by Lael Ewy
The assessment was born of mass alienation. If you know what you’re doing, if you know your craft, your art, your field of study, you know if you’re doing well or not. Assessment makes no sense outside of education or an industrial culture in which those actually invested and involved in the process of making and doing don’t “need” to have a complete understanding, or even a basic understanding, of that process or its final result.
As Matthew B. Crawford has pointed out, there is an ethic of doing that comes from an intimate knowledge of the tools and the techniques of the job. It is to this ethos that I suggest we return.
When the company owns your labor, it also owns your interest in that labor, in the quality of the work and the values invested in the process. Thus “labor” becomes a commodity outside of the actual job instead of integral to the task. Marx understood this as a foundational principle, but few collectivist schemes have been able to reinvest it in the activities of the people. That is because it is inherent not to capitalism as Marx suggested but to industrialism: large scale production separates work from product and expertise from process. It creates fictive worlds in which things are created and services delivered outside of the scale of individual agency: we can see how we fit the nut to the bolt, but we can’t see how the machine really works, where the resources are gathered, how the marketing gets made.
Those forms of collectivism that have succeeded have done so within the confines of traditional and often religiously-bound communities, such as the Hutterites, whose faith calls them to the tasks but whose understanding of the roles of each within the whole keeps them tied together and satisfied. It feels good to do good work. It feels good to see how what you do is beneficial to those you count your own.
Even quite simple assembly-line tasks can be reinfused with the notions of ownership and craft, and this is where management can play a role, but managers themselves must also become reinvested in their own roles. No matter what, the larger understanding of how one’s actions affect the overall task must not merely be allowed but encouraged. Part of the task of the company must be the continual education of its employees, much of which must happen by the employees for each other.
Because the labor of the worker is the property of the company, intellectual and ethical investment with the product or service must also be accompanied by literal investment in the company; labor must also mean an actual share in the enterprise. Too long have executives purposefully and often maliciously enhanced the alienation of the laborer by denying her her share in the overall endeavor. It is easier, after all, to get rid of a worker who has been convinced, and who has convinced herself, that her time there is worth only her time and not her hopes, much less her heart and sweat and soul.
Too many companies are like the current Hawker-Beech in Wichita, which went from a family-run airplane company to one that no one seems to really own, no matter one’s position within it or the value of one’s stock. So distanced are the principals from the task that the product line has stagnated, the traditions fallen fallow, the executives baffled when their latest ploys have failed.
When the worker is not merely entitled to stop the line when she sees a flaw float by but feels an urgent need, when she anticipates how that flaw will happen given the conditions, the resources, the processes in place, then assessments will be redundant and production again a worthwhile endeavor: an act of creation and not a mere set of actions within a set of procedures set against the stone hearts of an industry’s distant and disinterested captains.
By EW Wilder
Every 4th of July I get this feeling: patriotic stirrings combined with irritation and a little bit o’ malaise.
You see, for all there is to be proud of in this experiment in self-government, there’s also a lot to regret, many ways in which it’s a failure. More accurately, we’ve failed the nation, failed to live up to the promise that Jefferson so fervently thought we’d rise to, so insightfully worried we’d not be educated enough to pursue.
I feel this even more keenly schmoozing into a new election year, with the polls showing the popularity of candidates who are little more than what the Soviets would have called “useful idiots,” figures selected more for ideological loyalty than any kind of ability, wisdom, or smarts. I actually find it quite disturbing that I can completely eviscerate the arguments of even the politicians considered too dangerously intellectual to be elected. When middling minds like mine can out-think the smart ones, and the smart ones are rare, why are we surprised when things go so consistently wrong so much of the time?
As products of the Age of Reason, our much-worshiped “founding fathers” had in mind that The People, while themselves ill-educated and prone to folly, would, when given a chance to elect representatives, choose people who were smarter and wiser than they. This we have not done. Instead, we buy into the idea that “representative” means “somebody who represents how we actually think,” not “someone who will better represent our interests than we could.” We elect “just folks” with whom we’d like to have a beer, not those whose talents for leadership and forward-thinking are clearly beyond our own.
Perhaps it’s our narcissism, our myth of each being somehow individually capable of Taming the West, that leads us to this behavior. Perhaps it’s our own vast ignorance of what we do not know, what more there is to know.
For Jefferson, the latter might have been a more compelling argument. His tombstone reads: “Here was buried Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of American Independence, of the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia.” Nothing about the presidency is written there, but the founding of a university is. Take what you will of the good faith of his argument that he refused to free his slaves for fear that they would not be educated enough to conduct themselves well in a state of liberty, but the fact is he made that argument, and it applies to the rest of us as well.
By embracing liberty but not embracing education as a lifelong passion, as a continual pursuit, we make ourselves ignorant of what good leadership looks like, and we make ourselves incapable of the liberty our constitution guarantees and that our declaration helped secure. Doing this is the height of irresponsibility.
If you’re active in a political party, encourage those who are intellectually beyond you to run. If you’re considering an existing candidate, ask yourself if you really trust someone whose followers feel compelled to change Wikipedia to comply with her historical gaffes. If you’re thinking about what qualities you’d like to see in a candidate, don’t think of someone with whom you’d like to have a beer; think of someone from whom you’d like to take a class.
Above all, educate yourself genuinely, deeply. Close the clamshell of your laptop and go the library (yes, the public library), and check out the primary sources: don’t just read the Constitution, read Madison’s notes on the constitutional convention. Read the Federalist Papers. Read actual histories from real scholars and see where and why they disagree.
But don’t stop there: the fiction and poetry this nation has produced, the European philosophical underpinnings of our founding political thought, the contemporary concerns of our scholars and writers—all these inform what we know about who we are.
