THAT ELUSIVE FREE WILL
&
OUR NOTABLE RETREAT FROM INDIVIDUALISM
James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© October 23, 2019
We criticize all society when people are passive.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko, The Face Behind the Face (1987)
AUTHOR CHARLES D. HAYES writes:
For several days I’ve been thinking about The Meritocracy Trap: How America’s Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite, by Yale Law Professor Daniel Markovits. The book is just a different way of looking at an old problem. For me, it’s like perspective on steroids.
Markovits offers the very case that his subtitle suggests. I find his arguments mostly compelling and I take my change in perspective as evidence of how lethargic my conventional thinking can become over time. For example, no one can be against merit, merit is like sunshine, but in time the brightness can obscure the fact that merit has been overwritten and oversold having become the opposite of what was intended, as the rungs on the ladder of economic success are becoming fewer and much farther between.
Markovits argues that elite education is so much more capable of giving children of the rich a decisive economic advantage that in effect students from average public schools cannot compete, not to mention children from inner cities and rural communities. And even the intellectually gifted lack the connections to break the social barriers.
On page 268 he writes, “Meritocratic inequality is wrong on account of meritocracy itself—even and indeed especially when fully realized—and the concept of merit is the taproot of the wrong. What is conventionally called merit is actually an ideological conceit, constructed to launder a fundamentally unjust allocation of advantage. Meritocracy is merely the most recent instance of the iron law of oligarchy.”
Years ago, the focus was on the idle rich, these days they have been replaced by the working rich whom Markovits calls superordinate workers. These people have been subject to education and training from birth that is far superior to what is offered by public schooling and in many cases, it includes graduate school and many years of advanced schooling.
Page 26, “The elite’s massive investments in education succeed. The academic gap between rich and poor students now exceeds the gap between white and black students in 1954, the year in which the Supreme Court decided Brown v. Education. Economic inequality today produces greater educational inequality than American apartheid once did.”
The competition though for the number of jobs with stratospheric compensation is fierce as Markovits writes, “Meritocracy traps elites in an all-encompassing, never-ending struggle. Every colleague is a competitor. At every stage, the alternative to victory is elimination.” P35. I have friends facing this reality.
In effect, the working rich have become analogous to their own version of human capital in the flesh, stalked incessantly by the threat of being replaced by automation or someone with greater expertise. Now I have only noted a little of the arguments in this book. Digital automation is ratcheting up the pressure on rich and poor alike. We are in my view metaphorically at low tide in an algorithmically oriented future and high tide changes are coming.
My generation is going to be toast soon, most of us aren’t going to live to see the decimation of employment that’s going to leave an egregiously hollow middle class with respect to “good paying jobs,” but possible economic catastrophe aside that may change this—this unemployment reality is inevitable. No doubt there is still going to be lots of things that need to be done, the trick is being adequately compensated for doing them when one is simply a sidekick assistant to an app.
To compensate for what’s to come, we need a real makeover, a little bit of traditional tweaking is not going to cut it. The notion that we can’t really afford a just society is the con of the century. We can’t afford a deficit in the stratosphere so the superrich can have tax cuts either, but that’s what we’ve got.
I’ve seen several instances lately by both liberals and conservatives of characterizing Elizabeth Warren as being “uber-left.” When I consider what Warren describes as her political agenda, as difficult as it will be to achieve, what comes to mind is something closely akin to a just society. Assuming a just society is uber-left, in my view, is evidence that one has been uber-influenced by too much wingnut Kool-Aid disguised as meritocracy. That we are so far removed from a truly just society, is precisely why we wound up with the political angst that caused so many disillusioned people to take a chance on the orange imbecile in 2016.
If we retake the White House and the Senate and keep the House in 2020 and we don’t make profound economic changes, that dramatically increase our ability to cope with the oncoming effects of the digital technological tide of evolving algorithms , then 2024, or 2028 will likely be a repeat of 2016.
The stress on rich and poor alike is going to increase exponentially and we desperately need to acknowledge that our economic system is not more important, than the need for having an economic system in the first place. In other words, if we can’t agree to treat our citizens as ends in themselves, and not simply as a means to an end, it may actually be the end.
Politically, what I fear most is a clamoring for moderation, which results in a few feeble economic tweaks—as the mediocrity and coming up short of the goals that’s sure to follow does too little too late to address our growing inequality, except to increase the number of people wearing MAGA hats. With the worst economic inequality since the 1920s, we are too far out of kilter to expect that a few moderate changes are going to address the existential social threats, positioned like an iceberg dead ahead, if we don’t right the ship of state. Thoughts?
