Author: Jason

Categories
debate

Squeeze Dinosaur Blood from Stone

After a few pandemic-related years of hiatus from taking on new rhetoric students, I have returned to the practice and the first topic we are working with is “The United States ought to prohibit the extraction of fossil fuels from federal public lands and waters.” Since (almost) every affirmative case on this topic is going to base its advocacy on the environment, here’s how I would negate:

I am staunchly opposed to this resolution and my opponent’s particular advocacy of it because I value education, as do you based on your vocation or at least participation in this activity, and we can measure the depth of education here with a criterion of topic-specific research, which is where my opponent — taking the easy bait of the thought-terminating cliche (Lifton, 1961) — claims to value by criterion of to advocate for environment over oil, except that it’s not as simple as that.

The problem that deeper research into this topic turns up is that the topic is too constrained — being limited to government policy on federal land use — to deliver the world-saving effects that they’re promising you.

Contention 1a: Minority of fossil fuel extraction in the US is from federal lands, limiting affirmative efficacy.

The Institute for Energy Research, a fossil fuel lobbying group, reports in December 2021 that:

Most recent data from the Department of Interior and the Energy Information Administration show crude oil production on the federal offshore to be 15 percent of total U.S. oil production and 8 percent on federal onshore lands in 2020 [and] natural gas production on the federal offshore to be 2 percent of total U.S. natural gas production and 8 percent on federal onshore lands in 2020.

IER, December 2021, https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/fossil-fuels/gas-and-oil/oil-and-natural-gas-production-on-federal-and-non-federal-lands/

So that’s less than 25% of domestic oil production and 10% of natural gas production.

Contention 1b: Private mineral rights put extraction on private property, not federal lands.

As NYU environmental studies professor Colin Jerolmack (who has a whole book on this topic) reported for The Grist in June 2021:

America is the only country in the world where property ownership commonly extends well above and below the land’s surface…. By making ownership of those underground resources absolute, the U.S. Constitution limited government’s ability to hoard the fruits of private industry. … Mineral-rights ownership, as it is called, has enormous, if often ignored, consequences for the politics of fracking in America. It means that the decision to extract gas and oil from the land beneath our feet … is largely a choice that thousands of ordinary people make without the consent of their neighbors, let alone future generations.

Jerolmack, June 2021, https://grist.org/fix/opinion/private-landowners-property-leasing-gas-fracking/

So when we do the research to become educated on this topic, we discover that the big federal government isn’t as engaged here as our biases — prompted by the resolution — suggest it is.

Contention 2: Extraction accounts for only a sliver of the environmental impact of fossil fuels.

Sub A: Standard transport and processing cause major environmental impact.

As Jes Burns for Jefferson Public Radio in southern Oregon reported in 2019 on the now-canceled Jordan Cove liquefied natural gas export terminal and pipeline that was being funded by Canadian company Pembina:

look at the gas before it gets to Jordan Cove, from where it’s being produced in the Rockies to the system of pipelines that deliver it to Coos Bay. There’s a big concern here about natural gas leaking from pipelines and wells. … Oil Change International used a middle-of-the-road methane leakage estimate and found the life cycle emissions for Jordan Cove would be about 36.8 million metric tons a year — about 17 times higher than the emissions in Oregon alone.

Burns, June 2019, https://www.ijpr.org/environment-energy-and-transportation/2019-06-25/jordan-cove-would-be-oregons-top-carbon-polluter-if-built

Once the natural gas gets to the refinery, it is liquefied for export resulting in additional metered emissions, same source:

Jordan Cove would export more than just LNG; it would also burn natural gas to power its equipment. … [A] compressor station near Klamath Falls would push natural gas from the Rockies and Canada … to the export terminal in Coos Bay. … Massive compressors would then liquefy the natural gas at the terminal site on Coos Bay. … That’s how the bulk of Jordan Cove’s carbon emissions would enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming that is changing our planet’s climate. … Total annual expected greenhouse gas emissions in the project footprint are calculated as part of the federal environmental review that happens with projects like Jordan Cove. For Jordan Cove, those emissions amount to 2.14 million metric tons per year in Oregon.

