And So Resolved

I don't have any gospel of my own. Postwar, and the early pages of Bloodlands, have revealed a truth to me: I am an atheist. (I have recently realized this.) I don't believe the arc of the universe bends towards justice. I don't even believe in an arc. I believe in chaos. I believe powerful people who think they can make Utopia out of chaos should be watched closely. I don't know that it all ends badly. But I think it probably does.

I'm also not a cynic. I think that those of use who reject divinity, who understand that there is no order, there is no arc, that we are night travelers on a great tundra, that stars can't guide us, will understand that the only work that will matter, will be the work done by us. Or perhaps not. Maybe the very myths I decry are necessary for that work. I don't know. But history is a brawny refutation for that religion brings morality. And I now feel myself more historian than journalist.
Ta-Nehisi Coates "The Myth Of Western Civilization"

Mr. Coates is neither friend nor acquaintance. For me, he is simply a columnist, although a very good one. Therefore I have no insight into his life before he concluded that the divine was unreal. Part of me hopes that he didn't feel the need to force himself to relinqush a long-cherished faith. Although I have never possessed on of my own, I understand that it can be a traumatic loss, and the world has enough sorrow as it is.

I am uncertain that, in the grand scheme of things, that any of the work that we do will matter, in any real sense. Its consequences may ripple through the generations that follow us, but what was done may almost always be undone. Still, I do it anyway. I brace myself against the universe and push in the direction that I think it should bend, because I think I know what Justice looks like, even if I doubt that I have any real hope of pushing the whole of existence towards it. Lacking a divine purpose, I create what I think should be from the scattered peices of both what is and what has been imagined; and while I am never quite satisfied with the puzzle that I have assembled, I will defend its versimilitude with the world that I see around me. I do the work, uncertain as I am of both the goal that I work towards and the possibility that I can even reach it, because it strikes me as required. The fact that there isn't an objective rightness that can be created doesn't release me from an interior need to create a world that I think is better than the one I currently perceive.

Before reading Mr. Coates today, I had jokingly decided to resolve to be anxious and easily distracted - to go for the "easy A," as it were. But now, I think that I will resolve to keep my mind on the work that I have set for myself, no matter how impossible it is. And to remember that the world as I understand it to be is not the world as it truly is; I must always be open to new ways of seeing and thinking and experiencing. While I will set my sense of empathy against any revealed standards of justice and good, it is important that I never shirk from doing so - I am not perfect in this regard, and many heads are better than one.

So I note with amusement that from having read an online column I have rededicated myself to a task that I'm fairly certain is manifestly impossible as my resolution for the new year. It's not the dumbest thing I've ever done. And I'm pretty sure that it's not the best. But I see no reason to let that stop me.

Demapathy

Someone, I think that it may have been James Fallows, once noted that China does, after a fashion, have a form of democracy. It's rooted in the fact that with a population of over a billion people, the Chinese Communist Party could never hope to put down a widespread popular uprising. And so while they can get away with things that we in the United States find over-the-top, if they push it far enough that the torches and pitchforks come out, it's game over.

I think, to a different degree, the same is true here in the United States. People may not have high approval ratings for the government, but the number of people who are upset enough about the way things are going to actively protest against it is fairly small, and the group of people willing to take up arms is effectively zero.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.*

What's interesting about this is that it basically says that the Constitution is means to an end. And one of the things that perhaps we miss in our day-to-day lives is that most of the things that we do are means to various ends. The American public is, rightly or wrongly, notoriously disengaged from the politic processes that run the country. And while there is a lot of hand-wringing about this, among good-government types, the fact of the matter is that most people don't care because their ends that they are working towards don't require a better and more responsive government than the one we currently have. In other words, they don't see a need to get out the torches and pitchforks (or in a lot of cases, even simply vote) to achieve their ends.

While H. L. Mencken identified the whole aim of practical politics keeping the population fearful and thus desirous of political leadership, I would submit that a this should be expanded to include keeping the enough of the populace just affluent enough that they have something substantial to lose in the case of a sharp social upheaval and the maintenance of that affluence just easy enough that people don't have an incentive to question what needs to be done in service of that maintenance. The rest takes care of itself, and the abstract ideals that people often claim to support can be set aside. American government is, in effect, a kludge, and one that works just well enough to get by without stepping on enough toes that the organizational effort required to displace (let alone fix it) it becomes rational. And generally speaking, the incentives line up to keep things that way. And therefore, until those incentives change, little else will.

*If you were a child in the 1970s, you have to sing this part. But you can leave out "of the United States," since it's easier that way.

Whitewash

The unspoken thing here is that the reason Americans aren’t more outraged or guilt-ridden is that the people dying are poor brown people—many of them in a tragic irony are classified as narcos so governments can claim it's just gang-on-gang violence.