Charles D. Hayes
http://amazon.com/author/charlesdhayes
http://www.autodidactic.com/
http://www.septemberuniversity.org/
http://self-university.blogspot.com/
http://septemberuniversity.blogspot.com/
MY RESPONSE:
I read with interest these words of yours and know you believe them.
What happen to American individualism; to free will?
What happened is that they no longer exist. Oh, I hear background noise proclaiming that there is no such thing as “free will!”
Then what was going on when I resigned from Nalco Chemical Company in my mid-30s in the midst of a sparkling executive career with a wife and four pre-teen age children to support?
I write in my semi-autobiographical novel, DEVLIN, that the corporation controlled me and that the Roman Catholic Church owned me. I walked away from them both. The novel ends with Devlin leaving the church’s confessional with the priest asking:
“Don’t you want to know your penance?”
“Father, life is my penance.”
With that, Devlin left the confessional and the church, walked out into the clamorous cacophony of Michigan Avenue in downtown Chicago, looking for refuge in a good bookstore. He wondered if Brentano’s was opened at this late hour.
Devlin may have been out of South Africa, but now he was entering limbo, not the purgatory of the afterlife, but the real world of chaos in his fading youth and equally fading idealism, no longer employed while returning to the United States in a collapsing marriage and into an equally collapsing American economy of runaway inflation and unemployment. Meanwhile, his four children were going speedily through puberty without the guidance of a father who was about to retreat into Nowhere Land as Nowhere Man.
George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” wrote about his plight as fiction, but Devlin was entering that dystopia world as his reality. One of the blessings of life is its uncertainty and Devlin knew a lot about uncertainty and was destined to learn much more in the future.
* * *
Markovits writes about the collapse of “the middle class” while “devouring the elite.” That is precious. Since The Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt has established a welfare state national economy, and since WWII, Corporate America’s economy has enjoyed that same welfare status. Alas, the venerated “middle class” of which Markovits refers, does not exist. It is a mythology, but HYPE (Harvard, Yale, and Princeton Elite) does exist, managing always to take care of their own.
Professor Markowits apparently sees (I have not read his book) meritocracy (if his long title is any indication) falling into the hand of the precious few. Well, as I point out in my writing, since the 17th century, the distribution of wealth and privilege, translated “clout,” has not changed appreciably in these United States.
Moreover, as I have alluded to in a series of books on the burgeoning professional class, it is afraid of freedom; afraid of failure; afraid of not belonging; afraid of accountability. It wants the perks, the privileges and the status of clout without the messy concomitant responsibilities. It wants its cake and to be able to eat it, too.
There is a section in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel, “The Brother Karamazov” (1880), which on a totally different theme seems however quite apropos. Brother Ivan wants to recite a prose poem he has concocted to his brother Alyosha. It bears the title, “The Grand Inquisitor.” Ivan is a rationalist and atheist disaffected from both heaven and earth. Today, he might pass for an existentialist who is totally disgusted with life. Alyosha, on the other hand, embodies goodness, purpose and good with simple uncomplicated Christian faith.
The scene is Seville at the height of the Spanish Inquisition, on the day after an auto-da-fé in which 100 heretics have been burned. Christ appears. He is immediately recognized by everyone. The people fall to their knees and worship him. He brings a little girl back to life, and cures an old man of his blindness. Christ is no phantom or illusion. The old Cardinal Inquisitor appears. He too recognizes the Christ and has him arrested and imprisoned to face an auto-da-fé the next day.
That night the Grand Inquisitor goes to Christ’s cell, and berates him for what he has done, not only for reappearing but for what he has done to Man. Throughout the rebuking, while Christ remains silent, the Inquisitor charges Christ with making Man afraid of freedom:
No science will give them bread as long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, but never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of Man?
Read Book V of “The Brothers Karamazov” and draw your own conclusions. Christianity, specifically, Roman Catholicism and its autocratic style and governance is often a theme of Dostoyevsky’s with a particular animus towards Jesuits. Where the Russian novelist’s disposition registers with me is the current passivity of the professional class of workers who display an equivalent fear of freedom expressed by the Grand Inquisitor. Granted this is a rhetorical exercise by Dostoyevsky, but with relevance beyond the hypothetical.
* * *
Being reared in an Irish Roman Catholic family, I know a lot about passivity. I was told by relatives and family friends that the largest public high school in my area would not play me in basketball, “Because you are a Catholic boy,” yet I won three major letters and went to the State Regional Tournament as a freshman with the varsity team. I was told by my high school and university counselors that I would go nowhere in the business community with my arrogant personality, yet I rose to corporate executive status with two Fortune 500 companies with my land grant university education and proprietary ways.
