Homeless Human Resources of Peoples and Cultures

Unemployment is the result of a lack of democracy. A democratic society can never have unemployment. The greater the level of unemployment, the lower the level of democracy. 

Abdullah Öcalan speaks the truth in those lines.[1]

After all, people are not tools. That is, human beings are not implements that have been made to be employed in accomplishing some purpose. Persons are not like hammers and nails: they are not products that have been produced to serve as means for achieving ends beyond themselves.

When I began my own career as a professor of philosophy, the faculty and staff of colleges and universities were regarded as and called “personnel.” At a college or university, the department charged with overseeing matters pertaining to faculty and staff was accordingly called the “Personnel Department.”

I remember when that all changed back in the 1980s, and what used to be called personnel departments came instead to be called departments of human resources. That happened no less at the University of Denver, where I was employed, and other universities and colleges across the country than it did at American manufacturing companies and industrial corporations.

As I experienced it then, that change of name actually struck me as a refreshing breath of truth. After all, in modern society nature itself had long before the 1980s been reduced to no more than “natural resources.” Nature had thus become no more than a storehouse of potential power to be exploited by humans, thereby fulfilling Rene Descartes’ intent of developing a foolproof “method”  whereby humanity could establish “dominion and control over nature” (I have added the emphasis to bring out the key notion).

Now, during the 2020s, there is a growing movement to change names once again, and to make Human Resource Departments into Departments of Peoples and Cultures. That just means that management is becoming more aware of the value of disguising itself behind the pretense of being there to serve employees rather than their employers.

Such lies often prove helpful for improving the bottom line.

A small stock of human resources from various peoples and diverse cultures

* * *

In his own 1956 afterword to Lolita — the book itself originally being published a year earlier by The Olympia Press, after being rejected as pornographic by various major publishing houses — Vladimir Nabokov remarks in a parenthesis that “reality” is “one of the few words which mean nothing without quotes.”  “Reality” is everywhere and always just what passes for, what’s to be counted as, what’s real—what is.  “Reality” is what they, the powers that be at any given time, tell us we have to accept as real, as what truly is.  All else, they tell us, is fantasy, illusion, mere image.

But in the face of such all-encompassing mere “reality,” it is in actually only in our dreams that what truly is can speak to us, and it is only in our art that the truth of what is sets itself into work.  It is in our imaginations, dreams, fictions, and artworks that we truly live, not just “survive” amidst all the wastage of globalized consumer capitalism, with its washing machines and cars, its televisions and mortgage payments, it’s “little poisons for the day, and little poisons for the night,” as Nietzsche’s Zarathustra put it long ago.

No wonder that, if that’s all there is, we do indeed want to break out the booze — to allude to an old Peggy Lee song that sums it up well.  In liquor or drugs or sex or romance novels or movies or cutting our flesh or chewing our own skin, we escape “reality.”  When “reality” is where our society stores us all up as no more than human resources or the equivalent, in what other ways can we possibly look for what truly “is”?

Indeed, in such a no-place excuse for a place as our current unreal “reality” proffers us, daydreaming, drug-usage, and other such activations of our imagination’s capacities become  politically subversive acts. What’s more, It takes deep courage to perform such politically subversive acts of imagination.  When all that surrounds us is “reality,” such daydreaming becomes a way of “speaking truth to power,” to borrow a phrase.  To imagine is to make “reality” vanish like smoke, like a dream one wakes from, dismissed as a phantom in and by our very fantasies — those subversive acts of “merely imagining” — to adapt an image from one of the Psalms.

In the contemporary global consumer market that is our “reality” today, it is in fantasy that what truly is must find its place, the place denied to it in such “reality.”  In acts of courage such as daydreaming, it does just that.   

   “Be not afraid,” Jesus tells us in the Christian Gospels.  What a dreamer![2]

[1]  Beyond State, Power, and Violence (Oakland, CA: 2023), pages 304-305. An English  translation by Michael Schiffman and Havin Guneser of Bir Halkı Savunmak, originally published in 2004 in Neuss, Germany, by Mezopotamien Verlag.