Burns, June 2019, https://www.ijpr.org/environment-energy-and-transportation/2019-06-25/jordan-cove-would-be-oregons-top-carbon-polluter-if-built

Sub B: Transport disasters are non-unique and extratopical.

You may recall the catastrophic oil train derailment from the beginning of 2023 — it feels so long ago! — but Tom Perkins reported in The Guardian (February 2023) that the problem is with rail safety administration, not the cargo:

Ineffective oversight and a largely self-monitoring industry that has cut the nation’s rail workforce to the bone in recent years as it puts record profits over safety is responsible for the wreck, said Ron Kaminkow, an Amtrak locomotive engineer and former Norfolk Southern freight engineer. [Noting that] Up to 50% of volatile Bakken crude oil refined on the east coast currently runs through metro Pittsburgh, RPPP estimated, and about 176,000 Pittsburghers live in the derailment blast zone.

Perkins, February 2023, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/feb/11/ohio-train-derailment-wake-up-call

Or you might consider the 383,000 gallons of Canadian oil that spilled from the Keystone pipeline — sibling pipeline to the notorious Keystone XL that has been actively protested for many years now — in North Dakota as James MacPherson of the AP reported (via PBS) in October 2019:

“Our emergency response team contained the impacted area and oil has not migrated beyond the immediately affected area,” the company [TC Energy, formerly TransCanada] said in a statement.

MacPherson, October 2019, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/keystone-oil-pipeline-leaks-383000-gallons-in-north-dakota

So TC Energy was role-modeling not extracting fossil fuels from our lands, I suppose? The larger point is that when we actually do the topical research to learn about the industry and the infrastructure, we realize how ineffective the federal government stopping its land leases is going to be at preventing environmental damage caused by fossil fuels.

Contention 3: Government abdication of responsibility saps solvency.

Let’s say for a moment that you, like a normal person, prefer the balm of the thought-terminating cliches that the affirmative assures you will solve your problems to the troubling depth of the situation I’ve presented. Well, sorry, it gets worse because there’s nothing stopping the federal government from divesting itself of public lands.

As Joel Webster inquires for the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership in January 2023:

Has Congress Put Public Land Sales Back on the Table? As of January 2023, the U.S. House of Representatives “rules” package, which determines how the chamber will operate this session, includes a change that makes it easier for the federal government to sell off or give away your public lands. The new rule removes the Congressional Budget Office’s requirement to consider the financial value of public lands if selling or transferring those lands to other entities.

Webster, January 2023, https://www.trcp.org/2023/01/24/congress-put-public-land-sales-back-table/

Or, to put it another way, after the back-and-forth on Bear Ears and the Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge over the past few years, the environmentally-antagonistic elements in our federal government are working hard to eliminate any benefit, no matter how small, the banning of fossil fuel extraction from public lands might offer by rendering the lands non-public; doing as the affirmative asks will merely catalyze their work to its disastrous completion to the profitable delight of big (Canadian) oil.

That, I propose, is what we were really supposed to be learning about when we were researching this topic that I must, based on my research, soundly oppose.

Categories
literature

Prufrock: Privileged but Powerless

“The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” opens with a warning that is promptly ignored by teachers of literature: with the first proper line of “Let us go then, you and I,” the reader is warned that while they are invited to accompany the speaker, they are also separate from the speaker and should not over-identify with the speaker. This allows the speaker to obfuscate things that they (he) cannot bear to confess while students often learn to accept what they are told as if it is sincere.

