the recruitment of human assets

I recently picked up Karen Ho’s Liquidated: An Ethnography of Wall Street. Reading about recruitment at elite universities brings back memories of investment banking and management consulting propaganda. Note their profligate use of words that suggest opportunity and elitism.

David Pyle, Managing Director of Fixed Income at Morgan Stanley at a Princeton recruiting event, 2000:

Our goal is to be the preeminent global firm, to be what we already are, the top. We want people coming into work every morning knowing that we’re at the top and always striving to be at the top. We are global; if you’re not global, you can’t win…. People are our single most important asset… Our people are the smartest in the world… There is no one in the world that we can’t reach and that’s middle of everything. We have huge reserves of capital and human assets, and we want to recruit the type of person that always wants more, who is not happy being second… Our theme is “network the world”.

From a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter 2001 recruitment ad:

Anything is possible. This is where the generation of new ideas lives. Because we’ve built a global network of people who see possibilities where others see confusion and risk—and who know how to turn those possibilities into realities. And by working at internet speed- propelling dozens of companies and millions of investors into the new economy. We are propelling careers all over the world.

These messages compelled confused and anxious undergraduates into hours of resume writing, recruitment presentations and interviews. For those of us who have spent a lifetime climbing the meritocracy ladder, investment banking and management consulting is a comforting next step compared to the prospect of actually figuring out how to live our lives. These careers promise prestige, excitement, learning, wealth and endless opportunity--- who could refuse? And it is only expected that we would be attracted to institutions that reproduce the elitism and selectivity of the colleges we attend. If the future is uncertain, we should strive to preserve the privilege of our Ivy League educations in the most secure way possible. *

And so, in 2010, even after the financial crisis of 2008, investment banking and management consulting recruitment remains attractive and competitive.


* Teach for America has taken advantage of this by being super selective in order to create an “elite cadre of teachers”…. For us organization kids, we need achievement paths.
** All recruitment excerpts taken from Karen Ho's Liquidated

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.

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.

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

on being feminine

I occasionally like to visit the website Real Simple for recipes and organization tips. One of my secret indulgences is reading “how to organize your life” books and articles. It makes me feel like I am actually organizing my life, rather than just reading about it.*

This poll appeared on one of the side panels:

What is your favorite type of book?
a. A good mystery.
b. A heartfelt romance.
c. A historical novel.
b. A memoir.

If you haven’t noticed already, NONE OF MY FAVOURITE TYPES OF BOOKS are in this list. General journalism? Sociology? Theology? Even science fiction? I suppose I’m not Real Simple’s target audience and that I don’t have typically “feminine” tastes in books. In fact, I find it insulting that the poll suggests that women mostly like fiction (mystery, romance, historical fiction) or “emotional” non-fiction (i.e. the memoir).

But atleast the poll suggests that women read. Most women’s magazines would lead me to conclude that women are only interested in losing weight, attracting men, buying clothes, planning weddings, cooking, hosting parties and keeping a house clean. Not that male-targeted magazines are any better. What’s the tagline for Maxim again? Girl. Sports. Beer. Gadgets?

Our mainstream representation of gender is limiting and depressing. Is being feminine about shopping, watching chickflicks and dressing like Carrie Bradshaw? Is being masculine about drinking beer, watching sports, and checking out girls?

In any case, I had no particular agenda for this entry. Much like my ethnicity, I don’t often reflect on how gender affects my life and others’ perceptions of me. But it does become relevant from time to time. I especially find it amusing that I have a “masculine” personality type (INTJ), but feminine hobbies.

If you’re interested in exploring media representations of gender, Sociological Images is a great source. Check out their tag for gender. A few highlights:

• Should a phone be masculine or feminine?
• The infamous I’m a boy, I’m a girl books
• Business Week posts a story about women hedge fund managers that mentions nothing about families or motherhood under the “Working Parents” section of their paper
• The uncanny juxtaposition of girls playing with "boy" toys
  

Other interesting stories I’ve stumbled upon:

• We use men and women’s names differently
• The mockery of Twilight is a gendered mockery because it's easy to hate on teenage girls

*One of my other secret indulgences is reading “Top 10 Trends” list. I like to read them so I can conclude that all the trendy items are ugly. As a result, I can feel superior because I'm not a slave to fashion. But if I realize that some cheap shirt I picked up from the thrift store is on the list, then I can also feel superior because I own something fashionable . It’s a win-win situation! Instant smug satisfaction boost!

when words hide their meaning

We rarely evaluate anything as morally right or morally wrong anymore. Those terms seem outdated. Many of us celebrate this cultural shift as it suggests freedom from oppressive social norms. But while we no longer resort to a vocabulary of right and wrong, our language can still speak with power and oppression.

