Mike Sturm

19 Jan 2016

I read an excellent piece by John Metta on Medium today, and it re-kindled some embers in my mind about the Civil Rights movement which have been long cooled. Metta’s piece has numerous quotable passages, but this one gets at the essence of what is kind of irksome about most of America’s treatment of the Movement, and the assignment of its mascot, Dr. King:

That is what Martin Luther King has become: a trope that can center the hard work of White America. Martin Luther King’s importance is that he helped White America reach their salvation of racial equality….This MLK day, like every other, we will hear people wax poetic and canonize the Magical Martin Luther King in tribute. It’s a lie. That canonization serves only one purpose: to devalue Blackness. It’s a way to ignore Black intelligence and Black agency.

This point about the “salvation” of White America is not to be passed over. We cannot, as Americans, forget that the narrative of this country was written by white people — white men specifically, and it continues to be that way. There is now just a glimpse of black, brown, and female authorship finding its way into the story; but that is very limited, and still heavily edited by the hand of White Male America.

That editorship includes not only (as Metta points out) the whitewashing (pun intended) of Dr. King’s image and story, but also the actual selection of Dr. King as the representative figure in the Civil Rights Movement. At an even deeper level, the actual naming of the movement itself is an act of white editorship. It’s not called the “Black Liberation Movement” or something else, but rather abstracted so as to draw away from acknowledging the issue that was (and is) essential to the movement. It was about black people being recognized as equals, not about everyone being recognized as equal. It is no different than attempts to water down “Black Lives Matter” by saying that “All Lives Matter”. It’s a cheap (but effective) rhetorical trick; and it continues to be played every third Monday in January.

To put a finer point on it, and to be perfectly clear: I fully recognize that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. deserves the utmost respect as a warrior for black advancement in America. However, I believe that his exclusive selection as the figurehead of the movement, as well as the naming of the movement — striking any mention of race from it — is an instance of exclusion that is tinged with a reluctance of White America to give up the reins of power.

I have always felt that the selection of Dr. King has tended to come at the cost of fully recognizing Malcolm X. Actually, it’s more than that, Malcolm has more been discounted than he has been “not fully recognized”. I recall being raised (as a young white boy, in a nearly all-white school in the midwest) to regard Malcolm X as basically a version of the noble Dr. King, but with too many violent and hooligan tendencies to be taken seriously. Is this anecdotal? Sure. But it was part of the narrative that I carried around with me as young white man until college — when I learned that it was a mischaracterization.

The truth is, Malcolm X was exactly what America needed. His Journey from a literal hooligan in the streets of Detroit, to a strict Muslim rounding up followers in Chicago, to a repentant man going on the haaj, and writing a wonderful meditation on the brotherhood of mankind. Malcolm lived through a full intellectual journey, evolving in much the same way that Americans’ thoughts needed to evolve. We can still learn a lot from his journey — and yet, sadly, we fail to.

So, every Martin Luther King Day, I give the requisite reverence, but still hold out hope. I settle for Martin, but I hope for Malcolm.

Godspeed.

Originally published at www.mikesturm.net.

image courtesy of enoshop.co.uk

01 Jan 2016

The year has ended–2015, that is–and thus begins the mass (if short-lived) migration of people from their well-worn habits into new and interesting realms of self-improvement and experimentation. How fun! Some naysayers bemoan the practice of new year’s resolutions, and their reasoning is sound. After all, if you really want to get better, why wait until a calendar date to begin that journey? Life is short; why not begin the process of being better now? I get it. But there is something about January 1st of a given year that serves as a helpful anchor, psychologically speaking, for a new habit, or walking a better path. If when early February comes, and you’ve kept your resolution–whatever it is–you can easily remember how long you’ve been doing x; since the beginning of the year! Along with that comes an easy motivator–you’ve gone this far on your quest, you’ve got momentum, so you can overcome whatever current struggle with which you find yourself engaged. Sure, maybe that is just a psychological misstep, and there is no real advantage to resolving to change as the year’s number changes. But, even if that is the case, it seems to be embedded into our minds–perhaps into our collective consciousness, so why not leverage it to help become better?

All that preamble is to say this: I have a resolution this year. Actually, I have a few resolutions this year, but there is one in particular that I would consider public in nature. I hereby resolve to do the following, as much as I am able, in 2016:

Each week in 2016, I will be writing an analysis/interpretation of one of Eno and Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies.

