Ockham's Razor

What I cannot comprehend is, how did we wind up accepting this notion of people as human resources?

What in God's name is a human resource?

An intelligent piece of meat? An automaton? Are we a kind of sentient cash crop, the way wildlife has become a "renewable resource" in the jargon of government "wildlife managers" and gun lobbyists, to be "harvested" during hunting season?

Or, are we resources in the sense of land and minerals and oil deposits - raw materials for the production processes of the economy? The latter makes more sense; in fact, economists of every stripe, left and right, call labour a "factor of production." Human resources must be raw materials that are (incidentally) human.

Berkowitz is raw material, waiting to be recycled. Maternity wards are filled with raw material, ready for processing and refining into entities that meet the needs of our economic engines. They will be recycled, in their time.

And what purpose do human resources serve, exactly, in the contemporary economy? Why, they fill all the niches that are not yet filled by automated systems, by machines, by computers. Most of those positions are ones that it is not (yet) economic to automate; mostly jobs that involve creative thought, or dexterous physical activity like pruning a tree or flipping an over-easy egg or landing a disabled airplane or painting a still life or performing an appendectomy. Robots that can do these sorts of things are still terribly expensive, mainly because there is not a huge demand for them the way there is for, say, word processors or spreadsheets or the little black boxes that regulate most of the functions of an automobile nowadays, or for that matter the robots that assemble those automobiles.

Sometimes, in thinking all of this through, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that in winning the twentieth century's epic battles for freedom, we lost the war. That somehow, the measures we took to win - the Somme, Dresden, Hiroshima, the proxy wars, the nuclear arms race - debased our moral standards beyond recovery. The notion of "human resources" is at bottom a fascist idea, worthy of Stalin and Hitler and Pol Pot. And yet it has become one of the defining paradigms of late-twentieth century liberal-democratic culture.

The great nineteenth century British economist Alfred Marshall said: "The economist, like everyone else, must concern himself with the ultimate aims of man." The ultimate aims. He must concern himself, in other words, with values. In Marshall's time, the discipline was called "political economy" and the reference to politics, which everybody knew could never become a science, is what kept economics human. Gradually, though, economics subsumed politics and today we hear a lot of loose talk about how government is largely unnecessary if we let the market have its way; how "big" government is inherently evil.

It sometimes seems as if we no longer have values at all, not in the sense of a body of shared, deeply held beliefs and standards. But, of course, we do: having values is a defining characteristic of being human, and no matter how hard we may try to be something other than human, we cannot succeed. We will always have values.

What has happened is that our values have changed, and changed in a way that makes them fundamentally different from the values of any other age in recorded history.

Our values, those we are willing to express publicly and transfer to our public institutions, are firmly scientific, implacably pragmatic and rational. It is inevitable that they should be so, since values reflect our view of the universe and our place in it, and that view, for us, has been shaped by the last four hundred years of science. (A philosopher would call us "rational empiricists", or perhaps "scientific naturalists" or "scientific materialists"; I will endeavour to stick to the first and last of these characterizations, occasionally substituting the word "materialist" for simplicity's sake.)

Competing worldviews have been squeezed out of our frame of reference, relegated to the realm of superstition and cant. As a culture, our own highest value is productivity, which is not really a value at all but an engineering goal, a quality we attach to machinery. We seek to employ human resources productively and efficiently. Pity poor Berkowitz, who is too much a human being to be very efficient, and needs to be prodded into productivity.

Our private values we keep to ourselves, like medieval Cathar heretics huddled in the high hilltop villages of Languedoc, living lives of feigned conformity to avoid the attention of the bloodthirsty crusaders and the Inquisition, with its exquisite instruments of psychological terror and its embryonic technologies of mass behaviour modification.

• Continue reading Chapter One
  
• Previous selection from Chapter One
  
• Reviews of Ockham's Razor
• Table of Contents and Photographs
• Wade Rowland - Author Profile

Learn about Wade Rowland's latest book Galileo's Mistake