The Flight Of The Tarnished Superheroes

I've been following Cosmic Connie's blog Whirled Musings lately, and I came across a series of posts about a movie titled Sound of Freedom which was released by Angel Studios this summer.  Angel Studios is an arm of the American evangelical media industry, an industry about which I made a few comments in a recent post.  

The movie purports to document the efforts of Tim Ballard, a Mormon and former employee of the Department of Homeland Security who supposedly formed his own special private organization in order to rescue children from child-trafficking rings.  Both Ballard and the organization he founded are unabashed supporters of the Rethuglican (er, I mean, "Republican") Party and Donald Trump (who "protected" Mexican migrant children at the southern border by violently ripping them from the arms of their parents and throwing them into detention centers where some of them died).  The lead actor in Sound of Freedom is also a rabid Trump supporter and QAnon spokesperson.

The movie is an example of the longstanding strategy of the American right wing, in finding a group of people whom they can brand as monsters while claiming that the champions of the Right (and only they) can and will effectually deal with the monster they have identified.  Now I fully agree with those who say that the present operators of human trafficking rings (especially those which sexually exploit children) are monsters.  But for the Right to claim nowadays that its members are the pure and holy fighters of these monsters is laughable, especially when we see how the recent exposures of the sins of the Right (especially those of the evangelical/Protestant/religious members of the Right) have so severely damaged its credibility.  

This definitely applies to the makers and financial backers of the movie Sound of Freedom.  Let me summarize some of the points made in Connie's posts:

1. Both Tim Ballard and the organization he founded are guilty of factual distortions in their presentation of the problem of child trafficking and of the efforts of their organization in fighting it.
2. These factual distortions have actually made it harder for legitimate governmental organizations to fight child trafficking.
3. Some of the financial backers of Sound of Freedom are themselves involved in child trafficking or have groomed underage minors for sex or have trafficked in illicit drugs.
4. Some of these backers have also committed fraud against government programs.  Among these is Andrew McCubbins, the executive producer for Sound of Freedom, who pleaded guilty to Medicare fraud in the amount of at least $89 million (one source says $100 million) in September 2020, and who was indicted later in 2020 along with other defendants for defrauding the U.S. Government of an additional $4.5 billion in medical billing.  McCubbins has not yet been sentenced and has not yet gone to jail.

If you want all the details concerning these points, please read Connie's posts.  

I guess moviemaking is politics by other means.  (Didn't Clausewitz say that? ... Oh, ... he said it about something other than movies.  My bad!)  But here we are, not even out of the dog days of Summer 2023 and election year campaigning has already begun, courtesy of a movie made by the American religious Right.  As I have frequently already said, the American religious Right is interested in religion solely as a means for advancing white supremacy.  They themselves have no intention of obeying the New Testament.  This is obvious when we see how the white male defenders of "traditional morality" who come from the American Right keep getting caught engaging in pedophilia, fornication, adultery and homosexual behavior themselves.

And this is but one reason why I haven't been to church since March 2020.  Let me be clear about this.  I know that everyone has issues, and that anyone who wants to become a decent person will find himself struggling with his own besetting sins.  That is a tragic consequence of our fallen condition.  I also know that I can't point to others and say that I'm any better than them.  All I can say is that whatever our personal demons, we can band together to support each other in leaving those demons behind.  But when you willfully and deliberately use religion - especially the Bible and the name of Christ - as a political tool for promoting the supremacy of your own people and as a justification to enslave or trash or oppress me - simply because I am not a member of your tribe or skin color or ethnicity - then I say God damn you.  When you portray yourselves as perfect and the perfect upholders of God's holy Law in order to justify your continued oppression of people who haven't done anything to you, I say, to hell with you.  May God punish you not only for not leaving your personal demons behind but also for your hypocrisy in claiming that you and you only are the sole defenders (and thus the sole beneficiaries) of all that is good in the world.  God damn you to hell.

FOTF Is At It Again ...

Focus On The Family (FOTF) is at it again - that is, they are spamming people who don't want their media offerings and who don't support their organization.  FOTF is an American right-wing evangelical organization that has sold its soul to support the Rethuglican - er, I mean, "Republican" party.  On Monday of this week they sent me an email telling me how I could "save children".  I called up their Colorado office and told them in no uncertain terms to take me off their mailing list.  I thought they had agreed to do so, but today I found another email from them in my inbox.  They claim to be a Christian organization, but I guess they have chosen to ignore those parts of the Good Book that say that we're not supposed to tell lies...