What are These Things, Now?

Great question.

The Oblique Strategies were created in 1975 by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. Some very useful writing about them and their storied past can be found here. The gist of the project, though, is this (straight from one of the men himself):

“These cards evolved from our separate working procedures. It was one of the many cases during the friendship that he [Peter Schmidt] and I where we arrived at a working position at almost exactly the same time and almost in exactly the same words. There were times when we hadn’t seen each other for a few months at a time sometimes, and upon remeeting or exchanging letters, we would find that we were in the same intellectual position — which was quite different from the one we’d been in prior to that.

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation — particularly in studios — tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case — it’s just the most obvious and — apparently — reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategies was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt this attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt that attitude.”[1]

Who of us hasn’t found ourselves in the situation Eno mentions? Who among us has been stuck, and/or up against the wall, knowing that we need to approach the problem from a different angle? I’ll answer for you: most of us.

What Will I do With Them?

My aim is this: each week, I’ll pick a random oblique strategy from the deck,[2]and write a post in which I analyze and interpret it in the most generally applicable way of doing so. The goal is twofold:

1. I believe that these strategies are useful, and I want to share them with the world. What better way to do that then the internet?
2. Having to write an analysis of one strategy each week will surely help to push me creatively, as much as I hope that reading said analysis will help readers be more creative.

Why Should Anyone Care?

This brings me to a very important point, which will likely resurface as I write about these. There is a lot of talk (and writing) about innovation. But innovation is a term centering around results, not around how those results come to be. Take a look at the definition:

in·no·vate
 ˈinəˌvāt/
 verb

1.make changes in something established, especially by introducing new methods, ideas, or products.”the company’s failure to diversify and innovate competitively”
 2. introduce (something new, especially a product).”innovating new products, developing existing ones”

Every company (or nearly every company) is asking for innovation as just another in a long list of required “skills”. For a while, one can probably get away with “innovating” by taking ideas from another job, industry, or person, and introducing them in their current role. That will only work for so long. After that, you need to create ideas and solutions. You can ask someone to innovate all you like, but what you’re really asking for is for someone to be creative–you’re asking them to come up with something new–to create.

I hope that each week, when I look at these strategies, and when people read my writing about them, I create new ideas and things, and help others to do the same. So, here’s hoping for a more creative you and me in 2016. After all, even machines can reason now, so we can’t express our humanity merely by reasoning. Machines, however, still can’t create new ideas from whole cloth (so to speak), like we humans can. So this year, let’s make moves to more fully express what makes us human: creation.

Thanks for reading.

Originally published at mikesturm.net on January 1, 2016.

You’re Going to Let Someone Down, But Take Heart…

Everyone who’s expecting something from you

It’s going to happen today. It will likely happen tomorrow, unless of course you don’t bother to leave the house, or boot up your computer — you’re going to let someone down. Someone was desiring more from you — more money, more time, more attention, better results.

There will be some part of that person who will think to themselves: man, that guy [or girl] is an asshole! But don’t fret. That is okay. Just be the asshole. It is not your job to be liked by all of these people, and in fact, if you actually fulfilled the crazy, unfounded desires of these people, you’d be derailing the most important things that you are trying to do.

You may have read about managing expectations, and you may focus on trying to ensure that all of the people that you touch base with are on the same page as you regarding what to expect. That seems good, right? But there is a problem: people have both expectations and desires — and they are different animals.

People — despite what you communicate to them — are going to continue to hold out hope that they can get more from you — from everybody — than what they expect. They will be let down based on what they hold out hope that you (or others) can do for them. The worst part is, the more you communicate with them to temper their expectations, and the clearer you try to be about that, the more of an asshole you’ll likely seem to be to them.

So here’s the trick: just be an asshole, but the right kind of asshole to the right people.

Be understanding, patient, flexible, and apologetic to your family, friends, and those who show the same traits to you. But to those who don’t give way for you, who aren’t in your inner circle, be clear about what they ought to expect from you, but be okay with coming off as an asshole if they don’t match their desires with their expectations of you. You truly can’t win them all. Be okay with it, and you’ll be okay with what they all think.

Thanks for reading. Godspeed.

Also, am I going to fail because I don’t have an idol?

