ETFRC Featured Reading on this topic:

The Wonder of Presence: And the Way of Meditative Inquiry
by Toni Packer and Michael Atkinson

This is a book largely concerned with Zen meditation, and with the concept of Truth as it
appears from the Zennist point of view.  However, the book is beautiful, and the authors
make the book a wonderful testimony on making inquiry and the search for truth one's
entire life, not merely something one engages in occassionally as a hobby -- which is, alas,
the way that the very small number of people in our culture who approach scientific and
philosophic inquiry at all approach it.  What is outlined here rings true for me: I certainly
cannot separate my "research" from my "life."  It's all grist for the mill.  Am I simply flattering
myself when I wonder what our world would look like if everyone's life was an ongoing
process of inquiry, of learning more and more, of trying to approximate truth as nearly as
we are able given our tremendous physical limitations?  I sincerely hope not.

The Place of Thought in Human Life

What, exactly, is "The Eaton T. Fores Research Center?"  Is it a mammoth complex of buildings and corridors, some with the the bizarre smells of organic chemical synthesis wafting from them; other departments far more limited in their need for equipment: the philosophy department, for example, owning only one item, its trash can?  Is The Eaton T. Fores Research Center something you can give money to and then write it off on your taxes next year?  Is it an official place where people "work," resentfully watching the clock until their eight-hour daily sentences are over?  Well, not exactly.  The idea of "The Eaton T. Fores Research Center" was originally simply something of an in-joke on certain Usenet newsgroups: whenever I wanted to describe my personal, subjective reactions to psychotropic compounds, in the venerable and extremely old tradition of psychopharmacology, I would report my subjective responses to said compounds.  My mode of discussing this was sufficiently convoluted that I actually congratulate anyone who was able to follow it.  I often spoke of the experimental problems caused by a sample size of one, thus allowing, statistically, zero degrees of freedom.  The work suffered from dozens of other kinds of confound as well, as genuine psychopharmacology always has and always will.  Especially interesting were the occassional references I would make to the "custom wetware system" employed at the ETFRC which had been "designed specifically for the evaluation of subjective states."  I'd hate to be a casual reader of Usenet and accidentally plough into such insane levels of verbosity. 

Life And Work

But there really was a point here, or perphaps there.   The point is that our lives, and our "research," whatever it may be, are not separable.  American culture has it that work and play are totally seperate realms of life: "we Americans play hard because we work hard."  I find this almost infinitely sad.  Leaving aside the heartbreaking idea that enjoying ourselves can only be justified if the vacation results in a net increase in "productivity" relative to pre-vacation levels  -- what are we here for, anyway? -- we see that, right from the start, this idea precludes the possibility that our work might actually consist in something interesting enough that we would enjoy pursuing it, that we would grow through it, that our work and our life would be the same thing.   It seems that in modern society, only a very tiny and very lucky few attain to this happy state.  Many of us ring registers at K-Mart all day, or something equally well-suited to human potential, and, when we go home, we don't think about the mind-body problem.  We are, in short, "human resources," not human beings.  The deepest wish I have for my work is that someone, somewhere, will think this over and realize that a sane life doesn't consist of radically separated parts -- "work" and "play" -- which have absolutely no relationship to one another.  As we grow to reclaim the natural intellectual hunger that should have always been ours, had it not been crushed out of us by "education," we feel the need to effect this integration ever more strongly.  What exactly is my research?   What does the ETFRC do?  Essentially, anything I'm into, and which I feel may have value in terms of helping me towards an understanding of the fundamental questions about existence, and the problems of human existence, and the particular problems of my existence -- questions which one or another segment of humanity has been trying to unravel since we became capable of thoughts more complex than "gimme your food."  I intend to keep following these thoughts, and publishing them and my reactions to them, here -- just following them wherever they lead me.  That's what my research is.  The immediate goal is for what I "do" and what the ETFRC "does" to become identical.   (Think of the possibilities: my entire life would become one big tax write-off!).   The longer-term goal is to make it a possibility for anyone who is so inclined to stop drawing an artificial line between their "life" and their "work."

Television Toxicity

Of course, big social changes would be required before significant numbers of people could live this way.  People would have to refuse, en masse, to be "human resources" anymore.  People would have to learn how to learn, and then they'd have to learn.  They would need to stop believing that what the television tells them is the bottom-line truth about Reality.  Egads, they might even need to stop watching television.   The watching of television is incompatible with a thoughtful, self-directed life, anyway.  Everyone says, "Yeah, but those commercials don't affect me.   I'm too smart for that."  Right!  The Corporations, which collectively allocate billions of dollars annually to television advertising, must be astonishingly stupid to waste this money year after year on something which -- ask anyone! -- has no effect on anything.  "Don't kid yourself" should be Rule Number One:  The only way that television commercials don't affect you is if you don't watch television.