Prufrock has an odd feature, though: the details that were not divulged are available as “Prufrock’s Pervigilum” disclosing how the streets the speakers follows go into seedy parts of the city, his sojourn in the red-light district, and a possibly drug-induced delirium. The intentional omission perhaps makes the speaker more sympathetic to a wider audience who would cast moral judgment on prolonged exposure such activities (but gloss over the terse euphemism of “restless nights in one-night cheap hotels” and was removed from the manuscript prior to publication after Eliot consulted with another writer), but is an ironic retreat from the epigraph, sourced from Dante’s Inferno, which concludes that no discussion is off-limits (translated: “I can answer you with no fear of infamy.”), a point confirmed by the speaker’s insistence that we “do not ask, ‘What is it?’” since “It is impossible to say just what I mean!” anyway. This reversal suggests that the speaker has unresolved ambivalence about his social standing: he will allude to taking actions that endanger his social status, but never directly act on or against his social status.

The speaker’s ambivalence about his social status is visible in the streets he is in: “Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,” and “I have gone at dusk through narrow streets…” Considering the street as a transitional space from one place to another, the street also becomes a threat to social order. As Mary Douglas draws on Van Gennep in Purity and Danger:

Van Gennep had more sociological insight. He saw society as a house with rooms and corridors in which passage from one to another is dangerous. Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, ch 6

There are two layers of social danger. The first danger is that there is a rogue element, an element that is not in its proper place, that does not have a proper place, that cannot honorably fulfill its social function because its social function is undefined. Douglas notes that in the best case “These are people who are somehow left out in the patterning of society, who are placeless. They may be doing nothing morally wrong, but their status is indefinable” while also noting that the temporarily-outcast may interact with society as “dangerous criminal characters.” The second danger, the danger Douglas focused on, is that of pollution: the disordered element spreads disorder, pollution, or entropy to adjacent elements that were properly ordered. The apparent potential of an interloper to compromise a social structure is a subtle but longer-lasting danger to other participants in that social structure.

The speaker, Alfred, feels caught between a stifling over-ordered, too-predictable life and his inability to change. While he despairs that “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” and that “I have known the eyes already, known them all” and the soporific and anesthesial effects of excess structure, he also doubts his ability to break out of his situation. When faced with the possibility of being cast down from his social position, “I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker … And in short, I was afraid.” This internal conflict results in his dishonorable behavior; he’s trying to provoke major consequences so that he doesn’t have to take any major action.

It is a mixed blessing for Prufrock that he will be thwarted. His lower associations aren’t meaningless, but his attempts to scandalize them will be defused. As Douglas describes:

To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power. … It seems that if a person has no place in the social system and is therefore a marginal being, all precaution against danger must come from others.

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, ch 6

Thus while Prufrock wants to assert power drawn from marginal or liminal experience—hence the choice of “I am Lazarus, come from the dead”—his provocations are deflected by the defenders of social order (“one, settling a pillow by her head”) claiming misunderstanding: “That is not what I meant at all; That is not it, at all.” As a society woman of circa 1912, she will tolerate Prufrock’s piquant provocations because the perks of her position in the social order are predicated by his presence. The danger to the social structure that Prufrock is trying to embody will be neutralized.

The defense of compartmentalized social order over accountability is a common organizational behavior. In Leadership BS, Jeffery Pfeffer describes how leaders and executives prefer to ignore or even cover for each others’ abuses of power rather than risk exposing their own behaviors to scrutiny or their position to insurrection. Looking back to Van Gennep’s structural depiction of society, people in a particular social station—a room, as it were—are far more likely to redress conflicts or offenses within their social structure rather than risk compromising the integrity of their social structure by (figuratively) defenestrating the offender. Indeed, the act of defenestration has a long history of secondary effects from which the powerful might learn that their first duty is to defend their position and their peers far ahead of the secondary objective of honorably discharging their duties.

The open question is how Alfred got into his position in the first place. After all, he asserts that he is “not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be.” Prufrock’s suggestion that he “should have been a pair of ragged claws Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” instead alludes to the unassuming smallness of a crab in the ocean, but is also notable because crustaceans are aberrant creatures in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Photo of a lonely crab "smoking" discarded cigarettes.
Do crabs feel constrained by their shells?

