assumptions – Stones and Flowers

To be here, on this mountain slope in Yukon, was not easy. Most certainly, it was worth whatever effort was required.

It is true that “convenience” is not a verb, not even an intransitive one. It might well be intransigent, though, in its subtle and unstoppable destruction of a society that once fostered kindness in our simple interactions with those who offered us a service.

I begin with an anecdote from my earliest teaching days. As a new sessional lecturer in the English Department of the University of Saskatchewan back in the days before personal computers sprouted in every office, I was deeply grateful—almost every day—to the secretarial staff in the department office. I told them which textbooks I wanted to use, and they ordered them for me, made sure that I got a free desk copy for my own use, and submitted the list to the bookstore. How that all happened, I don’t know. I do know that we discussed my choices, and I was reassured that all would be well. And it was so. I was free to prepare the actual teaching.

Near the end of the term, I submitted my typed copy of the final exam (some faculty turned in hand-written copies) to the secretaries for transformation into officially printed copies. Once I had finished marking the final exams, I filled in students’ final grades into the paper form supplied by the secretaries and then received by them. How those grade numbers arrived in the Administration Building was not my affair. I could pay attention to whatever student issues came up, such as deferred exams or questions about the next term.

Less than a decade later, during which I did the course work for my doctoral degree, I began teaching again, this time for a different college. I was informed, crisply, that I had to contact book publishers myself for any desk copies I needed, and I was responsible for sending my text list to the book store. After all, everyone now had her/his own computer and email address and could “conveniently” make whatever arrangements were necessary. Besides, the lone secretary in the office had many instructors to deal with and couldn’t be expected to provide that kind of service.

If I had thought that having to order my own books was a nuisance (yes, I know this smacks of privilege), that was because I hadn’t yet discovered that I was now also responsible for submitting grades directly to the Administration Office, using whatever software program had been designed for that exam period. My last phrase is deliberate: seemingly every time I had to submit grades, whether at Christmas or in late spring, the program had been changed and I had to learn a new interface. Hours and hours in the busiest season of academia were spent attempting to figure out what miniscule error I might have made that prompted the computer program to refuse my submission yet again. I thought about the hundreds of faculty on campus, each one sitting alone in front of a computer screen, swearing helplessly because the IT department had imagined that more “upgrades” were needed.

I will spare my readers the details of the day that my word processing program was updated, without prior notice, just as I was in the midst of writing a conference paper, with the deadline looming. For one entire awful afternoon, I couldn’t figure out how to access any of my files. I wished all kinds of horrible disasters upon the tech people responsible for my terror that I had lost all of the work of the previous weeks. Which one of them, I wondered, would submit willingly to have some stranger enter their home in their absence and rearrange, totally and irrevocably, their entire kitchen with all its contents—dishes, food stuffs, appliances? Would they not protest such a violation of their space in the name of “convenience”? Yet we poor, un-technically minded teachers and researchers had to submit not only to the monumental inconvenience of learning how to manage a new program but also to subtle implications that we were foolishly resisting progress or that we simply weren’t very clever.

I am grateful beyond measure to be retired now and freed from the tyranny of supposedly convenient technological enhancements to the act of teaching.

On the shores of a lake along the Alaska Highway, content with being there.

Unfortunately I am still repeatedly learning helplessness because of the illusory goal of convenience. And here I move from the classroom to the city street. As a farm girl, I had learned how to parallel park using strategically placed straw bales (the small rectangular ones, not the humungous ones that now dot the prairie). What was much easier to learn was how to pay for downtown parking in the big city.

Every car I ever drove, for decades, had a coin purse readily available. Putting coins in a meter was simple, even on cold winter days. Discovering that someone else had left time on the meter was delightful. If a meter was stuck and refused to accept more coins, that was not a problem for me. The meter reader would discover that malfunction before issuing a ticket.

Such simplicity is now gone. I still remember the day when I, now newly retired, planned to meet a friend on campus for coffee and discovered that new parking meters required me to use my phone to pay. There was no slot for coins. I did have a cell phone by that time, but it wasn’t yet a “smart phone.” And if I had had a smart phone, I doubt that I would have been equally smart in its use. I had no choice but to get back into my car, drive away to some neighbouring residential street that still had free parking and then walk back several blocks, now late for my meeting.