 [2] The second, closing section of this post is a reworking of some paragraphs from “Confession of Fear,” the first chapter of my 2013 book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, available for purchase in the “Archive” above this post.

Holy Irreality

“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well,” the Lord says to Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth century — a truly “calamitous” century, as Barbara Tuchman calls it in the subtitle to A Distant Mirror (New York, NY: Knopf, 1978), her history of the period.  Julian recounts that experience in Showings (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1977). 

Most of Julian’s coevals would probably not have seen things that way at all. 

“It’s all right, it’s all right, everything is all right,” parents everywhere for many centuries, in those or other words, have assured their frightened children — sometimes even when to all other eyes everything is far from all right, and it appears that things will never be all right again.  In their viewing of their children, such parents see with the eyes of love, and in what they say they speak that love, as Julian’s messenger did to her.

There may finally be some irreducible element of choice and decision in such seeing and saying, especially in the face of so much evidence to the contrary, so much obvious evidence that everything is anything but all right.  It is surely not unreasonable to consider the whole body of evidence pertinent to determining the truth of the assertoric proposition that all is or at least will someday be well — if such propositional truth is all that interests one. Nevertheless, deciding such issues with full regard to truth is far more a matter of having, or coming to have, “new awareness,” new eyes to see and ears to hear what is given one to see and to hear. 

No amount of further looking will reveal colors to an eye devoid of the capacity to see them, for example — as scientists tell us is true for many animals, including domestic pets. Nor will any further accumulation of data ever convince one without love honestly to assure a frightened or sorrowing child that everything is all right.

Julian of Norwich, statue by David Holgate, Norwich Cathedral (from Wikipedia)

*     *     *

In a well-known line William Faulkner says: “The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.” He speaks the truth.

To capture at least some of what is at issue in that same truth, one might say that fiction of the best sort serves as a sort of prosthetic device for awareness, giving readers new organs, in effect, to perceive what no amount of further investigation could possibly show them otherwise.             

What such fiction lets be seen is nothing fictitious.  Such fiction does not consist what might be called “as if” assertions — sentences masquerading as assertions but really asserting nothing. 

Fine fiction does indeed make “assertions,” but what it “asserts” is more real than what to all merely journalistic eyes passes for “reality” itself. Such journalistic “reality” is itself  asserted by fine fiction to be no more, at the very best, than a paltry portion of what is — a minor part uppity enough to lay pompous claim to being the whole.

Seen through the eyes such fiction gives us, the distinction between the mythical and the logical—between myth and reason, mythos and logos — redraws itself.  Above all, it no longer makes sense to try to make any sharp distinction between the gods of myth (the gods of so-called “pagan” experience) and the gods of religion.  Nor would it be any derogation of any god, or even of God, to call that god/God “mythical.”  It would not mean that there was no such god or God. It would mean, rather, that the god/God was more than real, and never to be found among what is no more than that — found, that is, as just one more thing within what passes by journalistic standards for “reality.”

To put the same thought differently, no investigation of journalistic “reality,” no matter how intensive and extensive, could ever give us enough to decide, one way or another, whether either Mars (the god, not the planet) or Yahweh exists.  That’s because, if either Mars or Yahweh was journalistically “real,” then neither could be Mars or Yahweh anymore. 

We might say that the being of the god Mars would have to be a Martial being, and the being of Yahweh a Yahwist being.  And to say that is not really to tell anyone anything we don’t already know:  that the being of divinity, if there is any divinity, has to be, of course, a divine being. 

So be it!

NOTE TO READERS: This post is a revised version of section 7 of “Hushed Talk of God,” the 7th chapter of my book God, Prayer, Suicide, and Philosophy: Reflections on Some of the Issues of Life, which is available at this blogsite in the “Shop” (see above the post).

