Ockham's Razor

I am tying my shoelaces and organizing my papers while the students introduce themselves. Last to do so is the person on my immediate left, Berkowitz, who looks to be about forty-five, and describes himself wittily as an overeducated victim of downsizing.

"I was in hospital administration. I could say I'm a consultant now but I guess I'm actually unemployed," he concludes, laughing. "I'm a victim of your information age."

The forced humour, the bewilderment, the pain and vulnerability all wrapped up in his simple statement touches me. I have seen so many walking wounded just like him; I've created some, and been one of them in my own turn.

I didn't know what to say and I feel my face flush. Finally: "Well, I hope I can offer some ideas that will help you to make some sense of the way the world works these days."

As a hospital administrator, Berkowitz had been part of a bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are all about control. Communication technology is also all about control: we communicate largely in order to exercise control. Machines communicate internally and among one another in order to control their internal processes. There are feedback loops everywhere in machinery, and in society as well, pumping information back through systems in order to control their operations.

Because the roles of bureaucracies and communication technology are identical, they are largely interchangeable. One is expensive and messy, the other is cheap, easy to manage and getting less expensive every day. Which do you choose if the bottom line is your Holy Grail?

Out the door go the managers who contribute nothing but information transfer and storage; in come the machines that can do it faster, cheaper, more efficiently, without complaint. Out the door goes Berkowitz. His department is reorganised into a self-managing work group, linked and supported by information technology. Next on the automation agenda - the work group itself, which can be replicated by nested algorithms: recipes within recipes.

I look at Berkowitz and I think he is like a mustard gas victim in the First World War, the war which was supposed to end wars; the war which was supposed to be over in a few weeks because, thanks to modern science, the impact of military technology was so terrible that it could not be withstood for more than a few days. It was technology not confined to machines and munitions, but which extended to the technique of management of the masses of ordinary men who made up the armies of democratic nations. Nobody stopped to wonder what might happen if both sides had access to this terrible, irresistible technology, which unfortunately was the case. What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object? Trench warfare, and carnage on an historically unprecedented scale.

In our shock and guilt we built magnificent cenotaphs, set aside a day and an hour and a minute each year to remember the sacrifices. Even now we hold poignant, straggling parades in which the survivors can shuffle along and be recognized.

But Berkowitz is not afforded even this much dignity. To be a sacrifice, you must have some intrinsic value, otherwise there is no sacrifice involved, just a shifting, a removal, a replacement.

In the world in which terminology such as "downsizing" and "human resources" and "outplacement" is created and used without irony, values are banished. Not monetary values, of course, but human values, the kind that are not subject to quantification, the kind you can't measure. There is simply no place for them: how can you run a business, let alone an economy, if you're having to deal with "values" that are unquantifiable? Where in your Microsoft spreadsheet is the cell for loyalty or integrity, let alone something as ridiculously subjective as dignity?

So Berkowitz, like the rest of us in the seminar room, like people everywhere, is now a human resource: subcategory "unemployed"; sub-subcategory "retrainable"; sub-sub-subcategory "poorly motivated" or perhaps "highly motivated," I don't know. The point is he is fixable. He can be motivated with the right psychological approach, the right incentives, the right threats; he can be retrained, by which is meant reprogrammed with skills more suitable to current market requirements; he can be reemployed, in theory, though in fact he looks a bit too old. Perhaps if he dyes his hair, dresses younger for interviews, uses eye drops, depilatories, moisturizer. Perhaps if he adjusts.

Erich Fromm wrote that the "adjusted" person in the work world, " is one who has made himself into a commodity, with nothing stable or definitive except his need to please and his readiness to change roles."² To which French philosopher François Perroux added, "Slavery is determined neither by obedience nor the hardness of labour but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing."³ A commodity; a tool. A slave, Aristotle said, is a living tool.

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