I was walking out of the lobby of my workplace today, when I spotted a copy of the latest Inc Magazine on the table between the two visitors’ waiting chairs. In big bold letters, the magazine yelled at me: “The Next Steve Jobs”. I paused, thought for a second about what exactly that meant to me, and left work to drive home.

I paused because this was not the first time I’ve seen a nod to the cult of Steve Jobs emblazoned on some print media, or at the top of a blog post (or a Medium post for that matter). Similar cult status seems to drape around the neck of Elon Musk as well. Both gentlemen’s names are the subject matter of numerous articles, headlines, and stories — all seeming to lead us to believe that these men are the pinnacle of achievement. This makes me uncomfortable.

Perhaps it is the residual of my long steeping time in the hot waters of radical politics, and my liberal arts pedigree. Maybe it’s my tendency to be generally skeptical of high praise (even of myself). Whatever the reason, I just get irked at how often names like Jobs and Musk are thrown at me and my generation in a certain way. I just really get irked by it.

Here’s what I think it is: it’s idolatry, and I am angry because I thought that we millennials had killed idolatry. Every other generation had its idols: Carnegie, Patton, John Paul II, Kurt Cobain. As I grew up, I thought our generation was different. I thought that the one good thing we took from the mess that is postmodernist thought was that idols are for suckers. Kill your darlings! and such. But alas, here I stand, having just turned the corner of my thirties, and here I’m being served up the exact idolatry that I thought I had helped to out-and-out refused.

But as I remember something, I begin to smirk…just a little.

You see, this is nothing to be afraid of. This is just the previous two generations’ death rattle as they attempt — for one last time — to do what parents and older siblings do best: point out how well so-and-so across the street is doing; we should be more like him (or her). I was irked in the lobby because I felt that familiar tinge of revolt as my parents (embodied by Inc Magazine) told me about some other person who was on their way to being another idol, up in the hall of heroes that I thought I had vandalized past restoration. But I can take comfort in knowing that it’s just old age and the realization of mortality taking hold. As the boomers and the Xers begin to age out of relevance in the business world, they’re throwing their weight around again, making a show of their idols, and worse, their practice of idol worship.

I hope that I don’t have to tell my fellow millennials that we will have none of this.

Steve Jobs did very well and built a strong company. Elon Musk is doing well, and is building multiple strong companies. But we do not need to build a makeshift cult around these men. They were men — men we can learn from — but men nonetheless. Speaking of learning, here’s the one thing we can very quickly learn from both of them; the business world still isn’t very friendly for women and people of color. So there’s that.

So, Boomers, Xers, I don’t want your idols thrown in my face. I don’t buy into the concept; never have, never will. Furthermore, our generation was built upon the rejection of the concept of idols. You can keep writing what you’re writing, but please know, it will be taken with a grain of salt.

Image Credit: USA Network/Anonymous Content

It’s rare that a word with a very negative connotation gets a second chance, but the term “hack” is a prime example of that rare occurrence. The word “hack” used to describe a person — ostensibly some sort of professional — who was terrible at what they did. In fact, a very telling definition, courtesy of Random House, reads as follows:

hack

(hæk)

n.

A person, esp. a professional, who surrenders individual independence, integrity, belief, etc., in return for money or other reward.

Other definitions include an old, ill-bred horse, the activity of driving a taxi for money, or a writer who writes low-level drivel for money. None of them are positive.

Even the the verb definitions sound negative:

v.i.

1. to make rough cuts or notches.

2. to cough harshly, usually in short and repeated spasms.

Rough cuts? Harsh coughs? Spasms? Not sounding desirable. And yet, the term “hack” is now enshrined in positive associations. And yet now, “hacks” are much sought-after tricks, shortcuts, tiny little solutions to myriad problems in life, love, and business, offered up to get you what you want more quickly and easily.

If you are so inclined, you could spend years combing through the search results for webpages where the word “hack” is a prime constituent. It seems that everyone is looking for a hack, and many more are writing about them, and their supposed glory.

But I am skeptical.

I used to be a wholehearted supporter of hacks, especially “lifehacks” — those little tricks that promise huge returns for even less work. I longed for more and more neat little shortcuts to do more, get more, be more. Alas, I am coming to find that these tricks are just that — tricks, as in they trick you into thinking something that is not true. They trick you into thinking that you somehow exploited a loophole in the universe, and jumped ahead to the front of the line, without having to wait like everyone else. Unfortunately, this is not true.

