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Rants and counter-rants.

A management crisis

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At the university where I used to work, there was a change in management not too long ago.  The old president left abruptly, without explanation, under a cloud.  The official reasons, time for a change, etc., left us thinking it had to do with either money or sex, possibly both.  In any case, an opportunity presented itself for a change of direction, since our erstwhile leader had championed a thoroughly capitalist model, which included, not surprisingly, lots of money for himself.  And so, with great fanfare, a search was begun for a new leader and, presumably, a new direction.

Well, we got the new leader.  In the wisdom of the Trustees, we also got two or three entirely new six-figure salaried administrative positions.  One of them was for a local contender for president who had failed to be selected; he was given a newly created job as, well, no one really knew what, except that he now made the second highest salary in the university.  All in all, when the dust settled, the ten highest paid people in the university collectively pulled down about$2.5 million, in a university with just about 5,000 students on the home campus.  True, there are numerous outposts worldwide, but they are generally self supporting.  We know this because if they are not, they are unceremoniously axed.

I suppose this would be fine, except for the fact that over 80% of the faculty at this university are adjunct, or, officially, part time.  That means extremely low wages.  An adjunct professor teaching ten courses per year can barely pull down $25,000.  You will note that this is hardly part time, as it is rather a heavy teaching load even for regular, tenure track professors.  It is also less than an average full time hourly employee at Walmart gets, and because it is officially part time, there is no retirement package, no health care, no benefits of any kind.  Even at Walmart, they get to buy into a health care program; not here.  Pressed for an explanation of how such a teaching load can be considered part time, the administration has proposed cracking down on the number of courses an adjunct can teach by simply hiring more of them; how thoughtful.  One adjunct teaching ten courses will cost exactly the same as ten adjuncts teaching one course each, since no training is required, and no benefits are given.  The net result will be more adjuncts teaching at multiple institutions in the city, more “freeway flyers,” as they’re called.  The regular full-time faculty only pay lip service to reforms, as they are worried about getting shipped out themselves, at least the ones who don’t consider themselves superior for having landed the meager allotment of full-time jobs.

This situation might seem beyond the interest of the average American workers, who have problems of their own, and who tend to think teaching isn’t real work anyway.  They would be wrong, because they are, indeed, in the exact same situation themselves: a mentality that decrees that when times are tough, increase management compensation and lay off or decrease the compensation  of the people who actually produce.  It’s the arrogance of the “job creators.”  How did we allow things to come to this?

It goes full circle back to the university.  At our institution, the one school where faculty are remunerated at anything like their value is the business school; it is also, not coincidentally, the biggest money maker.  Yet, as far as I know, there is not one single course offered in how to make anything, or even how to increase the efficiency of making anything, and the same applies to services.  What do they teach, then?

They teach people how to manipulate money, along with major doses of how important they are.  A couple of decades ago, managers were complaining that people coming out of business schools with MBAs didn’t know anything about how to actually produce anything of value.  Well, those old managers are gone, and only the B-school trained golden boys are left, and they make sure they get the lion’s share of the money.  In turn, the revolving door between business and the academy is well oiled and functioning smoothly.

But surely, you say, they’re creating jobs, aren’t they?  Isn’t that how capitalism works?  Well, actually, they’ve got it completely backwards.

Capital does not create jobs, demand creates jobs.  It follows that it’s not capitalists who are job creators, but consumers.  The role of capitalists is to facilitate the meeting of demand and supply.  Even in those cases where apparently new demand is created, it fills some need in society at large, and it still needs consumers to actualize the demand.

