The Educated Precariat: The Seedlings Of Early Trees

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we are now starting to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people who have obtained either bachelors or more advanced graduate degrees from a college or university, yet who cannot find stable work in their chosen profession.  I suggest that the troubled lives of the educated precariat are a symptom of the troubled state of higher education generally - especially in the First World (also known as the Global North).  Two troubled groups come immediately to mind, namely, academics (college professors or salaried researchers) and college or university graduates.  We will explore the plight of new college professors and researchers later.  But suffice it to say that the guaranteed career of a tenured professor is increasingly out of reach for this group.  (See also, "Tenure Track for Professors In States Like Texas May Disappear," USA Today, 13 April 2023.)  A third group that may not know it's in trouble consists of new and continuing college and university students whose necks will one day be broken by the mousetrap of student loan debt.  A fourth group consists of the administrators and employees of the system itself.  Their trouble arises from the fact that they are running out of a key resource, namely, new students!  This is due to a number of factors, such as declining birth rates, as well as a sober realization on the part of young men and women that college education itself has begun to yield sharply diminished returns even as it has become unbearably expensive.

In considering the historical role of higher education in the development of global civilizations, it is natural to ask how things got to this state in which American higher education has begun to crumble. Where exactly did we come from that we have arrived at this destination?  To answer that question, we need to look at where we started from - in other words, it's time to look at the historical origins of education in general and of higher education in particular.

The first thing we notice is that there are records on almost every continent from almost every civilization describing the origins and evolution of formal education and of the creation of higher education systems. Ancient places of higher learning can be found in places such as these (this is a very partial list, by the way):

• Mali, African Continent (University of Timbuktu containing the Sankore Madrasah)
• Tunisia, African Continent (University of Ez-Zitouna)
• China 
• Academy of the White Deer Cavern (白鹿洞書院); 
• Songyang Academy (嵩陽書院) (This was a private rather than public institution.)
• Taixue (太學) ("National University" established by Emperor Wu)
• Greece, European Continent
• The school of Isocrates
• The school of Plato (Also known as the "Academy", which was the first historical use of this term in the West.)  (See also Higher Education In Greece, Kyriazis and Asderaki, CEPES, 2008)
• The school of Pythagoras
• The Byzantine Empire
• The Pandidakterion (known today as the University of Constantinople)

Note that although some of these institutions are called "universities," the actual entity known as the modern university did not come to being until the Middle Ages in Europe.

The entire educational process including both primary and higher education has been documented for the Greco-Roman and Chinese cases, and so it is useful to examine these cases in more detail.  First, let's consider the Greco-Roman case.  And in the case of Greece, we must consider the distinction between education in the Athenian city-state and education in Sparta.  According to Wikipedia, formal education in Athens was reserved for boys who were free-born.  The education of slaves was forbidden.  Formal education was conducted by either public schools or by private tutors.  I was not able to find out how much access to public schooling depended on family wealth, but the sources I have found do indicate that the extent of this formal education did depend on how much a family could afford to pay.  Access to higher education was strictly on the basis of a student's ability to pay, and it appears that the system of higher education was largely created and run by private individuals with sufficient means for leisure.  Thus figures such as Aristotle and Plato could be considered a kind of educational entrepreneur.  As for Sparta, while both free men and free women could participate, the purpose of Spartan education was solely to train the nation for war-fighting.

A funny thing happened to educated Athenian Greeks who had enjoyed the status of free-born intellectuals: when the Greek city-states were conquered by and absorbed into the Roman Empire, these free-born intellectuals became slaves themselves.  However, these educated slaves were able to lighten the burden of their slavery by becoming tutors and founding their own private schools (often with very slim profit margins).  This system of private education began to assume the role which Roman fathers as heads of households had traditionally held as the educators of their children.  In the Roman empire, there was no state-funded public education, either at the primary or the secondary level.  Yet those who wanted to participate in Roman politics were required to obtain a formal higher education.  This limited participation in Roman politics to the wealthy.  Also, whereas in Greece, higher education was seen as an activity of leisure which should not be tainted by any practical application (From Formal to Non-Formal: Education, Learning and Knowledge, pages 8 and 9), in the Roman empire the situation was different.  For Romans insisted that all education should have some practical purpose.  