In essence, these little hacks trick you (and others) into thinking that you have somehow altered the nature of life, when in reality, you’ve only hacked your perception of it. You have only hacked yourself.

What Hacks Really Are

To be more specific, in using a “hack”, you’ve only really done one of two things. You either:

1. Renegotiated or eliminated the commitment to — or desire for — a result, putting in its place some other — usually more quickly/easily achieved result.
2. Acting as if effort or cost has been cut out, when it has actually been deferred or shifted elsewhere.

In either case, you have not figured out a shorter distance than a straight line between A and B ; you have NOT changed the terrain. Rather, you have changed your perception of the terrain—you have either found the straight line between A and B where others were previously taking a zig-zagging path — or you have realized that though you and most others thought that B was the desired destination point, it’s actually some less distant point,C, which is easier to reach.

Why Hacking is Dangerous

So, given all of this, hacking can be dangerous, and I think that our obsession with it may in fact already be putting us in danger.

You see, the more we continue to measure the success of people, products, and businesses by how much they hack, innovate, and disrupt, the more we may just be working toward the wrong goals. In addition — and perhaps more dangerously — I think we run the very real risk of eliminating our capacity for patiently and slowly doing good work. That being the case, I am scared that we may also be running the risk of coming to value very few of the things we create.

It’s a simple thing, really: you expend 1/2 the amount of time and energy on something, you’re bound to care about 1/2 as much about it. It’s not necessarily a law, but I challenge you to look at examples of it in your life — they’re there, if you pay attention. Sure, how much you value something is heavily a function of how useful it is, but just think of this: the constant innovation and hacking we do makes the usefulness of products and services go obsolete at a much faster rate. I valued my Samsung Blackjack at one time; I wouldn’t even use it as a doorstop now.

Value concerns aside, hacks and workarounds are dangerous because — quite simply — you can’t fool the universe. You will expend the necessary effort, one way or another — at one time or another. Maybe not even you, but the effort will be expended by someone, somewhere down the line.

Case in point:

1. The Sweet Tooth Hack: You can’t fool your body with artificial sweeteners — you will crave sweets after your Diet Coke, and expend that much more energy restraining yourself form tearing into that chocolate cake once you’ve guzzled your diet beverage.
2. The Cheapskate Hack: You can’t fool the IRS with elaborate loopholes and tax shelters — without making way more work for yourself, and an immense psychological burden.
3. The Fidelity Hack: You can’t fool someone close to you by trying to hide the truth and sneak around behind their back — without spending just as much effort as would have been spent if you were to be upfront and tell the truth.

These are just 3 cases, but ones like them abound. There is some amount of work that must be done for each objective one has. There are inefficient ways to do things, for sure. There are also efficient ways to do things, up to a point. Past that, there are ways to complete an objective which do get one the desired objective with what seems like less work. That work, however, goes somewhere else — either to someone else or to sometime other than now.

I fear that now, perhaps we are taking on that extra effort that we thought we were circumventing as we hacked and innovated away, and that it will someday become too much for us to bear. Take for example the financial crisis that came to a head in 2007 and 2008. Draw up whatever narrative you like of the whole thing — who were the heroes, the villains, the victims, etc. One thing will have to be present in any account of the crisis: it would not have happened as it did without the financial “innovations” and “hacks” known as credit default swaps and derivatives. These instances of financial wizardry barely passed the sniff test of shrewd investors like Warren Buffett who, 5 years before the meltdown, described them as no less than “financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal.”

I see a similar “hack” gone awry in the new “gig economy” that has cropped up in Uber, Zirtual, Air BnB, and the like. We’re trying to take shortcuts in building a market, and it’s going to bite us in the behind. As it tends to happen, a few people laugh all the way to the bank, and many others cry into their pillows, wake up, and get a job as a Wal-Mart greeter, rather than retire. I’m no futurist, so you can take this grave prediction with a grain of salt. Suffice it to say, I see a familiar pattern emerging. It may be merely coincidental, and not of the same form; time will tell.

If you managed to read this whole thing, congratulations and thank you.

For those who prefer to skim for heading type, below is the takeaway:

Hacking is dangerous because we believe we are changing or bending the rules of reality, but we are not. Rather, in many cases, we are merely shifting around the effort we think we’re saving or settling for a lower quality outcome.

