Competence Amidst An Age of Decline

Today's post will be short, as I've already spent more time than I'd like in the doing of necessary work.  But I'd like to briefly share something I've been thinking about during the last several weeks, namely the challenge of how one can demonstrate their competence during an age in which the value of most certificates of competence is tending toward zero.  This post can therefore be considered a sort of follow-up to the post I wrote a few weeks ago about the search for good work.  

Within the most recent decade of my existence as a working stiff, I have held a position as an adjunct instructor in a degreed technical education program at a university.  The experience has been eye-opening in many ways - rather like the opening of eyes one might experience if one had been raised in a household of strict parenting until one's fifteenth birthday, and then had been granted extremely grudging, reluctant permission to attend a sleepover at the house of a friend across town.  (Imagine a wide-eyed kid exclaiming, "They let you do that over here?!")  For when I was an undergraduate many years ago, I was regularly beaten up (metaphorically, of course!) by professors whenever my work did not meet minimum academic expectations.  I took a lot of lumps - especially because, at the time, I was also involved in an abusive evangelical fringe church which demanded of me a lot of good time that would have been better spent studying, so my grades suffered.  Yet I hardly remember complaining against the feedback I got from my professors, or believing that my university was treating me unfairly.

Fast forward to the present time, in which anyone who has had to deal with the current crop of college students has probably been motivated to Google the term "grade inflation".  Students have become conditioned to believing that all they have to do is "show effort" in order to receive a certificate of competence in a field of study.  Many of these have gone so far as to believe that guessing the answer or writing freshly-cooked gibberish in answer to a homework question is the same as "showing effort."  One dare not say anything accurately evaluative about their performance, lest one risk getting negative student evaluations from them.  (And no, the major culprits in declining academic performance are not students of color from disadvantaged backgrounds!)

This inflation of credentials of competence is particularly acute in many of the universities of the Global North.  But this inflation goes beyond colleges and universities.  For instance, this year I have chosen not to watch the Summer Olympics.  My reason is simple.  The Tokyo Summer Olympics include a number of athletes from a group of nations which regularly cheat by doping - that is, by using performance-enhancing drugs.  It should be obvious that what an athlete can do when juiced does not represent his actual talent and biological potential.  However, I am looking forward to the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics.  At least there, how far one can ski-jump and how long one can remain in the air while doing so are not dependent on anabolic steroids.

The inflation of credentials can become a national obsession, as is the case with the Russian "Sputnik" COVID-19 vaccine.  In order to boost its air of respectability, Russia had members of its Gamaleya Institute write a defense of the vaccine and of its efficacy for the British medical journal Lancet.  At the time the study was published, I am sure that there were many people like me whose doubts about Sputnik began to wane.  For we reasoned, "Hey - the Lancet is a very respectable peer-review jury.  If they were willing to publish an article backing the claims of over 90 percent efficacy, perhaps it's true..."  Except that an actual "jury-of-peers" from other nations showed up in the aftermath of the publication of that article, and has begun to ask extremely probing and inconvenient questions about its data and sources of data.  (See this, this and this for instance.)

A recently "defrocked" former contemporary Christian musician once wrote that "the lie is always cheaper than the truth."  The lie concerning competence sooner or later gets found out.  So why do we lie so often about what we're actually capable of?  Why do we tolerate those who lie about what they can actually do?  And how are our most long-lived measures and certifications of competence now being cheapened by false proclamations of competence?  Lastly, what new venues or means of certification or demonstration can those who are actually competent create so that they can be found by those who are desperate to find people who know how to do necessary things?  In other words, in an era in which an increasing number of things falsely glitter, how can searchers find the true gold?

In Search of Good Work, Or, A Right Autarky

I'm glad to report that the work I've had over the last few months is winding down to a more manageable level.  (Not that I want it to disappear entirely - I still like eating and having some spending money!)  So today I thought I'd write a post that continues to develop some of the thoughts I've tried to expound in my series of comments on Gene Sharp's book From Dictatorship to Democracy.  One thing that Gene Sharp says in his book is that "a liberation struggle is a time for self-reliance and internal strengthening of the struggle group."  (Emphasis added.)  This notion of self-reliance and internal strengthening reminds me of a Bible verse which has struck me repeatedly ever since I noticed its occupational context over ten years ago.  The verse reads as follows: "And let our people also learn to engage in good deeds to meet pressing needs, that they may not be unfruitful."  (Titus 3:14)  In the margin of my Bible, the word rendered "deeds" has an alternate rendering of "occupations."  It is the rendering of that word as "occupations" which first arrested my interest.

Now if you Google "Titus 3:14", you will encounter a huge number of emotive commentaries by people who tell us that the "good works" mentioned in Titus are primarily deeds of church-style charity to those who are in need, such as picking up elderly Sister Gladys from her house in the country so she can come with you to church on Sunday, or helping Deacon Weatherly pull weeds in his front yard on Saturday so he can have more time to be a servant to the church.  Carried still further, those who interpret the verse in this way begin to talk eloquently about the huge amount of work that is needed to run a church with multiple services - from running the sound system to making the coffee to mowing the church grounds to cleaning the bathrooms, etc., etc.  (Not to pick on anybody, but here and here are a couple of examples of what I'm talking about.)

But to interpret that verse in an occupational sense opens up an entirely different window - a window through which many people have never attentively looked.  For this interpretation begins to illuminate the spiritual dimension of the work, and of the kinds of work, which we choose to do for a living.  So let us consider this dimension as we read the words "good deeds," or in the King James version and other versions, "good works." Those words in the original Greek are "καλός ἔργον," which can be translated literally as "beautifully good work".  And the purpose of the work is to provide for "necessary, urgent, indispensable needs, necessities or uses" (ἀναγκαῖος χρεία).  If we take Titus 3:14 as part of a body of New Testament teaching on the spirituality of work, we are drawn to other Scriptures such as 1 Thessalonians 4:11-12, which says "...make it your ambition to lead a quiet life and attend to your own business and work with your hands, just as we commanded you; so that you may walk properly toward outsiders and have need of nothing."  

