work/life balance revisited*

In the nineteenth century, there was a prohibition in the United States on banks opening branches in communities other than the ones in which they originally operated. People had to trust the bank if they were to deposit their money in it, and bankers had to assess the character of borrowers before writing loans; it was generally believed that “the bankers’ interests and the interests of the larger community are one and the same,” as a historical sociologist of banking writes. We might imagine a banker sits down with a young couple and begins to form a judgment of their credit worthiness, that is, their character. This character is knowable because there is a community. Maybe the banker asks around at the grocery and the hardware store, and notes subtle cues in the tone of voice or body language of their proprietors as he mentions the name of the applicants and inquires after their record of credit. Satisfied, he vouchsafes their creditworthiness to his colleague bankers, who live in the same community, and a mortgage is secured. A thirty-year relationship is established between the bank and the couple. The banker feels he has done a good turn, helping virtue to its reward by the diligent application of his own powers of discerning observation, and his knowledge of the ways of men. He exercises prudence; his work calls on some of his best capacities…

Now consider the reality of the mortgage broker circa 2005, whose work takes on a very different character under absentee capitalism. Knowing the mortgage he secures will be sold by the originating bank (a branch of a nationwide bank) to some other entity, he needn’t concern himself with the creditworthiness of the applicant. The bank has no interest in the ongoing viability of the loan; its interest is limited to the fees it gets from originating the loan. The mortgages will be bundles on Wall Street then these bundles will themselves be transformed through securitization… The original encounter between mortgage broker and borrower as they sit across from one another is fraught with moral content- questions of trust- and both of the original parties no doubt experience it this way, in 2005 as ever. The mortgage broker gets a feeling in his gut. But this information is discarded through a process of depersonalization. The discarding is purposeful. Indeed the originating banks get frequent phone calls from Wall Street investment houses, urging them to invent new kinds of loans in which the borrower doesn’t even need to claim income or assets, much less prove their existence. This makes a certain kind of psychic demand on the mortgage broker who actually writes the loans: he must silence the voice of prudence, and suspend the action of his own judgment and perception.

Why would a system demand the stupidification of the mortgage professional? Again, imagine it is 2005. Unprecedented concentrations of capital have arisen, and these pools of money are competing with one another to find a home, and get a return. As a result, there is an insatiable worldwide appetite for mortgage-backed securities among investors. Further, the fees to be made from all the transactions between originator and investor are fueling a Wall Street boom. Therefore more loans must be written. So our mortgage broker writes loans that he knows to be bad, and makes a lot of money. Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of “credit,” shot through with bad faith, his work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life. So during his vacation he goes and climbs Mount Everest, and feels renewed. The next summer, he becomes an ecotourist in the Amazon rain forest. It is in this gated ghetto of his second life that he inhabits once again an intelligible moral order where feeling and action are linked, if only for a couple of weeks.

~ Matthew Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

* The original work/life balance post can be found here.
** Wow, that quote took a very long time to type up. Please let me know if I made any typos.

addendum

Speaking of the dangers valuing abstract knowledge over tacit knowledge, this American Life broadcast Two Steps Back (275) recounts how standardization efforts have frustrated a successful public school teacher's ability to teach.

(This American Life contains some very interesting programs. They're interesting enough that I'm actually willing to up to put up with Ira Glass and general NPR smugness in order to listen to them.)

perfectly normal

The Unknown Citizen

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

~ W.H. Auden (Found via 3QuarksDaily)

Ultimately society becomes nothing more than a collection of statistical regularities and statistical categories. It makes little difference whether the category is a traditional one of social structure (age, sex, class) or a kind of person (child abuser, homeless) because the statistical category is the great equalizer—it strips the meaning from a social category and the individuality from a human kind. Society is statistical and so are the individuals who comprise it.
…
The main reason we measure everything human is that the concept of normality has placed that of morality, or as Ian Hacking puts it, the concept of normal people replaced that of human nature. The traditional view of human nature was a moral one. Belief in a transcendent God or in natural law allowed humans to be defined according to an ideal or to virtues. Virtue was not based exclusively on public opinion, or average behavior.
…
The normal is now an epiphenomenon of statistics, which when applied to human culture and the individual turns quality into quantity and imperialistically imposes the equality of standardization upon the individual and society.