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Don’t Be so Naive

Succeeding at something great is difficult, and often complicated. If it weren’t, there would be a lot more people doing it. In fact, you would probably be doing it, rather than surfing for articles that guarantee that if you read them, you’ll succeed.

Just think of it this way: if success is really the result of one simple trick, that must mean that everyone else is either too stupid to read articles like the those, or too lazy to follow the “simple trick”. That seems a bit far-fetched, doesn’t it?

So here’s the simple trick you’ve been looking for to guarantee success: understand there is no one simple trick. There is no hack, there is no thing that Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and {insert name of eccentric entrepreneurial idol here} all did to gain success and fame. Once you begin to understand and accept that, perhaps you can get moving.

But, But, I read….

Yeah, I read Think and Grow Rich, and I read The Secret, and The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and whatever Malcolm Gladwell book you want to heave out in cocktail conversation. Remember, those were written by people. Each person has a subjective viewpoint of reality, particular experiences, and try as they might, they can’t penetrate the veil of other people’s private experiences. So how can they know that their one secret is really the universal hack to prosperity? They can’t. They don’t. They mean well, and are undoubtedly trying to help, but if they get you to believe that it’s all that simple, they set you up for infinite frustration.

The fact is, each person has a different path to prosperity. The paths vary in complexity and difficulty. Some easily navigate to notoriety and riches; some scratch and claw, and eventually make it to seven figures and their name on a bestseller list. Some go to work from 9 to 5, drive home, and enjoy weekends with their family. Wait, what? What was that last one? Is that last person prosperous?

I don’t know, you tell me.

Who made you think that you have to be the next Steve Jobs to succeed? Probably Walter Isaacson. Allow me to blow your mind. You define what it means to succeed. This is unequivocally true because success is by definition to acheive some goal. A goal is something that is set or accepted by you. Therefore, you decide what it means to succeed. If you have set impossibly high goals, fail to acheive them, and are a miserable as a result, consider adjusting your goal, at least for now. If the goal was set externally by someone else, and your failure to achieve it keeps you up at night, you’re not off the hook — you accepted and internalized that goal. You can just as easily renegotiate that goal — if you are willing to work at that.

Just Keep at It

Other than the “one trick” I provided above, you can employ one other “hack” to success and prosperity. If you absolutely must keep an audacious goal for yourself, then make it one such that the extremely hard work needed to accomplish it is fulfilling in and of itself. This way, when you (inevitably) fail again and again to achieve your goal throughout your tenure of trying (as nearly everyone does), two things remain true:

1. You got fulfillment out of the process of working toward your goal.
2. You will also enjoy the work of picking up the pieces after failing, and trying all over again.

That, folks, is called future-proofing your goals. So if you’re attempting to begin a startup, only to sell it and move to the Bahamas and lounge in your hammock, at least make the company one you’d enjoy running even if it failed. The Hammock is not where the joy comes from, the work is.

Anyone who has been through the process of applying to PhD programs can attest to the fact that so much of the process makes you question everything about yourself. You start questioning your intelligence, your credentials, your love for the subject you’re applying to study, your employability once you get your doctorate (if you get your doctorate), and so on. The process is exhausting. Once you send off your last application, you leave your fate in the hands of the gods (here, that is the admission committees at the various departments at which you applied).

In late December of last year, I submitted applications to philosophy programs under pretty unusual circumstances. I am nearly a decade older than most people going into PhD programs. I have a wife and a 1 year-old child. I have a job that pays decently, and has opportunity for advancement, insurance and a 401(k). I have, by all accounts, economic security. And yet, I was perfectly willing to give that all up in order to chase the dream of a tenured position as an academic philosopher. I applied to quite a few schools, and spent the next few months agonizing over my inbox. I ended up receiving 3 offers with full funding — one of them from a Philosophical Gourmet top 50 program.

I turned them all down.

You see, I began the application process very (probably overly) optimistic about the job market in academia. I believed in myself, my abilities, and I took to heart the encouragements of my mentors in academia, using them to propel through my increasingly quixotic venture.

My wife and I began to discuss what would be involved, looked at how much money we’d lose in selling our home when we moved, and went through the death of my grandmother right before the April 15th program offer deadline. I began seriously questioning the decision that I had previously made.

I am not sure what I expected when I applied to PhD programs. But when April rolled around, I began to ask myself what kind of future I was signing up for, and how different it would be from numerous other paths. After all, horror stories abound about the process of getting a PhD, and the terrible job market afterward.