Douglas notes that the consistent thread of “abominations of Leviticus are the obscure unclassifiable elements which do not fit the pattern of the cosmos”—for example, scuttling instead of swimming in water—and this makes them “incompatible with holiness and blessing.” That is, despite being flooded by social privilege as a (almost certainly white) man, Prufrock is unable to intentionally exercise or even really acknowledge that privilege in any meaningful way. Furthermore, the structural value his patriarchy-oriented privilege conveys on his person actually works against him; he is “pinned and wriggling on the wall” as somebody else’s trophy.

The twofold irony of the Hamlet reference is not only that Hamlet was also only protected from the consequences of his offenses against the social order by his princely privilege, but also that Prufrock’s lack of awareness on this point demonstrates that his privilege is unearned: while “the women come and go Talking of Michelangelo,” Prufrock’s lack of intellectual refinement blunts his ability to engage as an equal, rendering him a hapless victim of his social station.

To return to the previous question of how Alfred got there in the first place, Pfeffer also explains that social status is conferred on people not because of what they have done so much as in anticipation of what they will do. The corollary of this is the Peter principle: that people will move up from positions where they are capable until they are promoted—in full anticipation of continued success—into a position where they are incompetent. Thus we end up with Alfred whose white-male privilege made people anticipate his future success and positioned him in a social role that he, with telling-but-sincere ineptitude, disavows. The social order will protect Prufrock whether he wants it to or not, as well as many managers and executives, but few people can be happy when they know they have been elevated beyond their ability to thrive.

Indeed, unable to thrive in his position, Prufrock instead attempts to defect against it: this is what he wants the reader to know. But the immensity of the social structure that sterilizes his growth also sterilizes his self-sabotage as is obvious to a reader who understands the women’s position. The key question that Prufrock’s incapability prevents him from asking is: what else could he bring back from the margins?

Recall that Douglas observed that “To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power” and indeed Prufrock himself has observed many things (“lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows”) but since his intent is to engage in repulsive behavior he doesn’t recognize the potential for connective power in everything he sees. His inability to see past his self-loathing closes off his potential for growth.

Conversely, Fitzgerald’s depiction of Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby was a man who would cross unsavory boundaries in pursuit of new opportunities and made a point of blurring boundaries to cultivate personal connections. It is doubly-telling that Tom, as the defender of the old-money elites, is not just Jay’s antagonist, but also that he handles the final conflict between them not by referring the matter to the police—a structural force—but by instead sending George. By not recognizing the authority of law, Tom (and Daisy) preserve the social power structure that insulates them from consequences. Thus, when narrator Nick asserts that

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, p. 170

…he is only correct from the outside. Tom and Daisy are actually being quite care-ful inside their social structure to preserve their position, that’s the “whatever it was that kept them together” that Nick doesn’t understand. That’s what the late conversation over cold chicken was functionally doing: Tom was feeling his social position was at risk for the entire book, but Daisy’s vehicular manslaughter brought their social position into crisis. They came together for mutual defense and defended their position against the interloper trying to join their position from the social margins.

But Fitzgerald’s choice of George as an implement is also interesting here: George is perhaps one of Alfred’s lonely men in shirt-sleeves, or the redacted drunk, but to Tom—Tom, who will not sell George a car to flip lest George improve his social station—George is an instrument to be used toward an end. So even though Tom is defending his status quo position, he–like Jay–also engages in limited transgression of social boundary, to both demonstrate and increase his social power.

If Prufrock were able to understand his position, he would be able to bring back more from the streets than scandalous tales that he’s afraid to tell. But he does not understand his position and so he grows old and ignored while the women, who have more social consciousness and capability than he does, act in ways he does not understand. While we know of Prufrock’s indiscretions, the women around him have discreetly told us nothing.

Categories
literature

Hamlet: The Bad Prince

In “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” T. S. Eliot asserts “I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,” a line that is saturated with irony in that Hamlet was the worst possible prince: not even Prince Hamlet was meant to be Prince Hamlet, that is the source of tragedy in The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. While Shakespeare kept Fortinbras off-stage for almost the entirety of Hamlet, Shakespeare still presented Fortinbras as an excellent prince and Hamlet as a degenerate failure.