Disowning Ownership

All things should be the common possession of all, as it is written, so that no one presumes to call anything his own (Acts 4:32). But if anyone is caught indulging in this most evil practice, he should be warned a first and a second time. If he does not amend, let him be subjected to punishment. 

                                    — Rule of Saint Benedict 33:6-8 (RB 1980)

All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.

                                                                        — Acts 4:32 (NIV)

 Ownership dis-owns us: it robs us of our very selves, never letting us claim who we truly are, never letting us be our own.

Only when we disown ownership in turn do we at last begin to come into our own. Thus, only if we disown ownership can we heed Nietzsche’s admonition: “Become who you are.”  

What disowns us of what we own en-owns us, as it were, of ourselves. It grants us ownership over ourselves —not as though we held ourselves as some sort of marketable property, some sort of “capital,” but in the sense that it frees us from our delusions of ownership so that we can assume responsibility for who we are, as that itself is revealed to us step by step along the paths of our lives. Thus, disowning us of what we claim as our own property grants us the capacity to return again to who we are, only to know it now for the very first time — to adapt some famous lines from T. S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding.”

*     *     *

From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.                                                                                                                         

— Karl Marx

As challenging as it may be to those who style themselves “fundamentalist Christians,” how Marx in the nineteenth century in that line describes life in communist communities is just how life in a monastery is to be lived, according to Saint Benedict  in the fifth century. Like Marx, Benedict in his Rule says that each brother or sister is to contribute to the community in accordance with their ability, as each’s ability is acknowledged by the leader of the house, the “Abbot” or “Abbess,” and that all of the goods of the monastery are to be held in common, and to be given to each as each has need of them.

In turn, that Benedictine admonition accords fully — as Benedict himself notes in the passage from his Rule with which I began this post — with the practice of the early Christian communities described in the foundational Book of Acts in the Christian bible. Most self-styled “Christians” would probably wish to deny the Christian roots of Marx’s own admonition, but those roots are there — and they run deep.

The word abbot derives from Old English abbod, from the Latin root abbatem, itself from the Greek abbas, which in turn comes from the Aramaic language, one of the Semitic family of languages. In Aramaic the word abba is a title of honor that literally means "the father, my father." That honorific title was originally given to every member of the monastic community, but in its most emphatic usage was later limited to the leader, or “head,” of the monastery.  The Latin feminine form of the same word, used in the same honoring way, is abbatissa, the root of our English word abbess.

By Saint Benedict’s Rule,  all those who dwell in the monastic community are to address their “elders” as abbas, “fathers”; and all such elders are to address their juniors as fratres, “brothers.”  What is more, by Chapter 72 of the Rule, the next to last chapter, all the members of the community are to “vie in paying obedience to one another — no one following what one considers useful for oneself, but rather what benefits another” (Leonard J. Doyle translation, slightly modified). 

*      *     *

Sounds awfully Marxist!  

Karl Marx, picture from the Marx House in Trier, Germany

Progression, Regression, Aggression

Good writing is rewriting.                        

                        — Truman Capote  

I remember hearing Truman Capote say that on The Tonight Show decades ago. Over the years since, I’ve often experienced that the same thing also applies to reading: all reading is rereading. That’s true at least for anything really worth reading in the first place.

All my life, beginning all the way back to my childhood before I even knew how to read myself, I have realized that anything worth reading deserves — and richly repays —   rereading. As I may have mentioned before in one or more of my previous blog posts (I may well reread a bunch of them to find out for sure), back when I was only about four years old my mother thought that I was ready to learn how to read, given how incessantly I asked her to read and reread things to me. The Earth for Sam, which was originally published way back in 1930, and Space Cat, which first came out when I was six and began to be taught how to read and which was one of the first books I read myself, were my two favorites. 