Television has a horribly toxic message for us.  It destroys minds and souls.  It crafts "human resources."  Please, don't buy into the idea that you were meant to spend your days doing mind-numbingly tedious and entirely meaningless tasks, and then go home and spend your money the way the TV tells you to spend it, in order to "enjoy" yourself!  That's not what it's about.  The fact that you're here means that you have, at a minimum, a sneaking suspicion that something is wrong with the simulation of life we're being sold.  That is a good thing. 

The Potential of Human Consciousness

You're a human being, a glorious creature with a capability for understanding that vastly exceeds that of any other organism on the planet, although we have no idea why this should be.  We talk about "thinking," although in all probability all higher animals can think.  So, what's exceptional about our consciousness?  At least two things: first, our consciousness isn't simply impressions formed by watching the world and feeling our internal states, along with memories of these impressions; and second, there is an aspect of self-referentiality to our consciousness, which makes possible things like self-consciousness, which is the basis for a whole abstract world filled with uniquely human thought.  The first characteristic is due to language, and discussions of the supposed centrality of language to consciousness and thought would, and possibly should, fill a garbage truck  We almost never stop talking to ourselves.  There is an unbelievable, unceasing flow of babble constantly at the center of our consciousness.  Much spiritual work, in fact, is directed at the supposedly miraculous events that follow from silencing this endless commentary.   Whatever it may or may not accomplish, it must be granted immediately that shutting down The Chatterbox Within is a long, long way from being an easy or easily accomplished goal.  And similarly, the accomplishment of this goal is attended by changes in consciousness that are a very long way from being trivial.

Zugumba Replies

The preceding reflections evoked the following thoughts from ETFRC resident philosopher H. Vincent Zugumba, which I reproduce here in their entirety, after which they will be addressed:

On the one hand, there are menial tasks to be done in civilization; on the other, theses tasks are "dehumanizing".  In a wider perspective, there has been progress.  Think of the world 2000 years ago - there were no great civilizations without slavery.  One of the simple reasons is that no civilization could think of how to support itself without slave labor.  Evil as we may think of slavery today, only a few lone voices brought up the contrary idea (a stable social order without slavery), but no one saw any practical way to eradicate it and preserve social stability.  That problem took 2000 years to solve:  the rise of democracy and capitalism solved the slavery problem (though other problems rear their head, as your essay in progress indicates).

 So there has been progress, but civilization, even  as enlightened as we think we are without slavery, with democracy, with freedoms of different sorts, with prosperity, has not solved the problem of menial tasks.  Hence, we have the euphemism of "human resources".  Our need for people to perform mind-numbing tasks is so great that instead of killing or hiding away people with Down's Syndrome people proudly show that they can live happy lives flipping burgers or emptying trash at nursing homes.  We also feebly "defend our borders" against "illegal aliens" (aka, "human beings").  As Philadelphia's former mayor, Frank Rizzo, once colorfully put it when a college professor said that everyone deserves a college education:  "Somebody's got to wrap the fish, Doc, somebody's got to wrap the fish!".

 So the problem is this:  our social order still depends on menial tasks that don't look anything like play (stable social orders have required other things, too, like strong militaries and rules of exclusion and so on:  issues as important but no relevant to this particular problem).  And, democratic as we feel that everyone should enjoy the good life, we know that people really aren't all that equal outside of political abstractness.  It just so happens that there are people happy to wrap the fish, either because they want to eat and feed their family or because they are happy doing just that (i.e., not too bright).

 This isn't a prescription for halting progress.  But the onus on those who call for revolution is an alternative that works.  History shows that alternatives take ages to take root and, when imposed too quickly, raise other evils (the most obvious recent example is Communism, though history is scattered with violent upheavals of social orders). 

 But humanity needs its prophets who renounce "human resources" in its many guises and voice alternatives for progress.

Considering Zugumba's Thoughts

What of the points Zugumba has made?  As my thoughts seldom turn to the political, critique from our resident philosopher is vitally important, lest my reflections concerning the just society and the good life veer off into poorly thought-out idealism of a sophomoric variety.  For, at a glance, it does indeed seem that there is plenty to go around, and one wonders why the distribution of the fruits of society is so very skewed.  Clearly, history shows progress towards an increasingly equitable  life.  What is it that impedes this progress?

Recall how the science-fiction literature of the 1960s, (especially that of Aurthur C. Clarke), always spoke of technology freeing the human race from toil, giving everyone abundant leisure time.  We were to be scholars, artists, poets, or just lay around if such was our inclination.