Erik Vance "Cocaine Is Evil"

While it's nearly a matter of faith that the only people outside of the United States that White Americans care about are other White people, I don't think that this is at all accurate. And so for me, it's a tired old cliché, designed to try and guilt White America (because, apparently, the rest of us are either paragons of caring for Brown people, or simply don't matter) into caring about poor non-White people in other countries.

Good luck with that.

For starters, many Americans can just barely identify with other Americans of the same ethnicity who are of different socioeconomic backgrounds. While disasters may get people to rush to open their wallets, the day-to-day grind of poverty that exists in the United States barely registers for people who don't have to deal with it on a daily basis. You don't have to be a (relatively) wealthy expatriate to live in a bubble that insulates you from other people's realities. And given that, the idea that somehow, the average WASP would be keen on ending the cocaine trade if it happened to be operating out of England or Austria rather than Mexico takes on an even more ludicrous tone.

And, television portrayals notwithstanding, not everyone in Mexico is "Brown." There are White people there, too. (After all, there's a reason why Hispanics are commonly divided into "White" and "Non-White.") Surely some number of them have been killed due to some level of involvement in, or proximity to, the drug trade. (Or, simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time.) Surely, if what it took to generate public support for doing more about drugs was simply pictures of dead White people, Mexico could come up with some.

The fact of the matter is that it's unlikely that the average American who does cocaine concerns themselves any more with what it takes for that cocaine to get to them than the average American cares about how oil and natural gas are produced. And while the death toll in the fracking fields may not be anywhere near that of the trafficking corridors, it is rising. There may be people who anticipate a wave of outrage and guilt over the White Americans who never go home again, but I'm not one of them.

And Then He Said

The conversation doesn't end here. Not by a long shot.

CFO tells CEO: We institute Differentiation into our annual reviews and identify skills development as one of the primary criteria that people will be judged on. Then we remove the low performers on that scale and hire in new people to replace them. We take the money that would have gone into the budget for employee development and use some of it to hire people away from our competitors, give some it back to shareholders to goose the stock price and we split what's left over.

CEO: Deal.

Now, my point with this isn't to indulge some passion for cynicism. It's to point out that things aren't as simple as they can seem. The graphic that leads this post (which I can't be certain is correctly attributed), and a few variations on it, have been making the rounds of social media (I encountered a couple of them on LinkedIn) because it fits into a narrative that many people want to believe - that they're factors in whether their companies succeed or fail. But the binary choice that it presents, that companies either invest in their employees or be stuck with them as-is, is a false dilemma. And people who have climbed the corporate ladder to the "C-Suite," even if it's only because they created the company in their basement, are often smarter people than to be corralled into such a black-and-white way of looking at the world. But more importantly, they tend to understand what they're doing. Sure, companies get it wrong at times. And it's likely that many enterprises could, in fact, do better for themselves (at least in absolute terms) by investing in their employees to a greater degree than they do now. But the central conflict originally identified, what happens when employees take that investment and parley it into gains for themselves elsewhere, has been a topic of conversation in my circles for my entire adult life.

The question of whether a business trains for the skills they want, hires them from a company that has trained them or simply places the onus on the employee to purchase their own professional training has many more moving peices than any simple text graphic can capture. And whether or not we understand the nuances of it all, the Powers That Be have to understand them. And they act on them. When we understand them for ourselves, we can better understand, and appreciate, those actions.

Without Looking Back

"[Washington] state's largest newspaper urged the machinists to take the new [Boeing] deal, apparently subscribing to the theory that extortion is the new compromise."
John Levesque, "Flying South" Seattle Business January 2014 issue.

Compromise is more than two parties reaching an agreement that benefits them both, even if it doesn't give either side everything that they may have wanted. Compromise is generally two parties reaching an agreement that benefits them both, even if it doesn't give either side everything that they may have wanted because it's the best option available to either of them.

Boeing can turn to what is effectively extortion (demanding that the machinists union give back pension and health benefits that had been granted in earlier negotiations) because, and everyone knows this, they have a much better Best Alternative To Negotiated Agreement than the machinists do (even if the machinists' union sees the situation differently). By the same token, the Washington state legislature has, in Levesque's words: "offered the biggest tax break ever registered by the Institute of Servility and Submissiveness" because they perceive (correctly or not) that Boeing going somewhere else will hurt them as much or more than it will hurt Boeing. And in a zero-sum game, where the jobs that remain in the Puget Sound area aren't available to bolster economies and tax revenues in other parts of the country, Boeing is in a position to say "let's you and him fight."

One of the truisms of the modern world is that you can't go to someone as a supplicant and expect to be treated as an equal. Beggars, it has been noted, can't be choosers. Workers who are reduced to begging for the opportunity to support themselves and governments that must plead for taxable workers - parties that don't have the option of walking away - are going to be extorted because that's the way the system is set up. You can't negotiate with someone who knows that they hold a better hand that you do. They're going to extort you. That's the way the game is played.