From Edward Skidelsky, Regular Words that think for us:

Beyond inappropriate

No words are more typical of our moral culture than “inappropriate” and “unacceptable.” They seem bland, gentle even, yet they carry the full force of official power. When you hear them, you feel that you are being tied up with little pieces of soft string.

Inappropriate and unacceptable began their modern careers in the 1980s as part of the jargon of political correctness. They have more or less replaced a number of older, more exact terms: coarse, tactless, vulgar, lewd. They encompass most of what would formerly have been called “improper” or “indecent.” An affair between a teacher and a pupil that was once improper is now inappropriate; a once indecent joke is now unacceptable.

This linguistic shift is revealing. Improper and indecent express moral judgements, whereas inappropriate and unacceptable suggest breaches of some purely social or professional convention. Such “non-judgemental” forms of speech are tailored to a society wary of explicit moral language. As liberal pluralists, we seek only adherence to rules of the game, not agreement on fundamentals. What was once an offence against decency must be recast as something akin to a faux pas.

But this new, neutralised language does not spell any increase in freedom. When I call your action indecent, I state a fact that can be controverted. When I call it inappropriate, I invoke an institutional context—one which, by implication, I know better than you. Who can gainsay the Lord Chamberlain when he pronounces it “inappropriate” to wear jeans to the Queen’s garden party? This is what makes the new idiom so sinister. Calling your action indecent appeals to you as a human being; calling it inappropriate asserts official power.

The point can be generalised. As a society, we strive to eradicate moral language, hoping to eliminate the intolerance that often accompanies it. But intolerance has not been eliminated, merely thrust underground. “Inappropriate” and “unacceptable” are the catchwords of a moralism that dare not speak its name. They hide all measure of righteous fury behind the mask of bureaucratic neutrality. For the sake of our own humanity, we should strike them from our vocabulary.


We speak like enlightened relativists, circumscribing our judgments within the rhetoric of tolerance. In the end, we judge everything without believing in anything.


*This reminds me of Oscar Wilde’s saying: A cynic is the one who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing. Being cynical, I suspect his witty phrase applies not only to cynics, but to our consumer society as a whole. We know the price of everything (and how to shop for the best price), but of value, we know little.

a new species (2)

I would have just twittered this article, found via orgtheory.net, but it was too good to pass up for a quick late night quotes-only blog entry:

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

...

On today's court, the direction Justice Sotomayor suggested is unlikely to prevail. During arguments, the court's conservative justices seem to view corporate political spending as beneficial to the democratic process. "Corporations have lots of knowledge about environment, transportation issues, and you are silencing them during the election," Justice Anthony Kennedy said during arguments last week.

~ Jess Bravin

I'm sure it's a real hard guess as to who I agree with more. =)

the recovery of virtue

After many months of what appeared to be politics as usual, President Obama managed to give me hope again with his speech on Wednesday night. (And I can only hope that his rhetoric is matched with substance—integrity is after all often defined as coherence between the internal and external).

I was especially moved to hear him quote Ted Kennedy towards the end of his speech:

[Ted Kennedy] repeated the truth that health care is decisive for our future prosperity, but he also reminded me that "it concerns more than material things." "What we face," he wrote, "is above all a moral issue; at stake are not just the details of policy, but fundamental principles of social justice and the character of our country."

…

That large-heartedness - that concern and regard for the plight of others - is not a partisan feeling. It is not a Republican or a Democratic feeling. It, too, is part of the American character. Our ability to stand in other people's shoes. A recognition that we are all in this together; that when fortune turns against one of us, others are there to lend a helping hand. A belief that in this country, hard work and responsibility should be rewarded by some measure of security and fair play; and an acknowledgement that sometimes government has to step in to help deliver on that promise.
…

And they knew that when any government measure, no matter how carefully crafted or beneficial, is subject to scorn; when any efforts to help people in need are attacked as un-American; when facts and reason are thrown overboard and only timidity passes for wisdom, and we can no longer even engage in a civil conversation with each other over the things that truly matter - that at that point we don't merely lose our capacity to solve big challenges. We lose something essential about ourselves.

Habits of the Heart (Bellah et al.) noted back in 1985, the loss of the notion of civic virtue and warned of its potential consequences. Obama’s speech suggests that we recover the value of virtue and character in our national discourse. While the concept of virtue may not give us clear answers about the size and role of government in our technologically complex society, it can atleast be a guiding principle in how we frame our public debate about how this country should be governed.

From Habits of the Heart:

We spoke of the belief of Madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. It was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and public good. Without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and virtue, and probably end in authoritarian rule. Half a century later, this idea was reiterated in Tocqueville’s argument about the importance of mores – the “habits of the heart” – of Americans.