Today, many folks I know write that very technology, in the form of computer software which automates, and thus replaces people in, many of the intellectually empty, repetitive tasks associated with commerce and business  .  But the people thus replaced aren't given leisure time where once they reported to work each day, are they?  No, rather the increase in what can be produced at less expense adds fuel to the fire of competition, and while this competition first, seems to have an inexorable, if burtal, logic, and second, does indeed make more effective use of the world's resources, where do the dividends from this increase go?  Those fired are given nothing, they lose their niche in the social order -- indeed, there is no limit to what they might lose -- their lives are the price of a lower cost of labor.  

Is there anything in physical law that says that it must be this way?  Some take economics to reveal lawlike order in the social world that is analogous to the lawlike order in the non-intentional world described by physics -- social Darwinists.  Doesn't this, however, seem a bit of a rationalization, believed as it is most forcefully by its beneficiaries?

Most of the menial tasks of life can be automated right now.  Corporations are doing it -- but far from leisure time increasing, the pace of life becomes ever more frenetic as the competition-driven machine of the economy moves through ever higher gears.  Extrapolating from the present scenario, the future does not look good: the pace of life will soon exceed anything vaguely consistent with human happiness, or even human existence.  People will be broken on a wheel. 

We have everything we need now.  Yet something prevents us from brightening human life, from bringing it to its highest point for everyone.

Is speculating that the greed of a few is the operative factor here really so naive, so adolescent a view of the world?  If it is, how do we know that dismissing it as such isn't another rationalization?  For it is hard to see how a view becomes false in virtue of its being commonly held by young people with a vision of a better world.  Calling a line of thought "adolescent" or "sophomoric" is a stinging rhetorical blast, but where is its logical force?

"You can't change human nature," my dad used to always say.  But shouldn't we be concerned to discover what is meant by "human nature," and exactly why it is supposedly so immutable?

And Zugumba Replies Again

One of our house philosopher's great virtues is his willingness to dispassionately consider objections.  Dr. Zugumba is also seldom guilty of fallacies in his thinking, whether formal or informal.  So again, we ask his response, and as ever, we get a level-headed answer.

A lot of people work in the service sector today.  A lot of those chores are menial and I don't think they can be automated.  For example, a medical assistant or nurse does a lot of menial work.  It may be suitable to who he or she is and he or she may find it satisfying.  No doubt there are times that it is boring (just I often get bored doing what I do).  But on the other hard, there is a more immediate personal satisfaction for the medical assistant in a well-run hospital or practice,  that of being part of a team helping other people.

 Imagine having to be the person changing bed pans in a nursing home or hospital.  It's menial.  It's not something easily automated.  Yes, a machine might do it, but I have witnessed such people take delight in such work, because they stay focused on a higher cause:  helping others.  Even bringing a little joy through conversation to a lonely, aged person whose life is ebbing can be deeply rewarding.

 A century ago factories had hordes of people doing meaningless, repititive tasks.  But they were necessary for the prosperity of society, and it gave them a chance to participate in that prosperity, albeit in a small way.  Those jobs are automated or done by people outside the U.S. today.  Today hordes of people work in cubicles (though not all).  But that's the great problem of society:  this system produces a lot of wealth for many - many more than have ever shared in the prosperity of a society.  It does concentrate large amounts of wealth in the hands of a few, for sure, but I'm sceptical that extreme greed is the only factor that keeps humanity from being at its highest point.  As in all societies, there is an admixture of good and evil, and we choose which evils we're willing to tolerate.... and which we deem necessary.

 Christianity and Buddhism initially grew and spread in societies that were relatively safe due to disciplined and strong armed forces (namely, Roman and Ashokan).  The secure environment and a few educated people allowed such peaceful philosophies to be entertained, since the order of society and freedin from assaults by outsiders were ruthlessly protected.  And the same is true today.  We have prosperity in the US.  We have peace.  And we have a military that can destroy the majority of people on the planet.

 Think about it.  Society contains many ironies.  Or, as my father used to put it, sometimes you have to take the good with the bad.  (Of course, that doesn't mean you shouldn't always strive and work for the good, but that life is an mix of the two).

No Easy Answers

We would like to see a world in which each person had the freedom and the resources to achieve the most complete expression of his or her indivuality possible.  At the same time, human beings always exist within some kind of social matrix.  Society is the creator of civilization, and the womb and carrier of culture.  The direction of these things is always in doubt, and probably, in every age, there has been good cause for alarm at what might be lost in terms of species' historical repository of culture, its ability to continue producing culture, and the value of the individual -- who is, finally, the source of culture -- relative to the value accorded society itself.  Individuals are undoubtedly real; but is "society" an abstraction, like the "audience" that ceases to exist when the performance is over?

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