But isn’t the job of business to maximize profits?  Well, yes, as far as it goes.  It’s true that the job of business is to maximize profits, but it’s not the job of society.  The job of society is to ensure the maximum welfare of its members.  But didn’t Adam Smith teach us that unconstrained commerce will benefit the most of us?  Again, not exactly.  He did champion the free market, but he also warned that businessmen will collude for their own benefit if left to themselves, effectively trying to control the market instead of allowing it free operation.  True, he despaired of government effectively stopping such collusion.  But he was writing at the end of the 18th century, in a commercial climate that was far different from that today, and with no democratic governments anywhere in the world.  The Wealth of Nations is not a sacred text in any case, and we are as free to disagree with it as with any other.

Smith did get one thing right, though: commerce depends on the consumer, and not vice-versa.

Bottom line, as they like to say: if consumers are strapped for cash, the capitalists will eventually have no money to manipulate.  I know of no B-school course where that is taught.

The curmudgeon’s retort

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I quit Facebook a couple of years ago; I decided I just wasn’t cut out for it.  I suffer from the inability to let egregious errors slide, especially when the topic is an important one.  It’s not that I think I’m always right; I’m open to correction with a good argument.  Unfortunately, that’s not a response I got very often.  Most of the time, the responses were couched in personal terms: I was a troll, I was being too picky, or, in one case, I was making a ridiculous fool of myself for disagreeing.

Maybe they’re right.  I’ve had similar reactions on Twitter, although I’ve learned to just withdraw at the first sign of it.  What I find oddly disturbing, though, is how often a simple disagreement is characterized as a lack of respect.  Have we really come to the point where we think it’s disrespectful to openly disagree?

Social media seem to be seen as places where anyone gets to express their opinion, no matter how misinformed, or, indeed, insulting, without the fear of being exposed to contradiction.  If I don’t think something you’ve posted is correct, fine; I get to post my own opinion, but not in response to yours.  As a result, we, as a people, can happily continue shouting at each other without engaging in any meaningful discussion.

Nothing wrong with this, where mere opinion is concerned, I suppose, but the line between opinion and verifiable fact has all but disappeared in our discourse.  And that’s very dangerous in a democracy, because it leaves us open to all kinds of manipulation.  Not the least of which is the illusion that the majority of the nation feels exactly as we do on all the issues of importance, because we never allow ourselves to hear anything different.  As a result, when an election goes astray from what we perceive as the inevitable result, we’re convinced it’s because of corruption, or worse, a conspiracy.  And who’s to tell us otherwise?

If there’s a single word to describe this trend it’s this: childish. It goes along with our fascination  with the simple black/white dichotomies of the comic-book movies we’re inundated with, and “extreme” sports, also straight out of the comics.  Are we doomed to continue this prolonged adolescence forever?

Living in the present

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In these faux-buddhist  times, it’s become a true cultural meme: “Live in the present!”

It’s the fault of the beats, really, Kerouac especially, giving a Zen paint job to all the self-indulgent behavior they could muster, which was substantial.  Now we get Zen home decorating, Zen cuisine, Zen motorcycling, for Christ’s sake.  But the worst of all of it is the live-in-the-present motif, which seems to be interpreted, as often as not, as licence to reject responsibility.  You can’t fault Zen itself, which is in reality all about accepting responsibility.  Far from the hedonism spawned by everyone living “in the moment,” Zen actually teaches that desire, which motivates all this extremity, is something that we could all do without.

But let’s look at the idea of living in the present itself.  Can such a thing be done?

Not a chance.  First of all, from a purely physical point of view, it’s impossible, because by the time any information reaches our senses, it is already in the past, and from there it still takes time for us to process that information and become conscious of it.  It may only be microseconds, but it’s not the present.

But maybe we’re talking about the present as it relates to sense data already processed, and ready for use.  In this case, it doesn’t matter that the events themselves are in the past; the present we’re talking about refers to the interior present.  Can’t we live in that?

Good luck.  Suppose some light reflected from a moving bus enters your eyes and is processed.  Just to identify that light pattern as a bus requires you to use information stored in your memory from a lifetime of observation.  You’re stuck in the past.  Not only that, but if the bus happens to be moving toward you, you had better be thinking of the future, or you soon won’t have any.