Shakespeare wrote Hamlet around 1600, well after Machiavelli wrote The Prince in 1532. But rarely do we ask our students to consider them together. For example, the end of Hamlet where–spoilers!–Fortinbras of Norway just casually annexes Denmark without anybody being the least put-out by it seems perhaps a bit awkward unless one recalls Machiavelli’s observation that:

…when cities or countries are accustomed to live under a prince, and his family is exterminated, they, being on the one hand accustomed to obey and on the other hand not having the old prince, cannot agree in making one from amongst themselves, and they do not know how to govern themselves. For this reason they are very slow to take up arms, and a prince can gain them to himself and secure them much more easily. (p. 25)

By Machiavelli’s reasoning, it would make perfect sense for Fortinbras to wander in at the end of Hamlet–after Hamlet does the dirty work of exterminating his family–to annex Denmark.

Fortinbras arrives at Elsinore (from Kenneth Brannagh's 1996 adaptation)

But there’s a bit more going on here with the comparison between the princely qualities of Hamlet and Fortinbras. See, the core piece of advice that Machiavelli really wants an up-and-coming prince to take to heart is this:

A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline; for this is the sole art that belongs to him who rules, and it is of such force that it not only upholds those who are born princes, but it often enables men to rise from a private station to that rank. And, on the contrary, it is seen that when princes have thought more of ease than of arms they have lost their states. And the first cause of your losing it is to neglect this art; and what enables you to acquire a state is to be master of the art. (p. 55)

Claudius, as king, has some clue that he should be armed for war to defend against, as Horatio describes it, “young Fortinbras of unimproved mettle hot and full” and his “shark’d up… lawless resolutes” intending to “recover of us, by strong hand and terms compuslatory, those foresaid lands so by his [slain-in-combat] father lost” (Act 1, scene 1), which is a mark of quality for Claudius. Hamlet contrasts poorly with this when, in transit from Elsinore to the port, he encounters Fortinbras’s army moving to supposedly attack a worthless scrap of Poland and thinks it is astonishingly inspirational that an army would be squandered in such a way (Act 4, scene 4) instead of realizing that Fortinbras is setting up his army to be within striking distance of Elsinore.

Hamlet is, in fact, never good at reading the proverbial room. He regards Fortinbras as a “delicate and tender prince” (Act 4, scene 4) even though every peasant knows that Fortinbras’s father was slain the day Hamlet was born such that Hamlet and Fortinbras are roughly the same age (Act 5, scene 1); he is “very sorry, good Horatio, That to Laertes I forgot myself” (Act 5, scene 2) while ignoring how he slaughtered Laertes’s father and the possibility that Laertes might be upset about that rather than a breach of decorum; he casually and unnecessarily sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths on the grounds that “they did make love to this employment” (Act 5, scene 2) when they were merely following the King’s orders; he doesn’t grasp that when he has the actors perform The Murder of Gonzago, the murder is committed by the “nephew to the King” which better describes his relationship to Claudius than Claudius’s relationship with old King Hamlet (Act 3, scene 2) such that Claudius may be reacting to him because of the play he chose rather than the play itself. Hamlet is routinely terrible at interpersonal relations throughout Hamlet, even leaving his treatment of both his mother and Ophelia aside.

Hamlet’s encounter with Fortinbras reveals another gap in Hamlet’s princely capabilities: Machiavelli explains that a good prince needs to be out in the field to ensure they will

learns something of the nature of localities, and gets to find out how the mountains rise, how the valleys open out, how the plains lie, and to understand the nature of rivers and marshes, and in all this to take the greatest care [… and …] the prince that lacks this skill lacks the essential which it is desirable that a captain should possess, for it teaches him to surprise his enemy, to select quarters, to lead armies, to array the battle, to besiege towns to advantage. (p 56)

The very explicit point of contrast in Fortinbras’s and Hamlet’s cross-over in Act 4 shows Fortinbras building the essential skills of a prince–and/by positioning his army to march on Elsinore–while Hamlet is completely unaware as to what is coming next for anybody involved, as further demonstrated by his subsequent surprise that Claudius’s instructions to England are to have him executed (Act 5, scene 2). Put another way: Fortinbras is playing chess, Claudius is playing checkers, Hamlet is playing Candyland.