By the way, last year the Federal Election Commission allowed political advertising emails to bypass automated spam filters of most email service providers.  This policy change was due to pressure from the Republican Party.  

The Educated Precariat: The Modern University - Birth, Growth, Late-Stage Diseases

This post is a continuation of my series of posts on economic precarity.  As I mentioned in recent posts in this series, we have begun to delve the subject of the educated precariat - that is, those people in the early 21st century 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.  The most recent previous post in this series discussed the origins and evolution of formal education and of the creation of higher education systems in ancient societies.  Here we discovered that these societies left records of the creation and operation of institutions of higher education, and that these institutions served the following purposes:

• The creation of cadres of 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.
• The teaching and research of basic scientific knowledge and skills in such arenas as medicine, mathematics, and astronomy.

This previous post also discussed the widespread distribution of these institutions throughout the world, in the ancient societies that existed on the African continent, in Iran, and in China, as well as the ancient Greek and Byzantine schools.  This point is important, as our present society tends to hold up Europe as the sole source and origin of lasting intellectual inquiry.  This point of view is clearly not valid if one examines the history of other societies.  (See "Ancient Centers of Higher Learning: A Bias In The Comparative History of the University?", Michael A. Peters, January 2019.  Peters also points out the existence of ancient centers of higher learning in India that existed thousands of years before any such institutions in the West.)

Nonetheless, most institutions called "universities" in the 21st century can trace their structure back to the medieval European university as it came into being from the 11th century onward.  So today's post will briefly sketch the origins and motivation for the medieval university.  We will then examine the functions of the medieval university, and how those functions evolved over time to produce the modern research university.  We will close with an examination of how the growth of certain ancillary functions within the university have distorted the mission and focus of the university system.

Origins of the Medieval University

(Sources: "State-Building and the Origin of Universities in Europe, 800-1800", Hollenbach and Pierskalla, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark, October 2022; and Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University, Chapter 1, James Axtell, Princeton University Press, 2016.)

The medieval university arose from the growth experienced in European societies from the eleventh century onward.  This growth included the growth of European populations (with a resulting increase in the number of new towns and cities), and a corresponding growth of trade.  This was accompanied by a growing need in the new parishes of the Roman Catholic Church for advanced training for its new priests and administrators, along with a growing need for trained secular administrators in the newly forming towns, villages, and cities.  The training and education of an administrative class had been formerly performed by monasteries, but these monasteries were unable to provide the increasingly complex and advanced training needed by secular and ecclesiastical administrators from the 12th century onward.

The Church responded to this need by establishing "cathedral schools" for advanced training of its clerics.  From these schools came academics who desired a freer rein in teaching and scholarship than the Church was willing to grant them.  One of these scholars, Peter Abelard, founded his own schools for advanced learning in the twelfth century.  In addition, some of the secular scholars that studied at cathedral schools also went on to found their own schools.  These schools eventually organized themselves into self-governing "guilds of masters and scholars", or studia generale which received and taught aspiring scholars from any locale.  In order to free themselves from the kinds of obligations and interference that both Church and secular authorities imposed on ordinary people, these guilds petitioned both the Pope and the kings of their respective nations for the granting of formal legal autonomy and freedom of operation.  Such formally sanctioned guilds thus became the first medieval universities.  Note that the Catholic Church competed with these universities sometimes by co-opting some of them into its own power structure, and sometimes by founding universities of its own.

The charters granted by either State or Church or both, combined with the organization of these universities as scholastic guilds, produced a unique internal structure and operating environment for the medieval university.  Let's examine that structure and operating environment more closely.

Functions And Structure of the Medieval University

(Sources: ""Ancient Centers of Higher Learning: A Bias In The Comparative History of the University?", Michael A. Peters, Taylor and Francis Group, January 2019; "The Medieval University", J.E. Healey, CCHA, Report, 17 (1950); Wisdom's Workshop: The Rise of the Modern University, Chapter 1, James Axtell, Princeton University Press, 2016.)