…
As the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip from our grasp. As we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen”, the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. And with Ronald Reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group”, our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line. The citizen has been swallowed up by the economic man.

Yet this kind of economic liberalism is not ultimately liberating, for, as became quite clear with the final two visions of the public good described, when economics is the main model for our common life, we are more and more tempted to put ourselves in the hands of the manager and the expert. If society is shattered into as many special interests as there are individuals, then, as Tocqueville foresaw, there is only the schoolmaster state left to take care of us and keep us from one another’s throats.*


* I realize this quote may suggest that one-payer government-run healthcare system would be the perfect example of putting ourselves in the hands of the manager and expert and handing the disciplinary ruler over to the schoolmaster state (you know with the death panels and all). I am not inclined to read the passage in that way, especially not in the context of the book, but I will leave it up to you ponder.

what does it mean to own something?

As Matt and I adjust to renters and new neighbours, we wonder what it means for us to own a house, the pivotal piece of our private American dream. What does it mean to own something? Most would say that owning something entitles you to use it however you wish, as long as you do not harm anyone else or cross certain cultural taboos (e.g. sale of organs etc…).

But as with any concept, our understanding of ownership has been culturally determined. Nowhere is this more evident than our understanding of a corporation. Currently, a public corporation, or more precisely, a for-profit publicly-traded private company exists to increase shareholder value. What is owned serves solely the owner. And what is owned by the corporation must serve the owners of the corporation. But our understanding of corporations and of ownership was not always so, and many wish for a change.

From Habits of the Heart:

Henry Lee Higginson, a leading member of Boston’s business establishment, wrote in 1911, “I do not believe that, because a man owns property, it belongs to him to do with as he pleases. The property belongs to the community, and he has charge of it, and can dispose of it, if it is well done and not with the sole regard to himself or to his stockholders.”

~

The word [corporation] refers to any association of individuals bound together into a corpus, a body sharing a common purpose in a common name. In the past, that purpose had usually been communal or religious; boroughs, guilds, monasteries and bishoprics were the earliest European manifestations of the corporate form… It was assumed, as it is still in nonprofit corporations, that the incorporated body earned its charter by serving the public good… Until after the Civil War, indeed, the assumption was widespread that a corporate charter was a privilege to be granted only by a special act of a state legislature, and then for purposes clearly in the public interest. Incorporation was not yet thought of as a right available on application by any private enterprise.

~ Alan Trachtenberg

Reasserting the idea that incorporation is a concession of public authority to a private group in return for service to the public good, with effective public accountability, would change what is now called the “social responsibility of the corporation” from its present status, where it is often a kind of public relations whipped cream decorating the corporate pudding, to a constitutive structural element in the corporation itself. This, in turn, would involve a fundamental alteration in the role and training of the manager. Manager would become a profession in the older sense of the word, involving not merely standards of technical competence but standards of public obligation that could at moments of conflict override obligations to the corporate employer.

~

There’s a recently-created legal entity, known as the low-profit limited-liability company (L3C) that has been structured to be a business entity for the public good. While reading and hearing about the L3C, I was struck by how the language and the hype surrounding this new legal entity was rooted in pragmatism and lacked a greater moral vision.

The public good is privatized as L3C’s must “significantly further the accomplishment of one or more charitable or educational purposes,” as though “charitable or educational purposes” are but fragmented demands and desires of special interest groups. It is designed to attract program-related investments from foundations and hopefully obtain certain tax benefits.

I have yet to read anything that suggests the L3C could be part of building a moral vision of stewardship. (But if you do see anything, please let me know!) In fact, its very existence reinforces the idea that private companies and public corporations serve the private interests of their owners. That being said, I do commend the creators of the L3C for making a legal entity that could be a better vehicle for improving the common good.

Rather, what all this suggests is our collective poverty of language and imagination. We are caught in thinking in categories of for-profit, non-profit and government. And when we think about ownership, we are foolish enough to presume that our property really is ours.


*This was supposed to be a quotes-only post. Oops. I guess I like this topic a lot.
**It feels rather self-aggrandizing to bold your own text. I suppose they are my little delusions of grandeur in this little corner of the interweb. Alternatively, I could also argue that I bold text because I don't actually believe anyone will read this entire blog post...
***Sigh, time to make my mortgage payment. Ownership is only enjoyable when you get to exercise tyranny, not when you assume the liabilities.

a new species

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

Great and rational organizations- in brief, bureaucracies- have indeed increased, but the substantive reason of the individual at large hast not. Caught in the limited milieux of their everyday lives, ordinary men often cannot reason about the great structures- rational and irrational – of which their milieux are subordinate parts. Accordingly, they often carry out series of apparently rational actions without any ideas of the ends they serve, and there is the increasing suspicion that those at the top as well- like Tolstoy’s generals- only pretend they know. The growth of such organizations, within an increasing division of labor, sets up more and more spheres of life, work, and leisure in which reasoning is difficult or impossible. The solider, for example, ‘carries out an entire series of functionally rational actions accurately without having any idea as to the ultimate end of this action’ (Mannheim, Man and Society) or the function of each act within the whole. Even Men of technically supreme intelligence may efficiently perform their assigned work and yet not know that it is to result in the first atom bomb.