That helpless feeling has recurred repeatedly in the last years, as one form of “pay station” gives way to yet another version. In winter I loathe taking off my gloves to try to punch in my license plate number on an icy screen of some sort that half the time doesn’t work in the cold. That’s after I have walked a half a block in the opposite direction I wanted, just to find that pay station. Some of them still take coins, thank goodness, but I foresee a time when that option will also disappear. I will either cease going downtown altogether (go ahead, City Hall, whine about how people don’t come downtown enough) or simply refuse to pay for parking. At some point, I will doubtless get a ticket. Perhaps then I can actually find a person in City Hall and speak out against the relentless drive to keep changing technology in order to keep the tech dept. busy, and be damned to the vulnerable in the population.

I knew, at some intellectual level, that getting older would have disadvantages and that I would face an accumulation of losses. I had not reckoned with the soul-destroying helplessness that would accompany seemingly minor losses. Because the relentless drive for “convenience” (don’t ask for whose) inevitably eliminates personal interactions (think about the soullessness of online shopping or the maddening experiences of self-checkouts), the helplessness felt by the left-behind people is all the more acute. It’s one thing to have to ask someone for help. It’s another to find oneself alone with no one around to ask for help. No one, that is, except a disembodied voice from another country who finally speaks to me after I have listened through several menus and pushed numbers on my phone. And then I may not even be able to understand that disembodied voice.

If I once imagined that the elder years would be spent thinking about huge questions about meaning and focusing on deepening relationships, I have been disabused. We are instead called upon, repeatedly, to learn new technology in order to accomplish once simple tasks. I don’t even want to contemplate what it will be like to try to negotiate complex health issues when every institution has been incorporated into some rats’ nest of online documentation. All that “convenience” of being able to book an appointment online (instead of speaking directly to a kindly receptionist) comes at a high cost.

I suppose that I can look forward to hiring a young person with some suitable training to be my personal guide through the coming, hyper-convenient world. Oh, wait, that won’t be a young person, will it? It will doubtless be a robot, of inscrutable age.

“Convenience and efficiency are not virtues: efficiency is a tool to make money, and convenience lures us into spending it, often foolishly and for no good purpose.”

Photo of a car and a small backpack tent next to a picnic table. It is a camping site in the forest next to a lake. — Neither the getting here nor the staying here was convenient, yet the beauty and stillness of the place lingers in my memory.

Photo of large rock in foreground with the brown colors of autumn in the background.

My Stones and flowers blog was never intended to be overtly political, although I should have known that the love of beauty is not separate from the rest of human life. Furthermore, the care of our earth has always been political, albeit not in the current sense of partisan warfare and competition for public approval. Politics in its basic meaning is “the art of managing the affairs of people who live in proximity and share resources”; or “the art and science of government.” In terms of such broad definitions, almost everything we do is political, since we do not live in isolation.

That being said, I do think that the language of politics these days has become toxic enough that it is past time to examine carefully some of the assumptions that lie beneath our unquestioned positions. If we want to survive the coming weeks in North America with at least some integrity and sanity remaining, we could begin by declaring openly what we take for granted.

Assumption 1: government is bad, while business (of all sorts) is good, hence, the more government regulations we have, the worse off we’ll be.

Those who subscribe to this belief that government is inherently bad often preface the word “government” with “intrusive.” I live in a province where this belief is widespread; agricultural communities, with their typical stance of self-sufficiency and determined independence, often (sometimes for good reasons) deride government officials as interfering and annoying.

There is much to admire in that rural pride and creative problem-solving, especially since farming communities can be astonishingly generous in their assistance of one another. Yet something bothers me about an automatic dismissal of government as bad.