You could say this is pointless quibbling, that what is meant by the present in this case includes events and decisions in the immediate temporal vicinity.  Also, you get to take advantage of all you have learned in your life in interpreting the present.  And, of course, you get to consider the immediate future.  Enough to stay alive, at least.  Okay, enough to have a reasonably secure life.

Trouble is, when you start expanding the bubble around the present to include what you need for survival, you immediately run into problems with what that means.  In the end, for most people, that seems to involve cars, cell phones, huge televisions, and the sources of money to pay for all that.  Next thing you know, living in the moment just means doing what you want, and to hell with the consequences, for yourself, yes, but more often the consequences for others.

Blap! Just like that, you’ve taken a concept out of Zen and turned it completely around to mean its opposite.

This sort of thing is not unusual where religion is concerned.  Lots of airy contemplation and metaphysical nuance at the top, but by the time you get down to the ground zero believer, it’s boiled down to a list of rules and regulations.  We are, of course, familiar with this for the Abrahamic religions.  God knows that what the nuns taught us at St. Philip Neri School all those years ago had little to do with the rarified theology debated at Notre Dame and the corridors of the Vatican.  But with Buddhism, somehow, we all think we get it.

I don’t consider myself a Buddhist; I don’t believe in any religion, actually.  I was enchanted by it for a time in my youth, however.  I read all of the Western Zen writers, like Alan Watts, and moved on to the works of D. T. Suzuki and what other Japanese writers I could find in translation.  This sparked an interest in Buddhism in general, and so I was delighted when I met a young man from Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), who was an ardent Theravada Buddhist.  Theravada is the closest thing in Buddhism to orthodoxy, so I jumped at the chance to get at the roots of it all.  My friend was delighted in my interest in his religion, and gave me a handful of books and pamphlets.  To my dismay, what I found was the same old list of things to do and things not to do.  It could easily have passed for my old grade school catechism with a few minor changes in terminology.

What happened to all that cool Zen stuff about letting go and being in the moment?  I later learned that, even in Zen, the practice of it was far different from the lofty metaphysics, involving more sitting in wretched discomfort (for someone raised to sit in chairs), and getting whacked with a stick than any of that marvy freedom I’d been reading about.  My horrible nuns, it seems, had been Zen masters all along!

By the time any religion percolates down to the great unwashed (us), it’s all about rules and regulations, sprinkled with more or less of magical ritual.  I think of the St. Christopher statues in the cars of my youth, or the prayers rated with the precise number of days off from Purgatory their recitation would get you, or how, if you took communion on nine consecutive first Fridays of the month, you were guaranteed salvation.  Interesting that I never made it past five!

Buddhism is no different.  Think of the prayer flags of Tibet, or the redemptive power of reciting “Namu Amida Butsu” over and over in the Japanese Pure Land school of Buddhism.

I must say we’ve been pretty clever in our cooption of Buddhism in Western culture, though.  We’ve taken some of the lofty metaphysics of a religion we’ve no intention of following seriously, stripped it of any inconveniences, reinterpreted it to suit ourselves, and imagine ourselves to be marvelously spiritual.

Sweet!

The deep state

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A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly by Conor Friedersdorf  brings up the question of the deep state, and whether it has overwhelmed our elected state, the one you and I see as the government.  Briefly, the deep state is a term borrowed from Turkish politics, and denotes a secret cabal that actually runs things under the cover of the elected state, which is seen to be ineffectual in decisions that really matter.  Applied to the United States, it refers to the institutions that continue intact, regardless of changes in the elected government and whomever they may appoint as titular heads.  These institutions include the military, all the various agencies, and the bureaucracy in general.  In its most sinister interpretation, beloved of conspiracy theorists, it is the deep state that really runs things, elected government amounting only to window dressing, a sop to keep the ignorant masses deluded.  In its most benign interpretation, the deep state simply represents the necessary continuity in government, provided by career specialists, advising elected officials on finer points of a technical nature.