The medieval university had the following characteristics:

1. It received students from everywhere and not just its own local region.
2. It engaged in higher learning, going beyond "the Seven Liberal Arts of antiquity and the early Middle Ages" to include the re-discovered teachings and writings of Greek philosophers such as Aristotle as well as Arabic learning.
3. "A significant part of the teaching was done by Masters (teachers with a higher degree)." (Peters, cited above; Healey, cited above.)
4. It was a self-governing, autonomous institution (a corporation run like the craft guilds) with a high degree of control over its budget and expenditures, and complete academic freedom over what degrees were awarded, and to whom.  Indeed, those universities which depended entirely on student tuition had complete control over their own budgets and expenditures. (Axtell, cited above.)  This self-governance was usually exercised entirely by the university faculty, that is, the collection of masters who taught university courses.  However, sometimes, this self-governance was exercised by students, who could choose which masters to hire or fire in addition to their other administrative powers.  (See the University of Bologna, for instance.)  Note that there were no early cases of universities being run by "administrators" who were not directly involved in teaching or learning.  This point will become important later.
5. Its main function was to produce the European equivalent of mandarins and other "professionals to maintain and lead the established social order, secular as well as religious."  (Axtell, cited above.)  Research was not a major function of the medieval university, although the influence of Aristotelian thought on the university curriculum did produce a spirit of inquiry.
6. The individual universities eventually became part of a European university system in which a degree issued by any one university was recognized as valid by any other university and anyone who achieved the degree of master was to be recognized as such by any university and to be allowed to teach at any university without having to undergo further examination.

This medieval system was adequate for times in which the technologies available to European societies evolved relatively slowly.  This is also why although inquiry was encouraged through Aristotelian thinking, research was not a primary university function.  However, the strains in European society produced by the Industrial Revolution forced a reform and transformation of the university into an institution whose main mission is research.  This transformation began in Germany in the 1800's.  Let's examine this in more detail.

The Birth of the Modern Research University

(Sources: The Challenge for Research in Higher Education: Harmonizing Excellence and Utility, Alan W. Lindsay and Ruth T. Neumann, ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports 1988; "The Rise of Academic Laboratory Science: Chemistry and the ‘German Model’ in the Nineteenth Century", History of Universities: Volume XXXIV/1: A Global History of Research Education: Disciplines, Institutions, and Nations, 1840-1950, Chang and Rocke, Oxford University Press, July 2021.)

Although the medieval university system did not deliberately focus on research, the fact is that a large number of scholars who were products (either graduates or professors) of medieval universities went on to do the work that laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution.  These included such figures as Isaac Newton, Leonhard Euler, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.  It can be argued that the contributions of such intellectuals were greatly amplified and expanded by the transformation of the German university system, even though the stated motivations for that transformation were not initially the pursuit of practical scientific knowledge.  According to Lindsay and Neumann (cited above), the reforms of German universities triggered in the 18th and 19th centuries were "based on an acceptance of the view that the purpose of higher education was to advance as well as to preserve and transmit knowledge."  However, another significant motivation for these reforms was the fact that Prussia had been badly humiliated by France during the wars of the early 19th century, and so the German university system was reformed in order to catch up with and pass up the French.

The main reformer was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who stated that 

"Universities should view knowledge as incomplete and so subject to discovery, although full or final knowledge could never be attained.  Further, knowledge was pure and was to

be found deep within the self. It could not be gained merely by the extensive collection of facts. Only knowledge that came from, and could be developed within, the self formed one's character; and it was character and the manner of behaving that was important for the state and for humanity, not merely knowledge and eloquence ..."

In other words, von Humboldt helped to create a system in which universities engaged in the pursuit of new knowledge simply for its own sake, and not merely for any utilitarian ends.  However, it is undeniable that this focus on research for its own sake produced great advances in German science, including chemistry, and that these advances had a number of immediate practical applications.  Those nations whose universities adopted the German model of fostering pure research also began to reap the pragmatic benefits of the discoveries which that research achieved.  This has been the basis of the astonishing technological prowess achieved by the United States in the early and middle decades of the 20th century.  However, the changes in broad American attitudes toward the public good and the maintenance of the public commons have undercut American investments in basic science from the 1970's onward.  This pressure was felt and articulated as far back as 1988, when Lindsay and Neumann wrote that

"Over the last decade, university research has gradually changed its character under the influence of cost pressures, ambivalent public attitudes, and increasingly narrow notions of "utility." The natural sciences have received higher priority, and research has been increasingly concentrated in large teams and centers. The proportion of applied research has increased and closer links with industry developed. These trends have contributed to a weakening of the teaching-research nexus. Relationships with government have been marked by increasing bureaucratization and control. The business community and the government both stress the contribution of university research to national economic and social renewal, but the pattern of postwar development in higher education has brought utility into conflict with excellence, the traditional criterion for funding research. The challenge is to incorporate utility into research policy and funding without compromising the pursuit of excellence."