~ Richard Stivers, The Illusion of Freedom and Equality

calculating fashion

Matthew Crawford, in Shop Class for Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work*, distinguishes between two types of knowledge— abstract/universal knowledge and experiential/intuitive/tacit knowledge. According to Crawford, universal knowledge “aspires to a view from nowhere. That is, it aspires to a view that gets at the true nature of things because it isn’t conditioned by the circumstances of the viewer. It can be transmitted through speech or writing without loss of meaning, and expounded by a generic self that need not have any prerequisite experiences.”

Our society values this abstract knowledge—we crave more “technique” as Jacques Ellul would describe it. We value processes, technical manuals, best practices and flowcharts, rather than experiential or tacit knowledge. Crawford describes the basic idea of tacit knowledge:

“We know more than we can say and certainly more than we can specify in a formulaic way. Intuitive judgments of complex systems, especially those made by experts… are sometimes richer than can be captured by any set of algorithms.”

Perhaps the difference between intuitive knowledge and abstract knowledge is best illustrated by the supercomputer Deep Blue and the master chess player Garry Kasparov. Though Deep Blue did beat Kasparov, it relied on a different sort of intelligence, if it can be called that at all, than Garry’s. Kasparov himself writes:

“Instead of a computer that thought and played chess like a human, with human creativity and intuition, they got one that played like a machine, systematically evaluating 200 million possible moves on the chess board per second and winning with brute number-crunching force.”

When we only recognize abstract knowledge, we bureaucratize human intelligence. In the words of Crawford:

“Appreciating the situated character of the kind of thinking we do at work is important, because the degradation of work is often based on efforts to replace the intuitive judgments of practitioners with rule following, and codify knowledge into abstract systems of symbols that then stand in for situated knowledge.”

~

The nonprofit sector subscribes to abstract knowledge, evidenced by the proliferation of jargon about “innovation,” “portfolio,” “outcome measurement” and “performance”. In my consulting work, I struggle with what kind of knowledge I implicitly support. But like a good stereotypical female blogger, I'm going to spend the rest of this blog post writing about clothing (Actually according to this, female bloggers prefer to write about Christmas, family, love and babies. Matt says that I ought to question whether the dataset analyzed is a representative sample).

Getting dressed is a difficult and stressful task for me. It’s a complicated operations procedure, rather than an expressive fun activity. Basically I think of it this way: I need to optimize my appearance given a set of constraints: amount and type of physical activity (e.g. biking or walking), indoor and outdoor temperature, level of desired formality and professionalism, level of comfort, clean clothing available and semi-clean clothing available. (I complicate this task by keeping a pile of worn-once-or-twice-but-still-clean clothing that I keep in a drawer that I try to wear before that drawer overflows).

In deciding what to wear, I first think about all my constraints. For example:
- Need to bike in regular clothing today. Need a skirt that will allow ample leg movement. No pencil skirts.
- Workshop presentation. Need to dress professionally and make sure that you have a decent shirt underneath your sweater because you get really hot when presenting…
- Um, you’ve already worn that black cardigan three times this week.
- Um, you don't have enough time to put on two pairs of tights. (Trust me, when you wear two pairs of tights at the same time, the second pair is very difficult to put on).