At best, I could hope to be turning 40, with a 9-year-old daughter and whatever other children we may have, still making less than I was at age 30, and with no job security.

There was also a high probability that we’d have to pick up and move at least a few more times before I landed anything like a tenured position. This would only serve to disrupt my child’s (and future children’s) life, and in service of what? A short-term visiting professorship at a small state university? In a field belonging to a consistently disrespected and maligned academic area of study (the humanities)?

I Won’t Sink With the Academic Ship

Becoming a father has changed my thinking quite quickly and radically. I want a great career for myself — one where I will make a real impact with my ideas and my words. However, I can’t in good conscience subject my family to the kind of risks involved with an academy that is basically crumbling, and would continue to do so under our feet. I decided that I would not build a house on loose sand.

I have faith in myself, my abilities, and my enthusiasm, but I don’t necessarily have faith that people at academic institutions who are being told to hire more and more adjuncts and offer fewer tenured positions will have the energy to go to bat for me so that I can get job security.

I’m also not sure that they have the energy to go to bat for most other PhDs, either. This is because I am quite unsure that most of the people responsible for making education policy really recognize the difference between mindless job-training and truly enriching education. With thinking like theirs, we’ll end up killing the liberal arts within the next generation — and it will be an incredible tragedy.

The academy will likely never provide me with security; the only thing it could ever promise me is an outlet for creative and innovative thinking and writing, as well as the ability to talk to others about those innovative and creative thoughts.

I already have job security, at the non-academic job I’ve had for the past 5 years. I am already in a position where I seem to have a bright future, and some of my ideas matter. I have opportunities to come up with innovative and creative ideas, and I can talk about them with people who care about them. I can’t throw that away and face a very daunting, impoverished immediate future just because it’s not exactly what I had dreamed of, in the exact environment that I dreamed about. At best it would be selfish, and at worst, it would be foolish and shortsighted (whether I had a family or not). It took fatherhood to help me realize that, but I’m glad I have now, rather than 6 years from now, when I have a PhD, but I’m struggling to make ends meet for my family, and I struggle to get anything published and recognized.

My Advice

As a mentor of mine in academia said, philosophy is in my DNA, so I’ll always be doing it in some way. I am positive that that is true, and what is more, I see no reason why I must be pigeon-holed by an increasingly exclusive academy in order to pursue wisdom in earnest. Sure, my time may be divided (with the partition devoted to philosophy being quite slim), and I may never publish prolifically and be the next John Rawls. But I can certainly continue my earnest pursuit of wisdom, and it most certainly can be done outside of the academy.

What’s more, I can garner an audience of similarly-minded people, who can give me feedback, and collaborate. Technology has made this easier than it has ever been, and I intend to leverage that technology against the ever-disappearing opportunities in academia.

When i declined the offers I received, I felt a small sense of loss, to be sure. But people lose things all the time. If one is fortunate enough to be able to choose what they will lose, as a sacrificial step toward an immediate better life for them and their family, well that is good fortune indeed. Very few losses are of that kind.

My advice to those looking to throw themselves headlong into the academy is to ask yourself two questions:

1. Am I willing to live on $25,000 per year for the next 20 years of my life, and have only year-to-year contract gigs at small colleges?
2. Is there no other way I could ever be doing all the things I love and making a living other than having a PhD and teaching?

I don’t believe the answer to that second question can ever really be “no”. Because of that, I would advise that those not in the STEM fields look outside the academy — as much as is possible — to find work about which they can be passionate and *gasp* that they can make some money doing.

I have probably come across as a bit jaded, and perhaps I am, but please don’t misunderstand my message. I don’t mean to discourage those who wish to study for a living. To do that is a very noble and worthwhile pursuit, and society needs scholars — it always will, whether it wants to admit it or not. It will just simply continue to lose respect from most people outside of academia unless it can be direclty traced to creating some successful commodity or commoditized service. Accept that, and be prepared to face it head-on.

A Final Note

I won’t be getting a PhD in philosophy, but I will never stop learning, and I will never stop doing the things that motivated me to aim for that degree. Those who think that the academy is their only refuge from a dizzying capitalistic jungle, take heart — the business world is not as bad as you think. There are places where your enthusiasm for learning, thinking, and teaching can be of service. They won’t be easy to find, but when you find them, you might just find yourself way more appreciated than you would be in a job market where good positions keep getting whittled down to nothing.