In China, primary education began as an informal, communal process.  According to Dr. Ulrich Theobald, "The oldest word for "school" is xiang 庠, which actually means a building for livestock with two facing walls, where elderly people reared sheep, pigs or cattle and at the same time were entrusted with the duty to watch children and instruct them."  Primary education in China eventually evolved into a system of both private and public schools.  The public schools came into being during the Tang and Ming periods.  These schools, along with private primary schools and tutors, prepared students to enter the Chinese academy system, which then prepared promising students for posts in the Chinese civil service.  A couple of noteworthy facts regarding these academies is that there were times when private academies were either outlawed, disbanded, or taken over by the state as exemplified by the emperor.  Also, there were periods in which the state created or funded public academies in the academy system.  Lastly, some of the academies of the 18th and 19th centuries assumed research duties in addition to teaching.  The Taixue 太學 "National University" had already assumed a research role during the Southern Dynasties period from 420 to 589 AD.  

From the Chinese and Greco-Roman cases we can see that a key function of ancient higher education was to produce an elite class - that is, people who could either participate in politics and governance as ruling practitioners of statecraft, or as people who could serve as competent administrators/bureaucrats under these ruling elites.  Therefore the function of many ancient institutions of higher learning was not primarily research, although, as noted above, exceptions to this did exist in both ancient Greece and in China.  Stronger examples of a focus on both research and applied knowledge can be found in the Academy of Gondishapur in what is now modern Iran.  This academy was a center for the learning of medicine and science, among other subjects, and the modern hospital system owes much of its inspiration and foundational philosophy to this academy.  The Sankore Madrasah on the African continent also evolved a research function, although its main original purpose was Islamic education.  We don't have time today to explore the beginnings of the modern European university, but suffice it to say that the modern university system seems from the outset to have had the dual purposes of research and teaching.  Thus the early modern universities took over the function of producing the clerics of the Roman Catholic Church (the Western form of the mandarin administrator) in addition to producing research.

What is interesting to note is how systems of higher education fare in societies undergoing decline.  The Byzantine system of higher education is a key example.  The vicissitudes of the Byzantine empire in the 7th and 8th centuries and in the 13th century dramatically decreased the central government's ability to fund higher education and led to the privatization of higher education.  It is certain that this influenced the supply of competent practitioners of statecraft as well as competent administrators.  It is also true that declining Byzantine imperial power also produced declines in the number of jobs available to would-be mandarins who graduated from any Byzantine program of higher education.  This has significant implications for the American system of higher education, as the process of accelerating inequality continues in the United States, and as the rich parasites at the top of the food chain continue to suck nutrients from the rest of society.  More on that in another post.

A Modest Objection To "The Body Keeps The Score"

The present times are rather terrible, both globally and here in the United States.  We who are not of the rich and powerful are under a full onslaught being waged by those who are rich and powerful, and want to bring back the sort of status quo which existed in the early part of the 20th century.  Rights and protections are being rolled back by those who want to revive colonialism and white supremacy.  The effects of their efforts are widespread and tragic, as we have seen and will continue to see in my series of posts on economic precarity and the precariat.

One of the more curious responses to this phenomenon come from those members of the dominant culture who claim to be "woke" or who seem to sympathize with the plight of those of us who have once again become targets of oppression.  One of the expressions of this sympathy consists of framing the discussion of the ways in which oppression and the revival of racism hurts the oppressed in such a way as to imply that this oppression leaves the oppressed permanently debilitated.  And along this line, one book that has recently gotten a bit of press is The Body Keeps The Score.  This book describes the long-term traumatic psychological and physical effects of the stress of living in a hostile society, and its premise seems to be that the long-term experience of hostility, persecution and oppression can produce long-term debilitating effects from which the sufferers of such experiences cannot recover.  (By the way, where did the use of the word "woke" as an adjective come from?  Does the dominant culture really believe that we who are not members of it can't use a more grammatically correct term like "awakened"?)