And then I rely upon mental algorithms I’ve developed to optimize appearance, primarily from my husband’s excellent fashion advice:
- Best colour combinations for me are black + grey + one other colour (which cannot be yellow, brown or navy, but would ideally be purple or blue).
- I can ditch the black and do grey + navy + white. Or maybe do beige + navy or beige + brown, but beige and brown are not the best colours for me.
- Only one article of clothing can have patterns, ruffles or extra embellishment
- Skirts generally look better than pants as long as I can find appropriate matching tights. Skirts must be above the knees!
- I can’t wear dangly earrings when I have my glasses on. It's just too many metal appendages.
- Fitted clothing usually looks better. I am supposed to avoid empire waists, puffed sleeves, boatnecks and blazers.
- Apparently the whole trendy/Michelle Obama wearing a belt over a cardigan looks stupid on me.

Given that my algorithms are not very well developed, I often find myself venturing in foreign territory. This often proves disastrous or atleast results in a tardy appearance at work. For instance, this morning, I wanted to wear a brown sweater. My algorithm for brown (brown + beige) was not going to work because I didn’t have any beige skirts or khakis. So I tried a pair of grey jeans, but they didn’t fit over my long underwear. Then I tried brown workpants that were too stripey compared to the stripe texture on the brown sweater. Then I tried a brown skirts which proved too brown. Then I panicked, since I was running later, and finally opted to just wear blue jeans, which were rather uncomfortable.

So this is why it takes me 20 minutes to get dressed in the morning. Perhaps I can reduce it to 10 minutes if I use a flowchart. Or maybe I should diagram a set of successful outfits at different levels of constraints and choose from the list. (I once though about creating such a diagram for biking clothing for weather… e.g. which thickness of gloves do I need given the daily range of temperature and windchill?). Or write a computer program that draws from a database of all my clothing and then compiles outfits based on inputted variables. That would be pretty awesome.

Alternatively, I could try to develop some experiential knowledge.**


* The famous essay that preceded the book is well worth reading.
** Or I could get rid of all my clothing and just buy a few sets of black skirts, black tights + grey shirt + grey cardigan. And just wear it ALL THE TIME. Simplicity is so tempting sometimes, but unfortunately I like novelty and variety and other comforts afforded by my American educated class privilege.
*** This only a slight caricature. I actually think about getting dressed in the morning this way. That is why it is so stressful. It’s up there with grocery shopping and meal planning and cooking (yet another algorithm-dependent area of my life). A quick google search has yielded a few others who have "best practices" for getting dressed.

you can only trust debtors

… another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions become thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a whole sale transformation of the old Puritan moralism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto “Be frugal and free,” the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimitation of spending.

~ Matthew Crawford in Shop Class as Soulcraft

Not only do we have moral legitimitation for debt, but we also have institutional legitimitation. Matt and I have been entangled in paperwork as we’ve tried to establish his credit score. Every credit card application has resulted in rejection, not because Matt has bad credit, but because he has no credit. He’s a poor candidate for credit because he has never had a debt before.


*That being said, with the recent recession and growing concerns for the environment, debt and spending are beginning to take on different moral meanings.

simulating friendship*

Priority of sensation over substance. William Deresiewicz writes, in reference to Facebook:

We have turned [our friends] into an indiscriminate mass, a kind of audience or faceless public. We address ourselves not to a circle, but to a cloud.... There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Friendship is devolving, in other words, from a relationship to a feeling—from something people share to something each of us hugs privately to ourselves in the loneliness of our electronic caves, rearranging the tokens of connection like a lonely child playing with dolls. The same path was long ago trodden by community. As the traditional face-to-face community disappeared, we held on to what we had lost—the closeness, the rootedness—by clinging to the word, no matter how much we had to water down its meaning. Now we speak of the Jewish "community" and the medical "community" and the "community" of readers, even though none of them actually is one. What we have, instead of community, is, if we're lucky, a "sense" of community—the feeling without the structure; a private emotion, not a collective experience. And now friendship, which arose to its present importance as a replacement for community, is going the same way. We have "friends," just as we belong to "communities." Scanning my Facebook page gives me, precisely, a "sense" of connection. Not an actual connection, just a sense.