Wanting to do the right thing, my mother made the mistake of asking teachers of the Jefferson County Colorado school system—that being the county in which we lived—if she should teach me how to read, which she would have been able and happy to do. She was informed that it would be best for me to wait, and to learn how to read along with other children my age once I entered public schools and made it past kindergarten and into the first grade, where that would occur. So till then my mother, who took the teacher’s supposedly expert but utterly wrong-headed advice to heart, had to keep doing all my reading and rereading aloud for me.

At any rate, once I got to my mid-teens one of the authors I started reading and rereading on my own was Søren Kierkegaard. Once I became a college classroom teacher myself, I often used texts by him in various classes at various academic levels, from introductory lower-division undergraduate philosophy classes to seminars for graduate students and advanced undergraduates.

Despite my having read and reread most of Kierkegaard’s works, one thing of his I never read until just recently, and at least parts of which I have already reread more than once, was his academic dissertation, The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates. Among the already more than once reread passages of that text is the one that follows, a passage in which Kierkegaard is addressing the “Socratic outlook” on irony.  My initial reading of the passage is what helped give me the idea for the blog post you are currently reading. (The passage occurs on p. 60 in the Howard V. and Edna H. Hong English translation of the text, first published by Princeton University Press in 1989.)

     If we now inquire further and ask to what more universal view this Socratic outlook may be traced, in what totality it rests, then it obviously is in the meaning ascribed to [what Plato calls] recollection; but recollection is in fact the retrograde development […].  [. . .] It is Socratic to disparage all actuality and to direct man to a recollection that continually retreats further and further back toward a past that itself retreats as far back in time as that noble family’s origin that no one could remember. [. . .]

In the next section of this post, I will share some of what that passage suggested to me when I first read it.

Kierkegaard’s grave, Copenhagen (picture from Wikimedia Commons)

*     *     *

Profound progression is ever-recurrent regression into the groundless ground. Such regressive progression/progressive regression is never aggressive, at least not in the ordinary sense of “attacking”: it is, rather, always serene, and spreads the seeds of peace wherever it goes. However, in the original and originating sense to which the word aggression itself always goes back, progressing step by step in its retreat, through French to Latin and eventually to a presumed Proto-Indo-European root, in joins up with both progression and regression, as I’ll now try to explain. 

The presumed Proto-Indo-European root of all three words — progression, regression, and aggression — is *ghredh-, assigned the meaning “to walk, go.” To progress is to walk or go forth or forward. To regress is to walk or go back. To aggress is to walk or go against, as one sometimes needs to go “against the current,” as we say, to do what one is called to do as one progressively regresses/regressively progresses. 

Progression is walking the path forward into the terrain of what will be. Regression is walking the path back into the terrain of what has been. The walking itself traverses, step by step, the terrain of what truly is, regardless of what the current opinions about what is may be.         

*     *     * 

To come to a full understanding of the preceding section of this post, you may need to resist temptations to just go with the flow. Instead, you may need to go back to reread that section, and perhaps even the first section of this post, carefully and attentively again and again.

I will leave it to you to decide if I am speaking ironically in the preceding paragraph.

Note to readers: This will be my last post before I take my usual summer break. My next post will go up on Monday, September 12, 2022.

Health, Care, and Healthcare

The less meaningful our lives become, the more tightly we cling to them. 

That is why, in our global economic society, new institutions and provisions of institutionalized medical “healthcare” proliferate. They do so especially in the most commercially developed and advantaged countries. Those in power in the same economically developed countries then often dangle the carrot of such institutionalized healthcare in front of the faces of those who live in less developed countries. At the same time, the commercially powerful countries use the promise of healthcare as a stick to drive such disadvantaged countries ever forward, toward taking full advantage of all the touted advantages of planned, provided, medicalized healthcare.

If life in such healthcare-enticed and -driven countries becomes ever less meaningful the further forward those countries are driven along the healthcare road, so what? That’s a small price to pay for all the profits to be made by healthcare providers.