Now I must admit that I have not yet read The Body Keeps The Score.  But lately I get more than a little uncomfortable when I hear so-called sympathizers going on and on about how our experiences of oppression can produce long-term debilitation that is impossible to overcome.  I get irked by people who imply that our experiences of oppression tend to permanently disable us or to permanently reduce our capacity to fulfill our human potential.  To me, such expressions of so-called sympathy tend to reinforce the message that we who are of the oppressed are thus permanently robbed of our agency.  Such expressions of sympathy seem to imply that we who are of the oppressed should therefore give up trying to overcome our oppression and simply accept damaged lives and damaged identities.  (To use a cheesy analogy, imagine a scene in a space-opera sci-fi movie in which a green-skinned, three-eyed, lizard-faced commander of an enemy spaceship is telling the movie's protagonist, "Captain! As you can see, we've destroyed your death ray, we've damaged your engines, and we've blasted a few new holes in your ship.  Only your neutron torpedo launchers are still working.  Perhaps you should surrender ...")

To those who are unwittingly broadcasting this message I say please reconsider what you are saying.  To those who are knowingly using expressions of "sympathy" to broadcast such a message, I say you're full of garbage.  What's more, I have logical, historical counter-examples to show that you are full of garbage.  To name a few, consider:

Nelson Mandela.  While he was a prisoner of the white apartheid South African regime, he maintained a strict schedule of weekly exercise in order to keep himself in top physical and cognitive shape.  As documented by Alex Soojung Kim-Pang, Mandela found that keeping in good shape helped him to think more clearly and to effectively deal with the frustrations and outrages of being a political prisoner.  It also helped him to show his captors that he remained in charge of his own life and destiny, no matter what they tried to do.

The Polish Underground Schools in World War Two. When Germany invaded Poland during World War Two, the Germans sought to destroy all higher education in Poland.  (The Russians also tried to do this in the 1800's during their involvement in the 19th century partition of Poland.)  This was in order to turn the entire nation into a nation of manual laborers who would serve the Germans as slaves.  Yet the Poles resisted.  One of their methods of resistance - a shining example of building parallel institutions as a means of strategic nonviolent resistance - was the creation of a network of underground schools for their children.  By this means, Polish scientific and technical capabilities were preserved so that they could once again flourish when freedom was won.

Admiral James Stockdale.  I am not a fan of American involvement in Vietnam during the 1960's and early 1970's.  I think that American involvement in the Vietnam war was an expression of American stupidity, narcissism, and hubris which blinded this country to the realities of another people's lived experience and history.  However, I must say that James Stockdale's experience of suffering and survival as a prisoner of war of the North Vietnamese provides great inspiration and insight into how people who must face hostile circumstances can survive and eventually prevail.  To quote Stockdale, "You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."

The Guiding Lights of the Civil Rights Struggle.  Consider people like Robert Moses, Ella Baker, John Lewis, Martin Luther King, the organizers of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Rosa Parks.  Consider Rosa Parks especially - note her quiet, dignified demeanor and the way she carried herself.  See in these people - in their language, behavior and dress - how they communicated the message that they would not let their identity be defined by their oppressors.  

We who are once again targets of oppression have a hard slog ahead.  Part of that slog consists, as Stockdale said, of "the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be."  But the purpose of that confrontation is that we might begin to build a strategy to overcome those brutal facts.  I am thinking of two particular works of fiction to which I have been exposed in the last seven years.  One was The Warmth of Other Suns, and it was recommended to me by someone in a reading group that was organized by the management of my workplace shortly after Trump stole the White House in 2017.  I never read the book because I was turned off by the person who recommended it to me.  It seemed that the purpose of the book (and of the workplace reading circle) was to induce us to have a good cry over our shared experience of suffering as African-Americans, in the hope that after our cry we'd feel better and become pacified.  I don't have time for that kind of garbage!

The other work of fiction was a short story that I read this year, in 2023, and it is "Tempus Fugit" by a French woman of Black African descent named Ketty Steward.  I liked that story!  In it, the intended targets of oppression reclaim their agency by overcoming their situation.  Ketty Steward rocks!

P.S. If you have read The Body Keeps The Score and you have evidence that I have misinterpreted some of the press surrounding this book and others like it, please feel free to present your evidence.  I'm not above eating my words from time to time...