Since a boy, I knew teachers and coaches, managers and executives who were motivated primarily by self-interest and looked to those who could realize that advantage for them. In both instances where I rose to executive status, I was threatened with being fired, given marginal accounts to service and to look for other employment after only two months on the job. In the other instance, I was told if I didn’t find a receptive clientele in a 4,000 personnel high-tech facility within six weeks I was toast.
Seeing it would make little difference, I was allowed to call on major competitive accounts. I was an R&D chemist with a new company with no training in sales. Yet within that first six weeks period, I sold the largest account in the district in many years by telling the plant superintendent I was there to “save his job.”
In the second occasion, the troops from hourly workers to engineers and program managers of this hi-tech facility soon discovered that I was a listener and not a teller; a learner and not a knower, and there to serve them, not act as a management ploy (all of this is covered in my books).
Finally, Professor Markovits and I see this problem from opposite ends of the telescope. Where he sees crisis, I see the wisdom of insecurity; where he sees classical disruption, I see another interaction of transition and transformation (again, I write about in my books). Indeed, when we see ourselves in the cross hairs with no escape, it is all about “us” and not at all about “them.” What follows is a segment of an essay on my blog.
No One Promises You a Living, No One Owes You a Job!
(https://peripateticphilosopher.blogspot.com – from Job Security in an Uncertain World – June 16, 2014)
In an uncertain world, where job security is vital to our self-interests, we often do all the wrong things to put ourselves back together again. Instead, we panic or become traumatized when made redundant; when our place of work closes; when the skills we have that once were in demand are no longer; when we are asked to take a 10, 20 or 30 percent cut in wages and benefits for the company’s survival and are barely making it on our current income. How could this happen to us when we’ve done nothing wrong? Turns out we’ve done a lot wrong, starting with waiting for someone to rescue us from our predicament and from ourselves.
Author Alan W. Watts sees us in such circumstances consumed with the Law of Anxiety looking at nature backwards:
"When we try to stay on the surface of the water, we sink; but when we try to sink we float; likewise, when we try desperately to save our job, we lose it."
Insecurity, Watts maintains, is the result of trying to be secure in a topsy-turvy world in which the normal order of things seems to be completely out of order. Everything is the reverse of common sense turned inside out and upside down. Suddenly, circumstances have forced us to be in charge of our lives and no one has prepared us for that ordeal, leastwise ourselves.
We think we live in a time of unusual insecurity. This is not the case at all. In the past hundred years, or throughout the past twentieth century, long established traditions have broken down continuously: the traditional family, social life, government, economic order, religious beliefs, values, ethics, and most notable of all, morality.
We have seen society stagger out of the Industrial Age only to be caught in a breathless dance in the Information Age, as manufacturing assembly lines have become a shadow of their former status. This watershed moment of the early 20th century was the backbone of the spirited working middle class, now replaced in the 21st century by quick minds and fingers on computer keyboards and automation all but obliterating the blue-collar working class.
There is no longer certainty. Actually, certainty has never existed. It is a myth perpetuated by a society deep in denial. Institutions deny reality by failing to pay attention stubbornly plowing ahead with antiquated grammar, high school and college curriculum; workers deny reality by failing to learn new skills; and companies deny reality by failing to press for change as the metamorphosis of the workforce has changed from blue-collar to college trained white collar.
Meanwhile, schools and universities continued to teach as if locked in 1945 nostalgia, even as private and public workplaces appear colorblind to the changing color of workers’ collars. If blame is the game, there is more than enough to go around, but that doesn’t get us off the dime.
For far too long the majority have been willing to put up with doing jobs that were boring and inconsequential, content to seek relief from tedium with periodic respites of drinking and partying, or going on shopping sprees with reckless abandon. Saving for a rainy day was not part of their DNA as the weather ahead was full of sunshine and promise with no dark clouds. Neither workers nor employers were looking ahead. It wasn’t anybody’s job!
We often refer to assembly line blue-collar working jobs as boring. Nothing can compare to the boredom of managers and administrators who spend 50 to 75 percent of their working day in inconsequential meetings. These meetings take away from meaningful work, and consistently have no purpose other than they are scheduled. Meeting for meeting’s sake is a corporate disease that has been institutionalized to produce a report that few are likely to read.