In other words, American funding and administration of American universities (both public and private) has fallen victim to the same "free-market" conservative ideology that has begun to destroy many other institutions that once served the public good.  The purpose of this destruction has been to continue to concentrate the majority of our societal wealth in the hands of a few capitalist parasites at the top of our collective food chain.  Thus American universities have become cash cows which have unfortunately fallen into a lake full of piranhas.  Let's close with a picture of the feeding frenzy and how universities have tried to cope. 

The Present Day: Administrative Takeover and the University as Cash Cow

The shift in viewpoint of the American university toward a perspective of the university as a business is not entirely new.  In his 1918 book titled The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men, Thorstein Veblen wrote that American universities are 

"... corporations of learning [which] set their affairs in order after the pattern of a well-conducted business concern. In this view the university is conceived as a business house dealing in merchantable knowledge, placed under the governing hand of a captain of erudition, whose office it is to turn the means in hand to account in the largest feasible output. It is a corporation with large funds, and for men biased by their workday training in business affairs it comes as a matter of course to rate the university in terms of investment and turnover. Hence the insistence on business capacity in the executive heads of the

universities, and hence also the extensive range of businesslike duties and powers that

devolve on them."

In other words, even as far back as 1918, American universities were viewed by their administrators as businesses.  (For a look at this process in an Australian context, see "How we got here: The transformation of Australian public universities into for-profit corporations", James Guthrie and Adam Lucas, 2022.)  (BTW, lemme break one thing down for ya: when Veblen uses the term "captain of erudition," what he means is "business executive as college administrator.")

What's more, even as far back as 1918, the function of governing these universities was being moved away from faculty and students, and was being transferred to administrators who had no direct role in either teaching or learning.  Veblen was ruthless in his evaluation of these administrators: "They are needless..."  (That's "needless" as in, "useless"!)  Yet the ranks of college administrators have grown steadily over the decades, at first slowly, then meteorically during the period from the 1970's onward.  I don't have time to write the statistics here (it's late in the day - gotta clean the bathroom and kitchen, and water the vegetables!), but I will leave a list of articles that interested readers can check out themselves if they are curious.  Suffice it to say that the administrative function of modern universities has begun to displace all other functions, hogging resources like a cancerous tumor even as faculty tenure is eliminated, faculty input into university policy is marginalized, faculty pay stagnates or declines, the percentage of adjunct faculty relative to full-time faculty increases, and student tuition (along with student debt) skyrockets.  

It may well be that the growth of the administrative and non-teaching professional sector of university staff has begun to threaten the long-term economic viability of American universities, both public and private.  This would explain two phenomena which I have noticed over the last decade or so and which I identify as possible coping mechanisms: the increasing promotion of university athletic programs (particularly football) in universities which never used to care much about athletics, and the expansion of a bewildering offering of professional graduate degrees and certificates.  I suggest that these professional graduate certificates and degrees are producing a glut of mandarins of the Global North at a time in which the job market for these mandarins is becoming saturated.

What is to be done about these new mandarins and their dwindling job prospects?  One suggestion comes from Peter Turchin, a corpulent Russian academic who has proposed that elites should limit access to higher education lest their less fortunate yet educated underlings become a source of the kind of upheaval and social transformation that destroys the power of these elites.  I can't say that I agree with his moral viewpoint.  I argue that education should be made as widely available as possible precisely because of the power of educated people to transform situations of inequality dominated by entrenched elites.  But for this to occur, ordinary people must regain a sense of the purpose of education in order that they might produce and revive grassroots expressions of that purpose.  More on that in another post.

Additional Sources:

• "Globalization, Neoliberalism, and International Student Enrolments in Higher Education: Expanding Global Interconnectedness and Academic Commodification", pages 32-42
• "Degrees of Change: How New Kinds of Professional Doctorates are Changing Higher Education Institutions"
• Article by Michael Delucchi, Richard Dadzie, Eric Dean, and Xuan Pham in Review of Social Economy, June 2021 (Language warning!)
• "A Bad Bargain: Administrative Bloat and Low Faculty Pay at UDC"
• "How Much is Too Much? Controlling Administrative Costs Through Effective Oversight"
• "Report: IU Athletics generated 13th most revenue nationally in 2022"

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.