A Failure Of Performance Art

 

A billboard I recently saw in my city

Lately I've been reminiscing about my years in the abusive church known as the Assembly, and some of the strange teachings and practices which were pushed by this church.  The church I was involved in was modeled in many ways after the Plymouth Brethren pattern, although our head honcho denied that we were an exact copy but he insisted that we were a new and improved model.  (Note to any rabid PB's out there: A. Don't sue me.  You won't get much out of me beside two middle-aged neutered cats.  B.  Don't sue me.  There's already plenty of scathing criticism of you all - including the criticisms voiced by Garrison Keillor, former host of A Prairie Home Companion.  C. Don't sue me.  If you do, the angels of God will put a massive hurt on you on the Day of Judgment!) 

In retrospect, one of the weirder elements of our doctrine and practice had to do with our attitude toward instrumental music in our Assembly meetings.  You see, we firmly believed that in our worship, Bible study, and prayer meetings, any and all hymns sung were to be sung a cappella.  That is, they were to be sung with voices only - with no other instruments allowed.  This was because of a rigid (and frankly erroneous) interpretation of Ephesians 5:19 pushed by one of the granddaddies of Brethrenism, a certain John Nelson Darby, who believed that the presence and use of musical instruments during group worship was a sign of "worldliness".  However, we did believe in the use of musical instruments as a tool of "Gospel outreach" - that is, our attempts to evangelize (or proselytize?) the lost, also known as the "unchurched" in modern evangelical-speak.

Here things get interesting.  Before I met this group, I had been in the military, and had attended a number of live band performances at various bars near my post.  Thus I had acquired a taste for live music.  So when I encountered one of the "outreach bands" of the Assembly at a college campus, I was intrigued.  That bloody band was one of the means by which the Assembly hooked me.  But after a while in the Assembly, I discovered that although the use of instrumental music as a tool of outreach was allowed and encouraged, there was a bit of contention among the leaders and wanna-be leaders about the styles of music that were allowable in our "outreach."  So the Assembly band which I first encountered evolved gradually from 70's acoustic-tinged folk rock (think CSNY, Joni Mitchell, the Eagles before Joe Walsh, or some of the lighter offerings of Jackson Browne or James Taylor), eventually settling on what can only be described as a form of soft country rock.  The countrified phase lasted until some teens from one of the Assemblies in the Midwest formed their own hard-driving high-energy rock group.  (Think of Creed as an example of what these teens sounded like.)  They managed to achieve something that our band had lost the ability to do - namely, that they were able to get passers-by to actually stop and listen to them.  This threatened the narcissism of the long-time leader of the outreach band in my home Assembly, so he responded by amping up his band's performances and pushing his teenage kids to form their own hard-rocking outreach band.  Naturally he made his son the leader of our teen band - an example of living vicariously through one's kids - and talked of them as if they were in the same league as such well-known CCM (Contemporary Christian music) bands as Jars of Clay.

Our music-making for heathen audiences largely came to an end when the Assemblies fell apart in 2003 after the revelations of the criminal activity of our head honcho and his family.  But it is interesting to consider the message we sought to communicate through our outreach, as well as the strategic assumptions behind that message and our delivery of it.  For that message and its strategic assumptions have a parallel among many of the thought leaders in the larger realm of American evangelicalism.

The Message: 

The message we ostensibly sought to communicate was the message of the claims of Christ, namely that He is the eternal Son of God and that God gave Him on the Cross as a sacrifice for our sins so that everyone who believes in Him might be justified from sin and receive eternal life.  We preached that this justification was to be obtained by faith alone, and not by any attempts of our own to do good works.  We preached that this message demanded a response from those who heard it, and that an acceptable response had the following two elements: repentance from sin and receiving Christ as Lord.  Now I must say that although I have said strong things against white American evangelicalism, I am yet a Christian.  Moreover, I would categorize myself largely (but not entirely) as a fundamentalist.  So I have no problem with the Gospel message as I have just now summarized it.  However, I must say that that Gospel has mutated over the last few decades in American society.  (The message has always seemed to suffer from certain distortions as it passed through the lens of American culture.)  For repentance has been confined to merely giving up certain fleshly indulgences, and not to changing the way we relate to each other on a societal level, or the way we relate to money and earthly power. And actually receiving Christ as Lord - as Someone whose words we actually intend to obey - has been replaced by mere assent to "Judeo-Christian (or American) values" as defined by mainstream evangelical preachers. 