On this July 4th, make the pledge that you’ll live up to the promise this nation represents, the real pledge of allegiance, not to a flag, but “to which it stands,” the content, now, and not the form.
by E.W. Wilder
The American Left lost its way, and most of its persuasive power, when it gave up making strong moral judgments. This happened, probably, in the 1960s and ’70s when the Left’s ideal of tolerance came somehow to mean even tolerance of positions that were antithetical to tolerance. The Left, by the 1980s, was being accused of censoring Right-wing speech simply because the Left had traditionally spoken out against it. The Left’s attempt to make its language more culturally sensitive, so-called “political correctness,” was used by the Right to shore up its case: these people are hypocrites, conservatives said; they preach tolerance but will not tolerate speech they find offensive.
Those on the Left didn’t have a ready answer. In the name of radical pluralism, they surmised, the voice of the Right must be heard without judgment.
The problem with this position was that it made the Left look weak and ineffective, even absurd. This allowed intellectual lightweights like Rush Limbaugh to float in and kick the nearly inert body of American progressivism almost to death. I say almost to death because a few mildly liberal politicians like Barack Obama are still able to eloquently if not forcefully articulate progressive positions. They lack credibility, though, because they are unable or unwilling to act on their rhetoric, making that rhetoric seem even more useless and empty.
Most of this mess could be sorted out if the Left were to rediscover its moral voice. In the past, the progressive voice in America has been tied to humanism, both secular and religious. Even though we remember him only as failing to end the teaching of evolution, William Jennings Bryan was a powerful force for progressive change, deeply concerned about issues of social justice backed up by a deeply felt Christian humanism. In fact, the major worry about Darwinism during Bryan’s time was that it denied the human exceptionalism that kept people moral: without the ability to perfect oneself, to be more like God, human beings could not become the moral beings they needed to be in order for a more just and equitable society to exist. This strong strain of American Christian progressive humanism managed to survive WW2 and saw its apogee in the post-war Civil Rights movement, the most successful and effective parts of which were practical applications of Jesus’s ideas about non-violence.
Secular progressivism also developed its own strong voice—one that can be found everywhere from the UN Declaration of Human Rights to mid-20th Century Existentialism. The secular brand is rooted not in the notion that we must be moral to reflect that we are created as an image of God or that we must be moral because we will be eternally judged. Instead, secular progressive humanism postulates that human life is worthwhile because it is the only thing we have; we have developed culture and civilization to make things better for ourselves.
I contend that what distinguishes us as a species is the ability to intentionally build societies and that those societies exist to help human beings survive, to improve the lot of humans, not to degrade it. Culture in this sense is a continually adaptive adaptation, but one that requires us to always mind its purposes, since the tools of culture can also lead to inequality, injustice, war, slavery, genocide.
We have a felt sense of this need for bettering ourselves. People yearn for freedom, agency, safety, connection. People feel slighted when they are not dealt with equitably, and people despair when they see no hope, no opportunity, when they feel no control over their directions and fates. This felt sense goes deep; it provides the motivation for revolution and reform, for compassion and for resistance. We may be able to intellectualize injustice, but when we suffer under it, it makes our lives worse. Because of this felt sense, we need not rely on a single religious system to inform our culture, but we’d still do well to acknowledge the ways the various constituent faiths inform how we deal with the social problems that lead us to it. We need not even universalize a particular set of values to deal with them; it is enough to ask whether or not they are working to give the people in a society a shot at living without undue suffering. Further, we do have good, empirical evidence that people who live in more egalitarian societies live longer and report happier lives.
As it appears in our current culture, in an extreme form, American conservatism advocates inequality and economic uncertainty for the vast majority. It promotes a system that denies basic health care to millions of people, promotes stress and overwork for those who do have jobs, and protects a privileged few at the expense of the underprivileged masses. To live in the nation the American conservative movement has created is, for most people, to live shorter, poorer, less happy lives than the ones that our material prosperity should be able to support.
It is not unfair to judge the conservative movement as a bad thing for America. It is not censorship to speak out against it; speaking out is merely practicing the same right to speak freely that the conservatives claim not just for themselves but for the corporations they run. In fact, speaking out is the means we have of being intentional about what we want as a society. The only way we can demonstrate how things can be better is to show how bad they are now and how wrong-headed are the plans of those who would make things more difficult. We are, in fact, duty bound to expose injustice and inequality if we want our society to live up to its purpose and its promise.
This is exactly what the American Left should do. In doing so, it should make peace with progressives of faith. It does not matter why you want to dignify human existence; it just matters that you do. It should articulate, clearly and forcefully and without apology why the ideas of the Right are mean-spirited, degrading, unjust, and wrong. The Left should regain its moral voice and let it ring loud.
Perhaps the relative lack of seeable possibilities is part of what triggers/formulates ways of thinking that we associate with psychiatric diagnosis. This would help explain why we see someone like Jared Loughner as “deranged” or a “wackjob.” As humans we wish to make sense of our world in order to help us understand our possible roles within it. When we do not see those possibilities, we order our worldview in such a way that allows us to cope with what fundamentally doesn’t make sense: a world that does not recognize the obvious fact of our existence.
Our conclusions regarding this attempt to explain ourselves sometimes influence our actions; they generally influence our beliefs.
If so, this explanation reinforces the notion that individual agency is a fundamental part of being human and that successful cultures enhance and are enhanced by the agency of individuals within them. In some sense, and to rediscover an old idea from a new pathway, Jared Loughner is a manifestation of the overall illness of our culture. Because we expect a certain amount of individual control in our culture, we find it difficult to excuse his actions, but we are not yet prepared to admit that we have collectively failed to turn the agency of all individuals into possibility and thereby honor it and his humanity
–Lael Ewy
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