Hamlet’s ineptitude is perhaps the result of his auspicious birth: born on the day when his successful father slew a neighboring king/warlord in a story that every peasant knows (Act 5, scene 1) such that Hamlet is unwarrantedly blessed by–as Claudius describes to Laertes–the “great love the general gender bear him; Who, dipping all his faults in their affection, Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone, Convert his gyves to graces” (Act 4, scene 7) or, more simply, “He’s loved of the distracted multitude, Who like not in their judgment, but their eyes” (Act 4, scene 3). And so while Fortinbras is harrying the lands prompting Claudius to build up defenses (Act 1, scene 1), Hamlet does not request to lead soldiers in defense of Denmark as Machiavelli–and common sense–would recommend of a proper prince but instead to go back to college in Wittenberg (Act 1, scene 2). While the mortal failure of Fortinbras’s father may well have hung like a shadow over Fortinbras’s whole life, conditioning him to struggle and endure and to settle for taking umbrage in anticipation of revenge, the success of Hamlet’s father in maintaining the Danish empire may well have rendered Hamlet’s life too easy and Hamlet ill-disciplined at statecraft.

This perhaps reveals why Claudius was made King instead of the heir-apparent Hamlet: as Claudius explains, “young Fortinbras, Holding a weak supposal of our worth, Or thinking by our late dear brother’s death Our state to be disjoint and out of frame, Colleagued with the dream of his advantage…” (Act 1, scene 2). If Fortinbras moved to war against Denmark while Denmark was transferring power to the inexperienced Prince Hamlet–who was away at college in Wittenberg at the time–then Denmark would surely be in trouble. By transferring power to Claudius, who may have had some field experience during old King Hamlet’s campaigns, the nobles of Denmark made an unpopular choice for the sake of security. Sadly for them, there was no correct solution to this situation: the ongoing power and privilege Hamlet was allowed to retain and ineptly wield as the beloved prince of their departed king puts Denmark in a Kobayashi Fuck-You scenario where its fate is written on the cover of the script: it’s a tragedy.

Some armchair sociologists may speculate that Hamlet’s auspicious childhood and ruinous adulthood form a pattern that can be at least somewhat heard even at generational levels starting with the Baby Boomers. This is more of a stretch than I am willing to make into multicausal territory.

The far easier speculation to make is that after their paths crossed, Fortinbras realized that that Hamlet leaving Denmark was not acceptable: Hamlet had to be present in Denmark to be defeated–or, in Machiavelli’s terms, “exterminated”–according to Fortinbras’s plan. So, while it is possible that Hamlet’s ship was overtaken attacked by “very warlike” pirates who took him and him alone captive before departing and then releasing him in exchange for nothing but the promise of a “good turn for them” (Act 4, scene 6) instead of holding him for a prince’s ransom, it seems much more plausible that Fortinbras sent a spy to to follow Hamlet to the port and then paid–as is appropriate in the profession–a Norway-aligned privateer to very specifically hunt down Hamlet’s ship and return Hamlet to Denmark where Fortinbras would be able to publicly depose him. Since nobody knew that Claudius was sending a directive to have England execute Hamlet on arrival, Fortinbras’s reactionary maneuver would have been intended to prevent Hamlet from becoming an exilarch in England when Fortinbras seized Elsinore. While this speculation has no secondary support from the script, Hamlet’s failure to seriously consider the pirates’ motives is entirely in-character for him and how he is routinely terrible at interpersonal relations and leaves space in the drama for their motives to be inferred even if we do not get to really see it.