Now there are many motives for preaching this message, but in the United States, the motive among evangelicals in recent decades has been threefold, namely, to "reclaim America for God", to "reclaim Christian cultural values", and to "re-establish America as a Christian nation."  This shifting of motive from spiritual transformation to the building of secular, earthly political and cultural power for a certain privileged group is one of the prime causes of the mutation of the Gospel message over time.  

The strategy of delivery:

One of the key strategic assumptions behind our delivery of the message was first and foremost that the Word of God has intrinsic power in itself, apart from any human input.  Therefore, it is necessary only to proclaim the Word in order to fulfill the duty of preaching the Gospel, for the Word is able to do its work all by itself.  Bible verses such as Jeremiah 23:29 ("Is not My word like fire?" declares the LORD ...) and Hebrews 4:12 were used as proof texts for this point of view.  (However, one danger of such a viewpoint is that it neglects those parts of the New Testament which speak of the power of a good example and proclaim that preachers of the Word need to practice what they preach!)

The outcome of this strategic assumption can be seen in the multitude of inventive means which evangelicals, fundamentalists, and similarly-minded Protestants devised for the proclamation of their message.  These means have included preaching (obviously), in churches, Gospel halls, city parks, street corners, circus tents, and other places where people congregate.  But they have also included Gospel tracts and other printed matter, bumper stickers, billboards, T-shirts, movies, music CD's (and later, MP3's), live musical performances, "inspirational" or "faith-based" fiction, and other examples of artistic expression.  The arts have especially attracted the interest of those who have sought to inject "Christian" or "Judeo-Christian" cultural values into our society, as exemplified by a book written in the 1990's by Bob Briner titled Roaring Lambs.  Briner's book challenged those who call themselves Christians in the U.S. to make their mark in the arenas of moviemaking, television, other visual arts, and literature.  (Indeed, I seem to remember reading somewhere that his book was one of the inspiring influences that led to the formation of the band Jars of Clay.  But I can't find the exact reference to this, so don't quote me.)  Thus the "Christian culture industry" has received a massive boost over the years because of this focus.

Another key strategic assumption has concerned the response of the hearers of the message.  It has been assumed that if these hearers reject the message delivered, it is because of a spiritual or intellectual defect.  The assumption of a spiritual defect is too frequently made by those evangelicals or fundamentalists who are too lazy to actually get to know and understand their audience.  Thus their knee-jerk reaction is to automatically say that those who reject their message do so because "they are in spiritual darkness!" Those who assume that the rejection is due to an intellectual failure on the part of their hearers assume that the hearers are held captive by deeply formulated philosophies such as secularism, Marxism, post-modernism, or similar doctrines.  Evangelicals who assume such motives in those of their hearers who reject the evangelical message fail to realize that most people don't usually have time to think hard about various secular philosophies in detail.  (After all, most of us are too busy working like dogs!  We don't have time to read books ;) )   

Such assumptions have not adequately equipped the mainstream white American evangelical/Protestant church for the present times, in which many, many people are abandoning evangelicalism and church attendance, and some are even abandoning faith altogether - a time which has seen the birth of a new term, namely, exvangelical - a time in which the ranks of these exvangelicals are swelling.  (For an example of this, please listen to a recent podcast interview of one of the former members of the Assemblies I used to belong to.)  So let's close with a brief consideration of these times and the reasons for the people who are rejecting evangelicalism in these times.

Flattening, Breakdown and Failure

As I mentioned earlier in this post, the Gospel message has undergone a certain "flattening" in American culture.  This is seen in the things that the Bible put into the message that modern conservative evangelical/fundamentalist preachers have chosen to leave out.  For instance, there's the fact that the fear of God is seen in the way we treat each other - Job 22:6-9; Job 31:16-28.  And that the love of God is seen in the way we treat each other - 1 John 3:16-20; 1 John 4:20-21.  And that racism is sin, because it is an act of murder - 1 John 3:14-15 ("Everyone who hates his brother is a murderer; and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.")  And that God is opposed to the rich - James 5:1-6; Luke 6:24 ("Woe to you who are rich ...").  These are the things which God put into His message which people like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. and John MacArthur and other ecclesiastical sycophant followers of Trump have left out.  Meanwhile they have condemned things which God never condemned - things such as critical race theory, "woke-ism", social justice, and every other admonition to them that they should treat other people the same way they themselves want to be treated.  