Often times our ideals go unrealized as we move through life. There is no shame in continuing to strive for them, but there is shame in dismissing other avenues when you’ve done little to explore them. The academy may be shrinking from what it once was, but perhaps there is still a place for us thinkers, if we work to make it.

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Image courtesy of distancelearning.org

Dear 2015 High School Graduates,

This year, about 3.3 million of you will be tossing your caps up in the air, celebrating having made it through the gauntlet that is secondary education. About 66% of you will, in the span of a few short months, become college students. Many of you are excited about this, and you should be. For centuries, young people have been going to colleges and universities with the same attitude that settlers of the American West did in the 19th century (minus the genocidal tendencies, one would hope), an attitude of optimism and hunger. Students sat down at their first class ready scarf down all of the knowledge that they could with the aim of becoming wiser, better people, of preparing for a long life ahead. I felt this way back in 2001, when I entered my freshman year at a large public university in Illinois. But my experience teaching community college very recently leads me to suspect that very few of you feel the same way about your freshman year. I suspect that I know why this is.

College used to be a real marketplace of ideas, a place where different intellectual disciplines populated a bazaar in which they vied for the affection and interest of the students. Students were dropped off at said bazaar each August, encouraged to strike out and navigate for themselves. For a long time, each discipline was given more or less the same space in the proverbial bazaar; that is not so much the case anymore.

More and more, the 3P Posse (parents, politicians, and pundits) are pushing out merchants from the bazaar. States continue to cut funding to the non-STEM portions of public universities and community colleges. Universities and community colleges are consolidating or eliminating academic departments altogether. An increasing amount of official communication from colleges and universities espouses a mission of preparing students for careers. The message (at least to me) is clear: no time for finding yourself and trying to become well-rounded, get in, get out, and get in a job — preferably one that helps grow the prized sectors of the economy. Society is not interested in your overall well-being, just how well you are prepared to work (again, preferably in certain sectors).

Perhaps none of this is surprising to you, and that would just go to show me how out of touch I am. But I hold out hope that many of you are still looking forward to college as something more than just getting ready to work at a tech giant, an engineering firm, or what have you.

With that in mind, I give you, the graduating class of 2015, 4 things to remember as you creep into postsecondary life:

1. Your parents, politicians, and business leaders are trying to reduce your college education to mere job training, slicing off and throwing away those portions of it that can serve to help you be a happier, wiser, more well-rounded and thoughtful person; don’t let them.
2. College was meant to rest upon a core of liberal education, as in an education that liberates you. The system has failed to ensure that you receive this core. It is now incumbent upon you to ensure that you do.
3. It will be very rare that you have a better chance than college to really sit down and think about where you want to be. Take full advantage of it.
4. For the 34% of you that won’t be going to college, I don’t mean to exclude you. The current higher education funding structure has done that aleady. Best of luck in the rat race, and try not to end up in the criminal justice system.

I hope that these words invigorate you enough to carry out the duty that is incumbent upon each generation as they begin their respective journeys. That duty manifests as a choice. This is now your world to either accept or reject, and change to your liking. That acceptance or change happens now, when your parents and their generation begin to hand over the reigns to you, and you decide whether or not the status quo is good enough for you. I will give you a hint; it is not, and it should never be.

Good Luck and Godspeed,

Mike Sturm

What follows is most likely a self-indulgent rant, and may reveal a level of narcissism that not even its author will be comfortable with (a discomfort similar to ending a sentence with a preposition, perhaps).

I want my words to matter. Actually, I think what I want is more than that; I want my ideas to matter, and I want the words that elucidate those ideas to matter. I will stop short of saying that I want my words and ideas to create change; I would be happy to merely contribute meaningfully to a debate, even if no direct action comes from said debate. I believe in the power of discourse—both written and spoken—and I want my thoughts to be a part of meaningful discourse.

I actually do not think that this want of mine is unique. I have a hunch that everyone shares this same want. It may even be a need. If I could posit something bolder, I would say that it may underlie the adoption of democracy in the Western world, even in cases where it very clearly lacks the tendency to make swift and effective decisions for mutual benefit. This may be because the benefit of being heard, of having your words mean something, outweighs the “mutual benefit” of a top-down decision made by the state. It may be that there just is no way to justify ignoring the need that people have to be part of the discourse, no matter what the supposed benefit.