* I could also call this, as you may expect, "when words change their meaning" or "when words lose their meaning", but I thought it might be nice to have a change
** I discovered Deresiewicz via Charles Petersen's article In The World of Facebook

when words lose their meaning*

Diversity.

Example 1: Fashion magazine Love celebrates the diversity of eight of the most “beautiful people” in the world. Is it just me or do they look pretty similar? (via Sociological Images)

Example 2: Visit any business school website and you’ll be sure to find the words “diversity” mentioned somewhere about their student bodies. Yet my friend related to me earlier this year that admissions officers at top business schools told her that they prefer students to have no more than three years of work experience.

Example 3: In our workplaces, in our churches, we comment with smug satisfaction about the diversity present, generally in reference to multilingual capabilities and skin color. But oftentimes, this diversity is superficial at best, a visual characteristic of a group of people who share similar educational background, political views, lifestyles and socioeconomic status.**

A commenter on the Sociological Images blog entry referenced earlier writes:

Media decision-makers know that in 2010, the concept of “diversity” is a useful tool to generate a positive response in audiences, especially when the piece explicitly says, “Hey, this is diverse.” Whether or not there’s discernible “diversity” in whatever they’re labeling as such, the label itself gets the applause.

It’s like putting puppies or daisies in an ad. And it’s a particularly cynical trick they use when they just throw in the word “diversity” to drum up feel-good vibes in something that’s actually quite mundane and not at all groundbreaking, diversity-wise. (Original comment found here)


* I’ve lost count of the number. It might be 7, not counting variations. I should probably make this a tag. Speaking of which, I hate my tags. What I mean when I use them seems to keep changing.
** Not to say that ethnic diversity is unimportant and should not be celebrated, but let’s recognize that there are other forms of diversity that in multicultural America may be more meaningful.

standard of living

I attended an informal fundraiser for Haiti hosted by my sister-in-law in order to raise funds for Explorers Sans Frontieres last weekend. A friend shared about her numerous trips down to Carrefour, Haiti (Carrefour is about 6 miles south of Port-au-Prince). She lived with a family and spent many months teaching English. She recounted the love, the joy and the generosity amongst the people she lived with and related how the community has been coming together post-earthquake to rebuild.

The media has bombarded us with so many images of suffering, of chaos and of poverty since the Haiti earthquake, a sensational portrayal of a poor backward country: multitudes of impoverished (black) people in need of aid and help from our superior society.

Before we condemn Haiti and its people to our categories of exoticized and backward other as we succumb our personal opinions to the CNN newsfeed, let us remember the richness of the lives of people who live there. I was particular moved by my friend’s reflection on the death of a close friend of hers:

“He didn’t survive the earthquake. He was 30. But I thought to myself at age 30 in Haiti, you’ve already lived a long hard life, but he lived a full life. He experienced so much.” (paraphrase)

A full life. Many of us here in America never live a full life.

I leave you with something from Reason for Being: Meditation on Ecclesiastes by Jacques Ellul:

Let me repeat that the absence of progress does not result in sameness or stagnation. “What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done” (Eccl. 1:0). These words do not amount to a quantitative or practical assessment, but, as we have said, a judgment concerning being (“What has been… what will be”), and the way people carry out their action- not the means of human action. There is an enormous change in the way Genghis Khan killed (with the saber) and our way (with nuclear bombs), but the behavior pattern is the same. Murder, envy, domination—these do not change. Truly, there is nothing new under the sun.

To use a classic distinction, we can have (quantitative) human growth, but this does not indicate (qualitative) human development. As noted earlier, we need to look at reality in terms of what God reveals to us. We may live in the “illusion of progress,” but God’s revealed truth shows us what it really amounts to.


* Note: This post was written one or two weeks ago.
** My sister-in-law is involved in another fundraiser for Haiti that will take place on Thursday Feb. 25th at 6:30pm. The event is called Help for Haiti: Beyond Media Coverage and will be held at the Penn Museum.