This has led to a certain unpalatability of both these messengers and their message.  Indeed, from 2016 onward, these messengers have become not only unpalatable but downright nauseating.  I mentioned earlier in this post the need for the messenger of the Gospel to practice what he preaches.  This reminds me of a certain part of the third book in Liu Cixin's Three Body (三体, "San Ti") trilogy in which the people of Earth were tasked with configuring their society in such a way that any alien observers from outer space would be able to see that Earth humans posed no threat to the rest of the universe. The nature of the problem was such that this message (a "cosmic safety notice") could not be delivered by words, but only by actions.  (That part of his third book was where I first encountered the term "performance art", by the way.  Also, I'm not going to tell you how things worked out for the humans.  You'll have to read the books.)   This plot twist was a clever way of pointing out that one can learn much more about what kind of people one is dealing with by looking at what they do than by listening to what they say.  

This point is amplified by another book to which I was recently exposed, namely Haruki Murakami's Novelist As A Vocation.  In his description of the violence which ultimately ruined the student protests in Japan in the 1960's, Murakami wrote, “Uplifting slogans and beautiful messages might stir the soul, but if they weren't accompanied by moral power, they amounted to no more than a litany of empty words... Words have power. Yet that power must be rooted in truth and justice. Words must never stand apart from those principles.”  This is obviously true not only of secular social movements, but of white American evangelicalism and Protestantism over the last several decades.

That the words of American evangelicals have largely proven to be empty can be seen in the racism of the white American evangelical church, its misogyny as seen by the staggering levels of spousal abuse (see this, this, and this for instance), its staggering levels of child abuse, its hypocrisy (as seen in its promotion of religious leaders and political candidates who claim to stand for morality yet wind up getting caught with their pants down), its violence (as seen in the "Christian nationalists" armed to the teeth who stormed state capitols during the COVID lockdowns in 2020 and who participated in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021), and its greed.  

Indeed, if we look at what evangelicals actually do instead of what they say, we see that white American evangelicals (and the sons of Gehenna whom they have spawned in places like Brazil and Australia) care only about amassing secular earthly power to themselves.  The only thing they want is dominion, domination, and control.  Their religious profession is merely a tool to achieve this goal.  Their lust for power over others is seen in the ways they treat everyone who falls into their clutches.  It is seen in their treatment of their own women and children.

And this is what will lead eventually to their downfall and eventual loss of all earthly power.  I am thinking of the power of shared stories to illuminate the true character and nature of abuse.  I am thinking of the power of sunlight to disinfect dirty laundry.  I am thinking especially of the power of exposes, of scandals revealed, of things like the Shiny Happy People documentary of the abuse that took place in the family of Rethuglicans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar even as they paraded their family on national TV as an example of the perfect American family.  Truly, "...there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed, and hidden that will not be known." (Luke 12:2)

It will be interesting to see how evangelical power-holders react and respond to the dwindling of their power in the years to come.  Suffice it to say that I expect that their response will complicate our attempts as a society to deal with issues of encroaching limits and the erosion of economic, political and military power in general.  

The Burned-Out Bulb of Bright Ideas

For the last week I have been enjoying catching up on sleep.  This has not been an entirely painless process; as my body has begun to mend itself after a year and a half of excessive work, I have at times physically felt the discomfort of the mending process.  (To use a metaphor, wait until the engine has cooled off before you try to pop the hood and refill the radiator.)  The recent experience of working like a dog has given me further insights and inspiration for the essays on precarity which I have yet to write.  However, I am not going to try to tackle that subject today, except for a few brief observations.  

First, there are a couple of interesting recent articles which describe how the rate of scientific discoveries in the industrial world has been slowing over the last several decades.  The title of one of these articles is "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" and the other article, "Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study", cites the first article which I have linked.  (It's interesting that both articles have been published on websites which have chosen to support themselves partially by renting space for ads for gadgets, toys, t-shirts, and gossip.  The academic profession seems to be falling on hard times these days ...)  The chief researcher cited in these articles has suggested that a key reason for the decline of truly groundbreaking research is the fact that quantity of published research has begun to be emphasized over quality of research.  This is because funding for research has become tied to the number of papers published by research institutions as well as the number of citations of published papers by other publishing peers.