~ C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination, quoted previously

Whatever kind of future suburbia may foreshadow, it will show that atleast we have the choices to make. The organization man is not in the grip of vast social forces about which it is impossible for him to do anything; the options are there, and with wisdom and foresight he can turn the future away from the dehumanized collective that so haunts our thoughts. He may not. But he can.

He must fight The Organization. Not stupidly, or selfishly, for the defects of individual self-regard are no more to be venerated than the defects of co-operation. But fight he must, for the demands for his surrender are constant and powerful, and the more he has come to like the life of organization the more difficult does he find it to resist these demands, or even to recognize them. It is wretched, dispiriting advice to hold before him the dream that ideally there need be no conflict between him and society. There always is; there always must be.

~ William Whyte. Jr., The Organization Man

The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when ascetism was carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate the worldly morality, it did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which today determines the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force. In Baxter’s view the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak should become an iron cage.

Since ascetism undertook to remodel the world and to work out its ideals in the world, material goods have gained an increasing and finally an inexorable power over the lives of men as at no previous period in history…

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: “Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained level of civilization never before attained.”

~ Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

"centrally-administered materialism"

David Warren wrote an excellent editorial in commemoration of the Tiananmen massacre and D-Day:

The Second World War ended in split decision. There was victory in the West, and nominal victory in the East, but as Churchill said, an Iron Curtain fell, and those to the east of it were abandoned to a Communist tyranny little different from the daily Nazi tyranny that had preceded the war; indeed, worse for being prolonged. Two generations were condemned to slavery: whole lives passed under the twitching thumbs of party apparatchiks, with only the briefest respites, in Berlin, in Warsaw, in Budapest, in Prague. And each of those respites, bloody.

It was a mixed result also within the West, for it seems today that we learned nothing, and the principles for which men and women once died have been progressively abandoned in our public life. Yes we have democracy, of a sort: mass democracy, and rule in the name of numbers. But the numbers have been used to establish Nanny States that deeply impinge our freedom, and to advance the very cause of atheist materialism that once marked Nazi, Fascist, and Communist regimes as exceptional.

The people of China are now passing out of the third generation of Communist tyranny. Outwardly, it has eased. The Red Chinese state has relaxed its controls over minor arrangements in everyday life, to the extent of permitting the kind of "capitalist" consumerism that can enhance its own power.

We have been left with less to choose than we think, between the two systems, for we now have centrally-administered materialism in both East and West.

The soldiers who fell in Normandy were not fighting for swimming pools and home entertainment centres. They had before them a view of the dignity of man: of things worth more than life itself. The students who stood in Tiananmen Square -- who raised the home-made statue of Lady Liberty -- did not die for the sake of cellphones, and skyscrapers in Shanghai. They faced the tanks and bullets of the "People's Revolutionary Army" with something more substantial in their hearts.

Yet the generation after them, there as here, has been largely bought off with the false promise of material prosperity. There, as here, we have agreed to become a kind of indentured labour, on the promise that we will be taken care of, cradle to grave.

Let us at least celebrate, for a moment in time, men and women who were better than we are.

But perhaps more revealing about modern China was a joke made by a Chinese visiting scholar– “Nobody’s thinking about Tiananmen in China, they’re all thinking about Gao Kao.”

Gao Kao is the National Higher Education Entrance Examination that takes place over 3 days in China every year. It is basically SAT on steroids. If I’m not mistaken, it occurs only once a year and it completely determines where one goes to college. It conveniently occurs in and around the week of the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.


*On an unrelated note, here are some more encouraging slopes relating to the decreasing incidence of bike casualities in NY.

the slippery slope

Improved technology and more goods and services have raised the standards for what is acceptable in our culture. While there is more to choose from, we also have more to live up to. The introduction of indoor plumbing, electricity and household appliances into our homes have only pressured us to maintain higher levels of cleanliness. While wrinkles were once an accepted symptom of aging, we are now pre-occupied with anti-wrinkle creams and Botox treatments. The greater variety and availability of clothing has only raised expectations for our appearances (It’s not terribly acceptable to wear the same thing every day, unless you’re my husband. He somehow manages to get away with it).