*     *     *

I’ve told the story before. The first time I told it in print was in my first published book, The Stream of Thought (available through the “Shop” at the top of this blog website), which came out in 1984. It’s the story of how, a few years before that, in spring 1976, I hosted Ivan Illich for a visited to the University of Denver. 

That was just the year after after his book Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health had come out in its American edition, receiving a great deal of attention. Illich’s thesis in that book was that the modern institutionalized medicalization of healthcare had long ago passed the point of “specific counter-productivity.” Not to be confused with what economists call the point of “diminishing returns,” the point of “specific counter-productivity” is that point beyond which the process of institutionalization begins to work contrary to the very supposed purpose for which that institutionalization was established in the first place. Thus, Illich argues that the current institutionalization of medicalized healthcare, which was supposedly designed to foster health, is actually making society as a whole more un-healthy than it ever was before such institutionalized medicalization was initially instituted.   

As I first described it in The Stream of Thought (in note 98, on page 644), on April 22, 1976, I hosted Illich as he gave an address at the University of Denver: “During the course of his ‘address’ [. . .] an individual identifying himself as a member of the ‘health-care profession’ working at a local hospital expressed enthusiasm for Illich’s ‘position’ and asked what he, the ‘health-care professional,’ might, as such a professional, do to rectify the ills to which Illich was pointing. Illich’s reply was, ‘Burn down the hospital!’ The frustration this reply engendered was obvious on the questioner’s face and in his demeanor.”

At the time I wrote The Stream of Thought, I shared that questioner’s frustration with Illich’s response. What’s more, for years I continued to feel the same way. 

That was because my thought during all that time continued to be oriented toward the goal of changing the very institutions that, as I fully agreed with Illich, had progressed beyond the point at which they had become specifically counterproductive, making worse and worse what they were claimed to be designed to make better and better.

However, as my own thinking continued to mature, I came to a different perspective, one from which I was able to see that Illich’s response was, in fact, completely appropriate. Over the years I came more and more clearly to see what was genuinely at issue for him, and found myself to be in full, emphatic agreement with his position. 

That issue, I came to see clearly, was not at all to change the present system, or any of its ever-proliferating institutions. The issue, rather, was to live in the irrelevance of that entire system — its irrelevance to anything that truly matters in human life individually or collectively. That is exactly what I explicitly argued for myself, in my recent book The Irrelevance of Power, just published two years ago, in 2020 (and also available from the “Shop” at the top of this blog website). 

If we were to live in full awareness of just such irrelevance, we might well take advantage of whatever opportunities might present themselves at times to “burn down” the whole, irrelevant system — at least if we had nothing better to do, such as taking a stroll, snoozing, or eating a cookie. That, I came to see, was the real gist of Illich answer to the hospital healthcare worker’s question at D.U. in April 1976. 

He thereby gave the most genuinely responsible answer possible.

Ivan Illich

*     *     *

     Yes, we suffer pain, we become ill, we die. But we also hope, laugh, celebrate; we know the joy of caring for one another; often we are healed and we recover by many means. We do not have to pursue the flattening out of human experience. 

     I invite all to shift their gaze, their thoughts, from worrying about health care to cultivating the art of living. And, today, with equal importance, to the art of suffering, the art of dying.  

A little over fourteen years after I hosted Illich’s talk at D.U., he spoke again on the topics of health and healthcare. That talk occurred in Hanover, Germany, on September 14, 1990. What he said then became the basis for a short article he wrote called “Health as One’s Own Responsibility — No, Thank You!” The lines above are the closing two paragraphs of that article. 

The whole piece is less than seven pages long, and it is easily available online at https://www.pudel.samerski.de/pdf/Illich_1429id.pdf.  I recommend it highly. It is well worth reading carefully and thoughtfully. If you do want to do that, be sure when you read the article to keep clearly in mind what I said in the preceding section of this post.

It was only in February of this year that I became aware of that article myself, and I read it right away.  Reading it is what occasioned my writing of this current post.