A survey of a monthly sales report went out to affiliates and manufacturing facilities in 13 countries involving some 14,000 employees. When asked, first, if they were aware of the report, second, if they had read it, and third, if it was useful, most confessed they didn’t even know the report existed. Yet, several people spent a good deal of time each month preparing it. Further inquiries found that the report was redundant as all the information was accessible on a daily basis electronically to these same operations.
Sad as this is, nothing is more egregious than performance appraisal meetings. These are designed to bring managers and workers together to assess performance and create a developmental roadmap for workers to build on their assets and to manage their liabilities. Any organization has 15 percent hard chargers, who manage themselves, 70 percent followers who are management dependent, and 15 percent who are foot draggers, or essentially beyond salvation.
In this one instance with which I am familiar, some 4,000 professional workers and 350 managers dedicated several hundred hours to the semi-annual performance appraisal process. Six workers were found to be declining in rating, and four were designated to need improvement. All others received automatic merit increases.
Given the normal bell curve breakdown of the working population, at least some 600, or 15 percent of the workforce should have been confronted with poor performance and treated accordingly. This cavalier disregard for the obvious is the endemic disease of the Culture of Comfort, which results in complacency in a company which can ultimately derail a company and eventually lead to economic implosion in the process.
Performance Appraisal did these workers no favors. That was 2005 and the company is only a shadow of its former self today. Hundreds of these workers, once well paid and comfortably employed in ostensibly lifetime employment jobs, are now out of work. Unfortunate as this is, no company promises workers a living or owes workers a job. That is socialism, and we know how that has worked on a grand scale.
In an ideal world, workers, engineers, administrators and managers would acknowledge the facts of the situation, and take charge. Unfortunately, today, they have little incentive to do so. Poor as they might perform, they choose to believe they have job security and that their income is not in jeopardy. Incredibly, in many cases, 20 percent of the workforce is doing 80 percent of the productive work, yet they register nary a single protest against the foot draggers. Nobody wants to make waves or be labeled a snitch when the tsunami has not yet hit the shore.
Alas, we don’t live in an ideal world. Workers have come to be dependent on the company to do for them what they should best do for themselves. When the company fails, workers derive satisfaction accusing the company of failing in its function, unwilling to see their tacit complicity in the act. It has amazed me when a company is struggling and needs the full support and cooperation of its workers so often they call in sick, or go on strike literally cutting off the hand that feeds them.
In the 1950s, after World War II, many General Motors’ blue-collar workers earned as much as practicing physicians in the medical field. I was often a guest in these Detroit workers’ homes, and played baseball with their kids during my summer visits to my uncle’s home who was a professor at the University of Detroit. In many households, both parents worked for GM, Ford or Chrysler, and spent as much as they made. It was evident in their fine brick homes with new automobiles in their driveways or garages. Their children expected to follow being employed by the “Big Three” automakers right out of high school with no break in the continuum.
Then came the late 1960s. , The Rising Sun of Japam, Inc. entered the auto market and cut deeply into these automakers’ customer base and profits, producing better, cheaper and smaller automobiles.
Tom Brokaw hosted an NBC television program in 1980 with the program’s crying complaint, “Japan Can! Why Can’t We?” Japan was using American technology that American manufacturers scoffed at as too costly and not necessary. What was the technology? It was statistical quality control with production workers operating in decision-making teams, identifying and solving chronic work related manufacturing problems.
Detroit’s economic hemorrhaging forty years later has still not stopped despite using these new quality control tools. Little note was made of the differing cultures of Japan and the United States: Japan is a group-think oriented society and the US is individualistic. Moreover, 80-90 percent of Japanese workers in the 1960s were blue-collar while only 20-30 percent of American workers were. The hysteria generated by NBC’s proclamation resulted in cosmetic change while the auto industry’s workers and managers continue to lock step to the mindset of 1945 when the US held all the cards and could do nothing wrong.
Brett Farve, former NFL quarterback for the Green Bay Packer has it about right: “We get paid for practicing all week, playing on Sunday should be for free.” Yet, one of the main complaints of professional athletes is the reverse of this: they hate practice, don’t think they need it, and believe they get paid for Sunday’s performance only.
Many workers in other professions display a similar attitude. They acquire a quality degree that speaks for itself. They think, why do we have to take orders from someone “less qualified” than we are? These professionally trained workers don’t want a job; they want a position, and an automatic pass to the good life and a satisfying career. After all, what other reason would they have for busting their butts in college for four, six or eight years? The reality of experience, of course, proves that they are likely to fall far short of the mark.
Thank you for tolerating my views knowing they probably differ somewhat with your own.
Always with respect, I remain
Jim
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