The odd thing about the constancy of (housework) hours is that it coincided with a technological revolution in the household. When the early studies were done, American homes had little sophisticated equipment. Many were not yet wired for gas and electricity. They did not have automatic washers and dryers or refrigerators. Some homes even lacked indoor plumbing, so that every drop of water that entered the house had to be carried in by hand and then carried out again.

By 1950, the amount of capital equipment in the home had risen dramatically. Major technological systems, such as indoor plumbing, electricity, and gas, had been installed virtually everywhere. At the same time, many labor-saving appliances also came into vogue- automatic washing machines and dryers, electric irons, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators and freezers, garbage disposals. By the 1990s, we had added dishwashers, microwaves and trash compactors. Each of these innovations had the potential to save countless hours of labor. Yet none of them dead. In terms of reducing time spent on domestic work, all this expensive labor-saving technology was an abject failure.
…
Laundry provides the best example of how technology failed to reduce labor time... Laundry that had previously been sent out began to stay home. At the same, standards of cleanliness went up… In the (colonial) days, washing would be done once a month at most and, in many families, much less—perhaps four times per year. Nearly everyone wore dirty clothes nearly all the time. Slowly, the frequency of washing rose… Standards have crept up for nearly everything that housewives do—laundry, cooking, care of children, shopping, care of the sick, cleaning…

One 1920s housewife realized: Because we housewives of today have the tools to reach it, we dig every day after dust that grandmother left to a spring cataclysm. If few of us have nine children for a weekly bath, we have two or three for daily immersion. If our consciences don’t prick over vacant pie shelves or empty cookie jars, they do over meals in which a vitamin may be omitted or a calorie lacking.

But we were not always like this. Contemporary standards of housecleaning are a modern invention, like the vacuum cleaners and furniture polishes that make them possible. (The culture of cleanliness) was delayed because it was expensive. The labor of colonial women was far too valuable to be spent creating spic-and-span…

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American

Likewise, more freedom around what parts of our body we can display has resulted in more concern for how those parts of our body appear.

By the 1920s, both fashion and film encouraged a massive “unveiling” of the female body, which meant that certain body parts-such as arms and legs- were bared and displayed in ways they never had before. This new freedom to display the body was accompanied, however, by demanding beauty and literary regimens that involved money as well as self-discipline. Beginning in the 1920s, women’s legs and underarms had to be smooth and free of body hair; the torso had to be svelte; and the breasts were supposed to be small and firm. What American women did not realize at the time was that their stunning new freedom actually implied the need for greater internal control of the body, an imperative that would intensify and become even more powerful by the end of the twentieth century… cultural pressures have accumulated, making American girls today, at the close of the twentieth century, more anxious than ever about the size and shape of their bodies, as well as particular body parts.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project

No doubt we have made progress since the early twentieth century. And while most of these accomplishments have materially improved our quality of life, we continue to expect more. Improved technology designed to make life more convenient has not given us more leisure and rest time. And more freedom to choose what we wear and how we appear, may have only increased anxiety and worry.


* Somehow I feel a bit better that my apartment is not Real Simple-worthy. There are piles of books and papers stacked up in the corners collecting dust. Our bathtub is developing a ring of soap and scum residue and I believe our sink is building a lovely layer of grime. Yes, I would like my home to be cleaner, but I’m just too damn lazy to do it myself or to nag my husband to do it. But now I can say something elitist like I’m intentionally being counter-cultural and protesting the absurd standards of hygiene in our society… or tell everyone that I’m saving the environment. But don’t we often discover that our practical decisions end up being political? We didn’t buy a car, because we’re cheap. We line-dry our clothing, because there was no room in our apartment for a dryer. We try to reduce our meat consumption, because I don’t like cooking meat…
** Did you see this study that asked households to rank appliances as luxury or necessity? Fascinating!

fashion victim

Before World War I, girls rarely mentioned their bodies (in their diaries) in terms of strategies for self-improvement or struggles for personal identity. Becoming a better person meant paying less attention to the self, giving more assistance to others, and putting more effort into instructive reading or lessons at school. When girls in the nineteenth century thought about ways to improve themselves, they almost always focused on their internal character and how it was reflected in outward behaviour.

In 1892, the personal agenda of an adolescent diarist read: “Resolved, not to talk about myself or feelings. To think before speaking. To work seriously. To be self restrained in conversation and actions. Not to let my thoughts wander. To be dignified. Interest myself more in others.”

A century later, in the 1990s, American girls think very differently. In a New Year’s resolution written in 1982, a girl wrote: “I will try to make myself better in any way I possibly can with the help of my budget and baby-sitting money. I will lose weight, get new lenses, already got new haircut, good makeup, new clothes and accessories.” This concise declaration clearly captures how girls feel about themselves in the contemporary world. Like many adults in American society, girls today are concerned with the shape and appearance of their bodies as a primary expression of their individual identity.