Let’s assume all this is the case. Let’s assume that the underlying need to have one’s words and ideas matter is to be respected—perhaps at any cost. Let’s also assume that democratic governance at one time fulfilled this need (for most, and at least in theory). Is that need fulfilled today by mere representative democracy? Is the impoverished family in the big city, living 10 to a home, see a direct route for their ideas to flow to the public discourse? Does the single mother working 2 jobs and ensuring her kids can do their extracurricular activities have a clear sense that her ideas have a place in our national debate? I get a sense that the answer is “no.” I don’t think, though, that this answer is a negative one because of any kind of intentional oppression or conspiratorial silencing. I think this type of thing happens when people go about private affairs, expand, grow, and keep the state apparatus mostly the same. More specifically, I think that the more media outlets there are, the more people feel that need to be heard, because in a way, the conversation is going on loudly, and without them.

All of the above is why I think that our focus needs to shift a bit, in the media, in political activities, and even in daily life. Our interactions should center less around just trying to get policies made and get change through the halls of power. We ought to be focusing on ensuring that there is a real feeling of inclusion amoung the polity. The rest, I think, will come organically after that. But what do I know? As you can see, this writing isn’t published anywhere but here, and who will really see it? I guess I at least have my words here now; if only I could find a way to make them matter…

I regularly fail in my attempts to not write polemics, so what follows is another such failure. I have been working in the private sector for almost 5 years now, in a very red (read: conservative) part of the Midwest that is just a stone’s throw from a very blue (read: liberal) city. My alignment tends to be pretty far left, but in my private sector industrial job, I have rarely opened the kimono (so to speak) enough to reveal my fairly progressive views. Recent talk at my workplace about the continuing disputes between the Pacific Maritime Association and the ILWU has hit a kind of crescendo, and it has tended to be polemical talk.

The basic party line assessment here at the industrial distributor where I work is that unions are corrupt, promote inefficiency, and are an obstacle to productivity and good business. It’s amazing how short-sighted this assessment is, and how much it misses the point. I say this for a few reasons.

First of all, I will make a concession. Perhaps some unions—or even a lot of them—battle corruption. But that is no different than nearly any other sector in the marketplace. I will merely gesture toward the financial sector and let you make the connections yourself.

Secondly, unions may promote inefficiency for certain businesses, but this is missing the point entirely. Efficiency can only be a meaningful metric based upon desired outcome or output. A union may not promote efficiency of your business’s desired output, but that is because they have an entirely (and indeed opposite) output. The desired output of your business, as it pertains to labor, is to get the most output from labor while incurring the lowest cost for labor. In other words, a company is efficient with regards to labor if it can pay less in wages while increasing or holding steady their output. A union has no interest in doing this; it’s interest is in getting its members the highest compensation and employment security package it can. In terms of doing that, unions tend to promote efficiency quite a bit.

Thirdly, and related to my second criticism, unions only stifle productivity of businesses because they do not share the goals that businesses (most businesses, at least) do. Unions are concerned with ensuring sustainable and well-paid employment for their members. They are private organizations, just as businesses are, but their goals are opposed to the goals of many of those businesses. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but the general implication is this: for a person to say that unions are useless because they don’t promote industry goals is like a soccer coach saying that the opposing team’s goalie is useless because he keeps stopping the ball from going in. Unions are not supposed to work for the benefit of businesses, so to criticize them for not doing so is to offer up a hollow criticism at best.

As a final point—more of a question, really—I wonder about the concept of productivity on a world macroeconomic scale. Why is it so important that every company continue to sell more and more of their product or service? Maybe it’s because we all know that as companies produce more stuff, there will be more stuff for everyone, and that’s good, right? Well, actually it’s technically not important that companies produce more stuff. What is important is revenue, and if a company can bring in more revenue by selling fewer products, it has every reason to do so. So productivity is a concern for each firm, and if that comes by way of decreasing the productivity of another firm, then so be it. When viewed this way, it becomes increasingly quixotic to argue that we as a whole world should be concerned with boosting the productivity of firms. At the end of the day, increased productivity just doesn’t translate into increased equitable wealth; it usually translates into increased unequally concentrated wealth—more and more each year in fact. That being the case, we can argue that unions getting in the way of increased productivity is hurting us, but without someone like them to ensure a fair an equitable distribution to workers, we are making a moot point.