Second, my past year and a half of crazy busy work has introduced me to design automation tools which I had not had a chance to use during the past several years of my career.  I found that while I had been involved in things unrelated to the production of technical work products, the tools for producing that technical work had undergone a rapid and drastic evolution.  The software products of Autodesk are a particular example of this evolution - and of the consolidation of multiple formerly separate design functions into one software package, available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.  By the way, I am not singing the praises of Autodesk!  I think they have created a near monopoly racket.  Their subscription model for providing software services is to me like having a family of leeches stuck to one's legs.  I will be using an Autodesk package to do my part of a multidisciplinary design project during the next several months.  Thankfully, the client is paying for the software during the project.  But I have noticed all the things the software can do - things which a human being used to need to know how to do.  This has led me to ponder the de-skilling which is now taking place among many knowledge workers as a result of the automation of much of their jobs by software.

Where will this de-skilling ultimately lead?  And what will be its ultimate impact?  The answer to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask.  I will consider only one prediction, from that group of prognosticators known as "techno-optimists."  That prediction is the same prediction that has been made by such folks over much of evolution of the Industrial Age, namely, that automation of knowledge work would lead to increased leisure for knowledge workers as the tasks that would normally take such workers a day to do were sped up so that they could be accomplished in only a few hours.  After the last year and a half, I must disagree with such a prediction.  Digital task automation may speed up tasks, but what actually results is not that knowledge workers get to go home early each day, but rather, that they get more work to do.  For digital automation tools are not seen by capitalists as a means to grant more leisure to their workers, but as a means of getting more work out of them.  The deployment of such tools is usually followed by the demand that workers produce more each day.  Meanwhile, the workers (at least those whose jobs are not replaced by the automated processes) become more and more stupid as time passes and an increasing portion of their skill sets and the theoretical knowledge they learned in college is taken over by the automated processes they serve.  Thus knowledge workers of the early 21st century may well be turning into the cubicle equivalent of de-skilled industrial factory workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In short, our society seems to be evolving into a configuration in which the ability to think deeply and outside the box is dwindling, and in which our work is to blame for this dwindling.  (To read further about this evolution, please see "The Woodcutter's Dull Ax.")  We see here a trap to be avoided by those people in search of true craft, people who truly want to learn to engage in beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful.  Learning to avoid that trap should be an interesting experience.

Clear Air At Last?

The past several months have been painfully busy.  The last month has been especially excruciating.  The experience of entrepreneurship has recently seemed to me to be like being a skipper of a fishing boat caught in a gale, or like being a bush pilot for an air freight company whose clients suffer from permanently stormy weather.  However, my client backlog may finally be easing up.  I can hardly wait until I can once again start getting to bed at decent hours, resume exercising regularly, and take time to watch the sunsets.

During some of the worst moments, I found myself fantasizing about what my life would have been like had I become an author of short fiction instead of a technical professional.  The fantasies were triggered one morning at 4 AM while I was finishing writing a narrative and preparing CAD drawings for a schematic design report that was due at noon of the same day.  I hadn't slept since the previous morning.  As a bit of a distraction, I had taken a quick look at an Internet article about one of the crop of new young Chinese writers whose work falls loosely into the category of "magic realism."  The article showed a picture of this writer sitting at his desk while what looked like morning sunshine streamed through the window.  He was reading what looked like a book of ancient Chinese literature while he held a cat perched on one knee.  Both he and the cat looked vastly more relaxed than I was at that moment.  That got me wishing that I could be like Chen Chuncheng, Liu Cixin, Haruki Murakami, Yoko Ogawa, Ketty Steward, Yaa Gyasi, John Le Carre, and others like them who had actually found a way to craft an artistic career that pays the bills.  Ah well, one of these days ...

What I'd like to do all day.  In this picture, the computer actually has technical work on its screen, but let's just pretend that it really is displaying a short story or poem in progress.  The cat in this picture is mine ...

A Short Spring Break, and a Few More Observations on Precarity

I have a ton of things that need to get done in realspace, so I will need to take a break from blogging for a couple of weeks at least.  However, rest assured that there is yet much to say on the subject of precarity.  Note also that rampant inequality has led to a kind of precarity among large corporations.  In the first months of 2023, a number of high profile businesses have suffered bankruptcy, including Bed Bath & Beyond.  This year may be rather brutal for large retail chains.  