~ Joan Jacobs Brumberg in The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls

Not to suggest that life was better back in the nineteenth century, but merely to point out that we really do follow the fashions of our time. And when it appears that we have the greatest abundance of choice, we are often less free than we think we are.

the chief end of man...*

Man is dominated by the making of money, by acquisition as the ultimate purpose of his life. Economic acquisition is no longer subordinated to man as the means for satisfaction of his materials needs.

~ Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

In the words of the English historian E. P. Thompson, time became “currency: it is not passed but spent.” As employers consolidated control over their workforces, the day was increasingly split into two kinds of time: “owners’ time, the time of work”; and “their own time, a time (in theory) for leisure.’ Eventually, workers came to perceive time, not as the milieu in which they lived their life, but ‘as an objective force within which [they] were imprisoned.'”

~ Juliet Schor in The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure

By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return.

(The source of the last passage should be fairly self-evident. And in case there is any confusion, it is not from Philip Pullman's Golden Compass)


*and a different sort of iron cage.

I'm yellow!

and I like yellow butterflies

I have neglected this blog. I suffer from on average month-long writer’s block and this recent one has lasted longer than usual. Perhaps I’ve been distracted by more immediate things—work, house-buying ambivalence, obsessive knitting and hemming my ten gazillion skirts that are too long and hit me at the unflattering mid-calf length. Garbage in garbage out, so I suppose I can complain about nonprofit bureaucracy or ramble at length about the lengths of my dresses, but I won’t put you through that torture. That’s reserved for my husband (who is quite wonderful in case you were wondering).

Today I stumbled upon the Circle Ventures (somehow related to Circle of Hope church) blog post on white guilt concerning this history of the United States with regards to African Americans. It reminded me of how foreign America’s history is to me—the American Revolution, the westward expansion, the Civil War, the Great Depression, WWII, the Vietnam war – all this could be the history of another country. The history of my “nation” is a jumble of Communist and Cultural Revolution stories, the fall of the Berlin wall via our TV set in British Columbia (mildly upsetting because I wasn’t allowed to watch cartoons), Quebec separatism and a president south of the border notable for his extracurricular engagements. When I watch British or American period movies, I might as well be watching a movie about Sri Lanka, or Chile or Malawi.

My ethnicity, my family culture, whatever convenient label you might want to use, pops up in surprising but subtle ways. My husband and I have a now-resolved dispute about the “magic realism” in Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (one of my favourite books by the way…), most notably the yellow butterflies that follow around a character in the novel. These yellow butterflies offend my husband’s rational, INTJ sensibilities! For him, they are excessive ornamental flourishes because insufficient information is given to determine what they might mean or symbolize. And I know of a few others who feel the same way. But for me, it completely makes sense that this magic is embedded in the way of narrating a story or of seeing reality and no explanation is needed. While my family did not subscribe to Chinese folk stories, my mother practiced Chinese medicine. In the world where I grew up, sticking needles in a person’s face can relieve paralysis, too much “yang” in my system caused my colds and feeling one’s pulse could discern temperaments and long-term illnesses. And for the most part, I hold that all of this is true. Not true in the Western, rational, scientific sense, but true in another sense. We believe in truths in different ways. And so the fact that the yellow butterflies in the Marquez’s novel didn’t mean anything per se, never bothered me, because it corresponded with my cultural hybrid way of seeing (I can’t believe I just used the word hybrid...).

It’s funny how I’ve come to embrace my Chinese-ness recently, as I generally dislike acknowledging my ethnic background. I’ll smile if someone asks me about China, but the moment someone says something along the lines of: “Maybe you do that because you’re Chinese”, the smile becomes forced and my irritation becomes palpable. I will stiffen even more if someone says something like “You need to understand how being Chinese impacts who you are.”

This annoyance may stem from reading far too many “What’s my identity” “I’m a hybrid” minority novels in college (some of which were actually excellent), but it is primarily a strong reaction against the expectation that I must understand who I am in the context of my ethnicity. White people are not confined to conceive of their identities in terms of their ethnicity, then why must ethnicity be my starting point? What if my race is not the defining characteristic of who I am? Why must we limit the driving factors of our formation to race, gender and class when there may be influences that matter far more?

But I’m lucky. Because though I might occasionally receive awkward comments and rude questions, I have not been significantly marginalized because of my ethnicity. Fortunately for me, the privileges of education and wealth were also handed down to me along with my skin colour at birth. And so I am here and not elsewhere. And this is who I am, not someone else. Mostly Canadian-American well-educated wealthy Christian but with bits of Chinese weaved into the holes.

