My friend Ed Wischmeyer commented astutely on my previous post on useless resources (you can read his comment here). He got me thinking a lot more about what I had written, and in particular I got to thinking about what, exactly, was I trying to criticize about resources? So I replied, and in the process ended up writing another post on the subject:
Yes, I do see all the positive ways of seeing “resources”, and, indeed, if all people did was to recognize their talents and use them for the glory of God, this world would be a much better place indeed! 
Admittedly, what I’m trying to get at here is slightly out of left field, and is a combination of two criticisms: (1) a criticism of our constant evaluation of what is useful and what is not; and (2) a criticism of the pressure to “manage and control”.
The first criticism comes from a reaction against “functionalism” - the idea that everything has to have some kind of function. This kind of thinking has no place for things that do not have any function - unless some way can be found to assign some function to them. So, for example, “painting” would be considered to have no function, unless someone was able to convincingly state the value of art and why painting has a positive function in society, perhaps by highlighting its therapeutic function, or its cathartic function, or its expressive function, and maybe eventually its monetary function.
The second criticism comes from a reaction against “consumerism” in general and “mechanization” as a dependent thought process stemming from consumerist tendencies. In a society that increasingly values consuming goods as a central activity, human interaction becomes more impersonal and more centered around exchange of goods or services based on monetized value. Supply and demand of goods and services drive everything about societal and social life, to the extent that even care for the invalid or the elderly has become a monetized service sector industry today.
What started out as a barter mechanism for the exchange of material goods has become a barter mechanism for the exchange of our very souls.
When everyone is so entrenched in the dominant thinking patterns of consumerism, there is a subconscious tendency to micromanage all our activities and evaluate them in the light of how efficient we are in consuming our goods: what is the cheapest price we can pay for some service? What is the shortest track we can take to get to a particular destination (or to achieve a particular career objective)?
On the tails of consumerism come two particularly insidious beasts: “mechanization” and “positivism”. The quicker and cheaper we can produce, the better and faster we can consume, so we become a society focused on mechanizing every aspect of our lives. We either develop technology to do things for us - which we then out-source to be made by some other country, mechanizing THEIR society as a result - or we mechanize our own daily lives to be “more productive.” We willingly subject ourselves to the tyranny of “Personal Digital Assistants” who do more disruption than assistance. Dinnertimes become fragmented by the frequent incursion of work, entertainment, and scheduled activities, to the extent that we simply nod along when KFC airs a commercial exhorting us to “get out of the kitchen and stop by a KFC for a wholesome home-style meal on the go!”
Of course, in a society where we have become consumers, where our very identity is caught up in consumerism (when all the news articles refer to us as “consumers” and when our spending is tracked on the “consumer spending index” and when presidential candidates are referred to as “consumer advocates” and the most valuable resource is “Consumer Reports”), then we look at everything as something to be consumed: our friends, our relatives, our neighbors, our coworkers, all become part of a system where each person is trying to function as the most productive consumer they can be.
Which leads to a necessary development of “positivism” - a way to measure everything scientifically and provide objective metrics by which different things can be evaluated critically. We measure everything, because, as consumers, we demand the right to have the choice of deciding for ourselves which product is best for us, and for us to make that choice we demand objective metrics that evaluate our products for us. Everything has a measurable index associated with it these days: everyone asks you to fill out a survey after you have consumed their product, from KFC to the hospital, and everything has a user-review index system of one to five stars.
If it is not measurable then it is not worth measuring.
All of this colors how we see our very lives: when everything around us is constantly being measured and evaluated and judged based on how productive it is in a system of consumption, we ourselves develop an inner system of calibrating our selves constantly to how well we conform to our surroundings. We then feel guilty if we are not productive enough, if we are being outspent by someone else with more money, if we cannot do something as efficiently as the young whippersnapper in the next cubicle who has a crack-berry and has MATLAB on his cellphone.
Because measurements and evaluations are all ways that we use to manage our consumption and production efficiently. We want to make sure that we are investing our time and efforts wisely, efficiently, for the best use for the greatest benefit. We develop elaborate systems of justifying or quantifying benefits - some of which are cultural while some are counter-cultural. Even the ones that run counter to consumerism, such as willingly caring for an invalid, we feel the need to justify somehow in terms of the matrix of consumption of resources.
This leads to a rampant culture of management in our society - everyone becomes a manager, and everyone is constantly being managed by someone else, according to some arbitrary system of management paradigms and objectives. Corporations become “organizations” with “core values” and “quarterly objectives” that all management layers “synchronize” with and integrate their workforces accordingly. Even toddlers have figured out how to manage their parents. And parents are managed by coaches’ schedules.
If something does not align with our core values, or our yearly objectives, then it does not fit on our schedules.
And that’s what I am criticizing
May 3rd, 2008 at 10:01 am
“Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.”
– Sydney J. Harris
“That which has been is that which will be,
And that which has been done is that which will be done.
So there is nothing new under the sun.”
– Ecclesiastes 1:9
So, indeed, are these thoughts and scribblings - they are merely amateurish rehashings of the ideas and criticisms of Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Marx, Georg Lukacs, Aldous Huxley, and Noam Chomsky.
As I have been reading these authors, I’ve been reworking their basic ideas into terms I can see and understand today, so my ideas here are just restatements
For me it has been strange to know that these minds have thought through these problems of society at least a hundred years ago, and I did not encounter a single one of them in my 30 years of “highly educated” experience until now.
Because they are useless.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:41 am
Hari,
1. I wrote something like this in 1965.
2. You are describing the emerging Fourth World- Asia, China, etc.
3. Expenses rise to meet income: but can spendingy decrease to meet income?
4. Who said “Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.?”
5. People with money rarely notice those with less; those with less always notice those with more.
6. There may be more variables and constants than you propose…, say, identy being defined not simply by what one has but also by one’s context, relationships, self-esteem, vie de joie ( that’s “joy of life” if you forget your Yiddish).
7. NEVER forget the contribution of fine wine and micro-brewery beer!
Abdul
May 4th, 2008 at 10:58 am
Gary, I am not proposing any system of variables and constants
I am actively criticizing ANY system that tries to define identity in terms of variables and constants! 
There will always be something missing from such systematic approaches to life.
I agree, identity indeed should be defined by much much more than just what one has - but that’s not reality as expressed by material culture all around us today. Our context is in terms of materialism and consumption, our relationships are all about material obsessions, our self-esteem is tied to how much in demand we are, and our joy of life is tied to the latest must-have trend.
And so long as we continue to tie our identity to consumption this way, through our language and through our ways of thinking, in terms of productivity and usefulness and efficiency, we will always struggle with the increasing mechanization and dehumanization of our social lives.
Even if we try to see identity as something deeper, culture around us is ready to label such pursuits as “spiritual”, “transcendental”, “saintly”, “self-realization”, or, in other words, “not normal”. There is the pressure to ascetize and hermetize and occultize people who want to live a non-consumer lifestyle - we call them “earthy crunchy”, “tree-huggers”, “plant worshippers”, and all such manner of dismissive terms instead of seriously valuing their efforts to be truly human instead of just another credit card holder. So-called “popular culture”, as constructed by commercial interests who want us to keep buying goods and services, continues to manufacture music, ads, news, shows, sports and movies that emphasize the value of being a productive consumer in order to truly be “successful” in today’s “progressive modern society”.
This kind of criticism is not new, right? So why has it not changed culture yet? Why are we exporting such “progressive” cultural trends and fashions to the rest of the world while dismissing the rest of the world’s concerns at the ills wrought by our rampant consumption?