One odd thing I have noticed is that the rollout of electric cars by the major automakers has largely been aimed at the luxury market.  Most EV's are therefore priced over $30,000 - in some cases well over $30,000 - which puts them out of reach of large numbers of ordinary people.  Indeed, one such automaker's electric vehicles have a starting price of $73,000.  Most electric vehicle manufacturers (including traditional automakers who have started their own electric vehicle product lines) have thus become similar to other aspirational manufacturers and retailers who are aiming to make large profits from the market of potential luxury buyers.  However, this seems to me to be a sketchy strategy due to the fact that the pool of such buyers is shrinking, while the much larger pool of people who can't afford luxury is rapidly expanding.  The Ford Motor Company has already gotten its fingers burned by pursuing this strategy.  What we are seeing here is therefore yet another symptom of the insanity of trying to pursue infinite profit growth in a finite economy.  It will be interesting to see how things develop as time passes.

The Educated Precariat - A Preview

It is now nearly time to consider a particular subset of the precariat, namely, those people who have college degrees yet who have been forced into precarious employment - especially, those who are in low-wage jobs.  In this consideration we will move beyond the United States to look at the surplus of college graduates and the lack of appropriate employment for these graduates as a global phenomenon.  We will find that among the ranks of these are coffee shop baristas with graduate training in fields such as psychology as well as technical professionals hired by temp agencies and the legions of adjunct professors at public and private universities throughout the United States.  We will consider the underemployed college graduate in both American, European and Chinese contexts, and compare these to the ranks of underemployed graduates in the developing world.  We will also try to examine the phenomenon of college graduate precarity as it exists in Russia.  However, examining the Russian case may prove difficult if one wants a recent and accurate snapshot, due to the fact that the regime of Vladimir Putin has been trying as hard as possible over the last few years to patch up the fig leaf dress which Russia has sewn to cover up its putrid nakedness.  (In fact, it has become much easier to obtain an accurate picture of daily life for ordinary people in China than in Russia.  China is actually more open and honest!)

Today's post will ask some preliminary questions.  First, how did we get to this present place in which a four-year or advanced college degree is no longer a guarantee of stable, middle-class employment?  To answer this question, we will need to answer the following questions:

• What was the original purpose of college?  Note that the word "college" comes from the Latin word collegium, defined by Wiktionary as "colleagueship (connection of associates, colleagues, etc.", guild, corporation, company, ... (persons united by the same office or calling or living by some common set of rules), college (several senses), school ..."
• What did the world's first colleges look like?  You may not know this, but one of the world's oldest continuously operating universities is the University of Ez-Zitouna, which was founded in Tunisia on the African Continent.  What was the mission of the world's first and earliest universities, and how was that mission funded and carried out?  How did the roles of education and research interact?
• What was the origin of the system of public universities in the United States?  (For instance, what was the role of the presidency of Abraham Lincoln in the birth of American public universities?)
• What are the origins of the for-profit college or university, and how did these institutions cause the purpose of college to mutate over time?
• How has the decline in public and private funding for basic research affected the employment landscape for academics?  (You may not know this, but the United States no longer has any major corporately-funded laboratories dedicated to pure research.  Bell Labs, which was responsible for the discovery of radio astronomy and many other scientific breakthroughs, is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Nokia, a Finnish corporation.)
• What is the impact of declining numbers of youth and declining college enrollment on universities and colleges?
• How will the defunding of public colleges and universities affect the future of those nations such as the United States which pursue rabidly conservative "free-market" principles?  See, for instance, "Modeling research universities: Predicting probable futures of public vs. private and large vs. small research universities", 2018.
• What can college-educated members of the precariat (especially those college-educated who have been historically marginalized, such as people of color) do both individually and collectively to create a better situation for themselves?  For the present-day contraction of opportunities for the college-educated is being orchestrated by the present masters of our society in an attempt to maintain and amplify existing inequality.  What steps can we therefore take to create our own alternative spaces of collective self-reliance?

I hope to answer these questions (maybe with a little help from some friends) during the next few posts in this series.  I'd like to end with something that's somewhat related to this series of posts and to other posts which I've written for this blog over the last four or five years, namely, another link to a short fiction story which I recently enjoyed.  The name of the story is "Tempus Fugit" and the author is Ketty Steward.