~

There I did it! My crowning contribution to minority literature. New genre: Chinese Canadian American. CCA literature. Memoirs of my childhood amongst huckleberry bushes, chopsticks, francophones, and ice rinks. Maybe they will even have a CCA studies department!

the tyranny of private enterprise

History has always been one of the hardest subjects of me to understand. It’s either a muddle of events that I cannot understand or a simplistic narrative that I do not believe. Perhaps I relate to how Hayden White sees historical narrative: “translations of facts into fictions” as “the events are made into a story by the suppression or subordination of certain of them and highlighting of others”.

The motives and actions of presidents and prime ministers, of ambassadors and representatives. The handshakes made behind closed doors and the secret chain of command through bureaucractic institutions. What story can you spin out of the sparse paper trail of letters, memos and communiqués? Or out of Obama’s Blackberry log? What do you believe?

I have been making an effort to learn history better, since I have been, historically, rather ignorant of it, precisely because I couldn’t make sense of it. It wasn’t until I read two books, the Sociological Imagination by C. Wright Mills and funny enough, the children’s book , A History of US All the People that history finally began making sense.*

These books presented history or insisted that we study history from a more sociological standpoint—looking at the impact of historical events on the consciousness of individuals in society. I don’t really care about what country was a world power or what conferences and negotiations took place, but I am fascinated about how people living in that country felt amidst the whirlwind of headlines and changes. And recently, I’ve also become intrigued by what history has to say about various philosophical questions: How do you reconcile order and liberty? Equality and freedom? Justice and law?

This newfound fascination came as a result of a book recommended to me by my husband, called Commager on Tocqueville (one of the benefits of marriage is that you get more books and if you’re lucky, your husband has similar tastes to yours). Despite a somewhat self-preoccupied and unenticing title, the book is excellent. Commager assesses American history in the last century through the set of questions raised by Alexis de Tocqueville, the famous French aristocrat who wrote about America in Democracy in America (who I vaguely recall having to read in my US AP History class). Tocqueville primarily was concerned with democracy – especially the tensions raised between liberty, order and equality. In Commager’s words:

Would democratic majorities destroy liberty? Would centralization of power, which democracy made almost inevitable, prove incompatible with liberty? Would individualism—so ruthlessly being exercised on the vast North American continent- be compatible with either democracy or with liberty? And what of justice? There can be no liberty without justice and no justice without order. Can individualism tolerate order? Can democracy be trusted to safeguard justice?

Published in 1993, Commager’s conclusions still speak relevantly to what is happening today:

... in the interaction between two forces that (Tocqueville) himself thought the most powerful: majority rule and individualism. He was fearful that majoritarianism would take over the surrender to its natural propensity for tyranny with catastrophic consequences. In that event, it was not the majority that imposed its will on desperate minorities, but the spirit of individualism and private enterprise that permeated majorities and persuaded or seduced them into supporting even the most extreme manifestations of private enterprise. The danger today is no more from majority tyranny than it was in the 1930s when Tocqueville first sounded the alarm. It is rather in that excess of virtue of individualism that we now call private enterprise, but which is no longer private but public, and which, for that matter, is no longer very enterprising. The operation of military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific complex is an example of this. This group or complex does not constitute a majority, but it appears to represent a majority. And to speak for it, it does not formally exercise what we call tyranny, and as for all its triumphs and conquests, these have been brought about legal means and are not therefore tyrannical. But its character and conduct takes on more and more the character of tyranny. In all this, Tocqueville’s fears may yet be vindicated.

I wonder how history will write this past year—the demise of banking as we know it, the economic crisis, the first black president, the new uneasy alliance between banks and government.... What is happening? What does it mean? And how does all of this make us feel? Do we feel powerless as each company announces its own round of layoffs? Do we feel hopeful because there is now a president who seems to be intelligent and concerned about the people and because we may be able to rebuild new and better institutions? Or do we feel angry, ready to charge forth with our pitchforks and flames, because this military-industrial-financial-labor-academic-scientific-governmental complex has failed to demonstrate that it knows what it is doing, though it has justified its privilege and power on that very basis?