Since government is run by human beings and businesses are also run by human beings, there is no reason whatsoever to suppose that one is inevitably corrupt and the other trustworthy—whichever way you choose to apply those attributes. Government offices (at all levels) are often populated by good and decent people who strive to do what is best for as many people as possible; the same can be said of places of business. Both spheres can also inflict much suffering and injustice, and we don’t need to look far to find examples. To make a general statement about either is illogical and unrealistic.

Besides, governments change; businesses change ownership. In a democracy, we have more direct influence in government changes but we can also influence some changes in businesses through our buying choices. Thus it is far better to pay attention to specific actions and consequences than to simply apply automatic labels. In fact, pay a great deal of attention and make sure that both governments and businesses are strictly regulated and independently monitored. Make it as hard as possible to get away with corruption of all sorts in both systems.

Assumption 2: Because government is by nature always inefficient, private businesses should be contracted to meet as many human needs as absolutely possible. About the only institution that government should provide is military defence, and even that can (and should?) be privatized as much as possible.

Before I comment on this assumption, I want to point out that there’s yet another assumption underlying this one that really needs to be examined.

Assumption 3: Efficiency is an ultimate good and should be sought after without question. Waste of time, waste of money, waste of resources—all criminal (metaphorically at least if not actually).

Since the efficiency of any action or policy is measured in relation to the goals of actions and policies, we have to return to that second assumption and ask questions about the purpose of government and the purpose of business.

Businesses, from massive corporations to small family farms and craft markets, can be made more efficient because their primary purpose is to make money. They have additional purposes, of course, such as meeting the needs of their immediate communities, developing and using the skills of the owners and workers, paying for the resources required by the creativity of owners and workers, taking care of the environment, etc. Add in what delightful goals you wish. Some profits will have to be made, though, in order to achieve those additional goals. Interestingly, too zealous a focus on money and/or efficiency is likely to sabotage those goals.

The purpose of government, however, is entirely different. Its only goal should be to take care of its people, all of its people. If that sounds startling and ridiculously idealistic, let’s take a step back. The purpose of government is to create enough order and predictability to make it possible for people to take care of themselves, beginning with the basic needs of survival. Whatever form of government you imagine, from feudal landlords and monarchies to modern dictatorships, and including various forms of cooperation and/or democracy, the purpose of government is to establish and keep enough order to provide what people need to flourish.

If that still sounds idealistic—we know very well that plenty of governments of all sorts have not taken and are not taking care of their people—it helps to remember that even the worst, most brutally selfish dictator or drug lord will be better off in the long run with satisfied, happily productive people than with angry, starving people, even if only in terms of personal security. At a very basic level, people want their governments to defend them from outside threats, establish predictable and dependable ownership of property, and make it possible for them to earn their living. As soon as the goal of government becomes making money, whether for an aristocratic class. or for a single individual, or for a clutch of oligarchs, it has become corrupt and no longer fulfills its only rightful purpose.

Efficiency has nothing whatever to do with the act of caring for people. Anyone who has ever been a parent or looked after small children knows that being efficient is impossible. Anyone who has cared for elderly parents understands that beyond slight changes here and there, efficiency isn’t the point. In fact, a focus on being efficient puts some other goal in place of the compassion and patience required to give care.

Is all of the above over-simplified? Yes, definitely. Both business and government are far more complex than what I’ve suggested here. However, we need to start somewhere in our thinking, if we choose not to just yell insults. Paying attention to assumptions is a place to start, both our own assumptions and the assumptions of all those others we have derided as fools for thinking differently than we do.

A second step, which is related, is to pay attention to the words used to talk about those crucial assumptions. As George Orwell so astutely noted in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” a misuse of language indicates either fuzzy thinking or nefarious intentions or, more likely, both. To take one egregious example: a “Department of Government Efficiency” is by its very title and supposed purpose revealed as illegitimate. Subsequent information about the performance of said new department indicates that efficiency was never actually the point, but merely a distraction, a mask. It’s worth asking just what the purpose was.

It may feel like trying to nail porridge to the wall, but let’s keep asking questions about assumptions and keep insisting that words be clear and consistent.

Language becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. (George Orwell)

Stones and Flowers

Category: assumptions

Convenienced into Helplessness

Declaring Our Givens