The quiet working with our own hands is a key pillar of the Biblical definition of righteous autarky.  The other element of righteous autarky is contentment with what one has, as described in 1 Timothy 6:6.  But there are many in the world who seek autarky in a perverted way because they insist on living in a world that places no limits on them, and because they are addicted to consumer culture, national narcissism, and the love of money.  For them autarky means going to war against those who are both content and self-sufficient in order to knock them over the head and take their stuff.  The wealthy of most nations fit into this category - including много вороватых русских человечков в бункерах as well as many rich American thieves in their own bunkers.  This evil kind of autarky is a hallmark of earthly empires.

Righteous autarky is a hallmark of those who are escaping from the global system of predatory capitalist domination and exploitation which in Revelation 18 is called "Babylon", for those who practice this kind of autarky depend on their own beautifully good work and their own ability to live simply as a means of breaking their reliance on their oppressor, that is, Babylon (and providing themselves with a clear conscience as part of the bargain - Revelation 18:4).  I submit to you that engaging occupationally in "beautifully good work to meet indispensable needs" is a key part of righteous autarky.  Ain't bad work if you can get it, but ya gotta know where to look!

So let us consider the search for occupations that are beautifully good and that meet necessary needs.  And here we must consider the things which make this search difficult.  First of all, there is the distraction of the worthless - that is, the distractions served up by a society that exalts the worthless.  By this I mean particularly celebrity culture, the culture which exalts the best and brightest performers in those fields which are crowded precisely because they are fun, they don't require much effort, and they are entirely optional.  Here we have those who want to follow in the steps of rich as YouTubers and lottery winners, those who want to become famous podcasters like Joe Rogan, those who are wanna-be actors and other celebrities, and those who would like to become members of the British royal family - in short, people who seek to be like those individuals who have managed to get a lot of something for nothing.  We are told to imitate celebrity because celebrities are held up as a model which the rest of us can and should imitate.

An acute example of the distraction of the worthless is the celebration of worthless business.  By this I mean the rise and excessive valuation of many "tech" companies whose chief executives (like Mark Zuckerberg) are celebrated as inventors of engines of "wealth creation."  But to credit these people with "wealth creation" is actually false, for what they have actually achieved by means of tech platforms such as Facebook is parasitic wealth transfer - a transfer of the last remaining distributed wealth of the non-wealthy into the pockets of the wealthy.  In other words, men such as Zuckerberg (and, I would suggest, Elon Musk) are merely really good examples of efficient parasites.  The same could be said for the CEO's of many major retail chains such as Walmart and Home Cheapo which have driven smaller retail operations out of business.

The activities of these parasites has given rise to a third difficulty, namely the impacts of a changing society on our ability to find meaningful, beautifully good work.  This change has two causes:

• The change in the occupational landscape wrought by the deployment of artificial intelligence and task automation.  AI is an interesting subject in that there are two camps of human opinion regarding its use.  One camp consists of those who look critically at AI in order to determine and define its limits and adverse effects (such as the sometimes disastrous effects of automation-induced complacency).  The other camp is enthusiastic about the ability of AI to transform the workplace by automating repetitive tasks or tasks that require a lot of brute force calculation, thus freeing humans to focus on tasks which require "creativity."  A barely noticed corollary to this assertion is the fact that software and hardware development teams are trying hard to push AI into realms of human "creativity" as well.  (Case in point: if you use AutoCAD for engineering design, you will have known for a long time that Autodesk has automated many design tasks which used to take a fair amount of skill on the part of a designer!)  This push is being driven by owners of capital who would much rather use AI to continue their concentration of capital by paying an upfront capital cost for a piece of machinery in order to do more with fewer people.  As the push for task automation progresses, people will need to engage in a constant re-skilling in order to keep from being run over by the robot juggernaut of "progress".

• The impact of resource depletion on the kinds of economic activity which a society can sustain.  I will not say much tonight about this subject, since much has already been written on this subject.  (Some of what has been written actually makes sense.  On the other hand, I removed from my bookshelf all books by Dmitri Orlov or James Howard Kunstler and threw them into the compost bin.  Those books have better uses as fertilizer than as guidance.)  But I will say that there are forward-looking societies run by leaders who know how to play a long game, which have begun to respond to resource depletion by investing in progressive responses such as circular economy principles.  On the other hand, there are nations like the United States.  If you live in the USA, you may find yourself needing to navigate situations and invent solutions which Asian nations (and I don't mean Russia!) have long since collectively figured out.  

To close, then, let us look at the characteristics of the kind of work we should be looking to do.  It should be beautiful - that is, it should have an element of craftsmanship, of mastery, and of increasing rewards for the acquisition of increasingly rare and valuable skills.  It should be good - that is, genuinely beneficial to humankind.  And it should be necessary - that is, indispensable.  As Asef Bayat says, "An authoritarian regime should not be a reason for not producing excellent novels, brilliant handicrafts, math champions, world-class athletes, dedicated teachers, or a global film industry.  Excellence is power; it is identity."  This is how the church of the New Testament - composed largely of poor people and slaves - began to liberate itself from Rome.  This is how we of the African-American diaspora will liberate ourselves.  To  borrow some language from the study of artificial intelligence, let these characteristics define the "objective function" you seek to optimize in your search for paying work.