*So I am attempting to link to Goodreads more often, rather than Amazon. After all my ranting and railing about large corporations and all my lamenting about the demise of small bookstores, I really should stop giving Amazon free advertising. At the very least, I should sell out and have them pay me.
** For a progressive/liberal reading of American history, I recommend Commager on Tocqueville over Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States of America. This post was originally intended as a rant against Howard Zinn, but I decided to write something more positive instead…

America's welfare state

“the species of oppression by which democratic nations are menaced is unlike anything which ever before existed in the world… multitude of men… incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives…”

“That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild… It seeks on the contrary to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of happiness: it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances – what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking all the trouble of living… It does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”

~ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 1835

“…everyone wants to be free; everyone wants to eat… Everyone does indeed want to be free: free from bureaucratic control, free from burdensome taxation, free to exercise and enlarge the area of private enterprise. Everyone does indeed want to eat: the poor want welfare, the aged want security, the ill and the handicapped want medical care, parents want education for their children, consumers want protection.. The rich, too, want to be fed. They believe in private enterprise and delude themselves that corporations are somehow private rather than the product of very special privileges granted by the state and to be enforced by the state… When coal miners are in trouble they recommend government takeover. When railroads and airlines are in trouble they persuade the government to subsidize them, at least the bankrupt ones… We have developed not only a welfare state with all of its bureaucracy for the poor, but a welfare state for corporations and business interests as well. Clearly the most completely socialized ingredient in our economy is not the poor who are on welfare, but the complex that President Eisenhower first publicly identified as the military-industrial, which we can now see embraces as well labor, banking, the scientific community, and the academy. If these want governmental protection and aid, as clearly they do, they must take for granted big government, big bureaucracy and centralization. Those who yearn to diminish the powers of government must learn to lower their expectations from government, to restrain their demands on nature, to temper their insistence on endless growth and progress that is almost entirely material.”

~ Henry Steele Commager, Commager on Tocqueville, 1993

*I’m really scraping as far as blog posts are. I just can’t bring myself to write anything. I did, however, like my husband, cave in and start a twitter account. I have yet to determine whether or not I will update it regularly or whether or not I like the whole affair. It feels all a bit too suspiciously trendy to me, but perhaps 150 character posts will be more palatable to my creative tendencies. It also fondly reminds me of those good old AIM profiles and away messages I used to check. I guess Twitter is its syndicated version.

the inflection is near

I feel like I haven't posted anything substantial here in awhile. In any case, Thomas Friedman wrote an excellent Op-Ed in the New York Times about this recession marking an inflection point in the way that we think about the economy. (I suspect that you've already read it since it's currently Number 1 on the popularity list for "Most emailed"). Perhaps in the future, we will no longer measure the health of the economy in terms of growth, but rather in terms of flow (sustainability and reproduction). Friedman has a way of finding witty little catchphrases and analogies to describe current events, which for some reason I find annoying, despite the fact that they are generally intelligent and helpful in explaining the matter at hand. Perhaps I am jealous :P

In any case, now that I am done rambling, here are some notable excerpts from the article:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,” he wrote me. “No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.” We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks.

opium of the masses

Whenever we talk about money, we always end up asking, How should we organize the economy? –or even, What economic system should I support? “At the moment,” we explain, “I may not be using money the way I should, but when the new system (whatever it may be) is instituted, when the general money problem is solved, I in turn will become just.”

Thus we subordinate moral and individual problems to the collective problem, to the total economic system. If a man is a thief, it is not his fault; his economic conditions were such that he could be nothing else. Let us beware. If we accept this excuse on behalf of a poor person, we must accept it for everyone. Both the capitalist who exploits workers and the farmer who dabbles in the black market are also involved in impersonal economic conditions which leave them no options. As soon as we accept the supremacy of global concerns and of the system, as soon as we agree that material conditions remove our freedom to choose, we absolve all individuals of all responsibility for their use of money.

…

… human nature (with its lust for money) is corrupting the system. And that is why it is horribly wrong to believe that the problem of money can be solved by a system. It is horribly wrong thus to cheat man’s hopes and thirst for virtue and honesty. “You want justice? Then establish my system.” This is the error of all committed economists and others who think they can solve the problem without considering human nature.

But it is more than an error: it is also hypocrisy and cowardice. For then I ultimately ask no more than to believe the system-builder. It is so convenient. I don’t have to think about what I do. I don’t have to try to use my money better, to covet less, to quit stealing. It’s not my fault. All I have to do is campaign for socialism or conservatism, and as soon as society’s problems are solved, I will be just and virtuous- effortlessly.

…

But all this activity is a justification for avoiding personal decision making. My money? My work? My life? I don’t have to worry about them because I am involved in such-and-such a movement which will take care of all that for everyone once it comes to power.

~ excerpts from Jacques Ellul's Money and Power

Sometimes you just stumble upon the right book at the right time. Providential perhaps?

chariots and horses

Today’s headlines worried me. Growing unemployment. Risk of deflation. As Matt and I consider buying a house this spring, the prospect of losing a job or of deflation are troubling. Suddenly the solid ground of good education, strong work ethic and prudent financial management seems shaky. And with that comes the hope that this economic recession will humble us and remind us where our provision truly comes from.