It’s not hard to see that there’s a continuum there; the reality can run anywhere between the two extremes.  It can even vary, depending on the strength and leadership of the individuals in the elected government at any given time, on any given policy.  It’s hard to believe in the most sinister extreme, because it would mean that everyone who has successfully run for high office is in on the conspiracy, is too stupid to see what’s going on, or has been intimidated into silence.  The many instances of institututional displeasure with presidential policy would also have to have been staged, with none of us the wiser.  All it would take to expose a conspiracy on this order would be one individual.  We see already what Snowden has been able to do on a much lower level.  Unless, of course, that’s been staged as well.  If so, Snowden wins the Oscar hands down.

In his article, Friedersdorf’s alarm concerns the extent the military deep state has increased its power, based on some comments in Robert Gates’ recently published memoir:

…I can’t help but marvel at the casual manner in which this former secretary of defense observes that the military did take control of the policy process with regard to Afghanistan, and implies that they had the capacity to “run away with” the policy process.

This is in regard to the surge, strongly endorsed by the commanders in the field.  He goes on to question why Obama is suggesting changes in NSA eavesdropping, instead of simply ordering them.

I don’t see it, frankly.  Obama clearly had the option to go ahead with the surge or not.  What is it that supposedly would have happened had he declined?  An assassination?  Indeed, what would happen if he ordered the changes he suggests in NSA policy?  It is possible the NSA would simply continue clandestinely, and clamp down on leaks; it’s hard to imagine, though, a clandestine surge in Afghanistan.  Most tellingly, though, there are just too many differences in policy from one administration to another to led credence the worst of the fears, in spite of Obama’s unexpected continuation of many Bush policies.

What do you think?

An open letter to God, Esq.

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Dear Sir (or Whatever),

As you know, I don’t usually write you open letters, but these days, things have piled up.

First off, why did you have to make my hard drive crash?  Don’t go all innocent; every day I hear people say how you’re in total control, and it’s all according to your plan, etc., etc.  Besides, don’t think I haven’t noticed that everything computer lately is in the cloud.  That’s where you live; hard to believe you’d allow a setup like that unbeknownst.  Sure, lots of people say it’s just the computer companies trying to get more and more control and money off their customers, but I can’t believe you’d let your space be used that way – doesn’t seem like you.  I am also aware I’ve been rude lately, maybe even blasphemous, but a hard drive crash seems a bit much.  How about just one of those migraines, wouldn’t that have been more appropriate?

And then there’s the matter of your people down here – you seriously need to get a grip on them.  They’re always yammering about peace and love, and the whole time they’ve got their hands around your throat and in your pocket.  I like the new guy, Frank, at the Vatican, but frankly, I’m worried for him.  I saw what happened to John Paul I.  Was that you, or some of your Vatican enforcers?  Either way, things seem out of control, and not just in your Mideast franchises.  Here in the US, your people have gotten really crazy.  Look, I know that those you would destroy, you first drive mad, but did you ever consider that the rest of us have to live through that, too?  Didn’t you learn anything from that whole Job experience?

And the weather.  Don’t get me started on the weather.  Yes, we’ve screwed it up ourselves, but, again, it’s your people who have worked the hardest to keep us from fixing things.  We’ve got preachers down here positively gloating about Tribulations and Rapture and what-not.  If you’re not coming back right away, I’d just as soon you fix the weather thing and leave us alone for awhile.  Don’t give me that business that you can’t do anything about it; people ask you all the time to reverse those laws you set up so long ago, just so they can win a big football game, for Christ’s sake.  You could just wave your hand, or whatever it is you’ve got, and Bob’s your uncle.

Well, I know Bob’s not really your uncle.  I won’t even ask you about that triangle thing you’ve got going with Jesus and the Holy Ghost.  Not my business really.

Sincerely,
You-know-who