain from behavior that would bring discredit to the profession.
“We must lay out for every firefighter an expectation that we expect the virtues of sympathy, duty, fairness, and self-control to be first and foremost every day.”
Halton’s final message to the audience was that there is reason for celebration. “Celebrate and recognize the greatness, the particular sort of enthusiasm, present in all of today’s firefighters, reminiscent of the volunteers of old. Expect that every firefighter will be of outstanding character. The spirit of today’s firefighters is just as strong as it has ever been and is growing stronger.