What I should very much like to see, however, is a follow-on to The Great Gatsby. In the source material, Tom and Daisy Buchanan have a daughter–Pammy–and Daisy wishes simply that Pammy will be “a beautiful little fool.” I would be amused to see the sequel to The Great Gatsby follow Pammy’s lackadaisical Sex-and-the-City-esque life as she slowly fritters her parents’ fortune away, never realizing that Gatsby had an heir–the offspring from a European affair during the war–who is cunningly deploying her own inheritance with vengeful purpose against the family that apparently had her estranged father killed. In the end, Pammy would not be able to realize why she had been targeted or even fully appreciate the sustained viciousness of the attacks made against her–a point that that would frustrate the righteously-embittered, slightly sadistic Gatsby heir.

This would, of course, have a call-back irony to Tom Buchanan’s notable racism in The Great Gatsby. See, despite the (worrisomely enduring) popularity of eugenics as a concept, enforced “natural” selection hasn’t been effective in humans. Early eugenicist, mathematician, and cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton actually followed up on eugenic experiments and “discovered the phenomenon now called regression to the mean. His data left no doubt that it was real. … Excellence doesn’t persist; time passes, and mediocrity asserts itself” (Ellenberg, 2014, p. 301). This is easy to understand: while somebody may seem to have a favorable disposition towards a certain quality, there are other environmental and cultural effects–to say nothing of random happenstance–that will either augment or diminish the tangible outcomes. Thus characters like Hamlet or Pammy may expect that their lives will be peachy-keen based on the success of their parents and then be faced with the brutal reality that what their parents experienced and–certainly in the case of Hamlet’s not even considering going to war–shielded them from was actually an important contributor to the parents’ success.

In the end what we really learn by comparing Hamlet’s failure with Fortinbras’s success is that the worst for a parent to do is to allow their child to lead an unchallenged life. And yet it’s entirely natural for a parent to protect their child from challenges, either out of natural concern, or a desire for the child to have the best life the parent can provide, or because the parent wants the child to bypass the challenges that appear small and irrelevant to the adult. While we can guess at what motivated King Hamlet, who was so protective of his family that “he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit [Queen Gertrude’s] face too roughly” (Act 1, scene 2), what we know for certain is that he was already dead when the play started and unable to protect his family any longer: it was instead time for Prince Hamlet to stand up to a challenge that he was tragically ill-equipped to face.

References

Eliot, T. S. (1915). The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock. Retrieved from https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/44212/the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock

Ellenberg, J. (2014) How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Machiavelli, N. (1523). The Prince. Public domain. Kindle Edition.

Shakespeare, W. (~1600). The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Retrieved from http://shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html

Categories
career

The Departure

One of my former students is becoming an attrition statistic, moving from one large Fortune 500 corporation to another. The former employer may find this surprising: the employee had just been placed on a new project so things were going well and settling down, right? But the actions leading up to this point, the ones the corporation tried to bury, were the seeds of departure.

The employee’s new position on a new team was the result of his prior team having its budget cut. He’d been put into the euphemistically-described “redeployment pool” and given a few weeks to find a new position or be forced out of the company entirely. There are two fundamental problems baked into this organizational anti-pattern:

  1. it exposes the volatility of the entirely political nature of program funding such that no project is actually safe or demonstrably worthy of employee dedication, and
  2. this is compounded by the individualized threat to the employee’s livelihood.

Thus, while the employee’s primary goal while in the redeployment pool is to get out of the redeployment pool, the employee is nether going to limit their options to staying within the corporation nor have substantial loyalty to a team within the corporation that does pick them up. Noting that external hiring processes can run longer than internal transfers, the employee’s attrition risk remains (or is lagging) their being picked up by their new team. Hence an employee like my former student whose previous project was cut to save money can subsequently join another internal team and then abruptly depart from it causing a major second-degree disruption to that team’s ability to meet its projected commitments from the previous project’s cancellation.

While it is possible that our company’s previous engagement in illegal collusion with other companies to prevent employee attrition (Roberts, 2015) has resulted in a trained incapacity for cultivating employee loyalty in a proactive, positive, and legal way, it also suggests that our company knows how much attrition really costs the organization and therefore how much the organization should be willing to spend on preventing it.

Buckingham and Goodall’s Nine Lies About Work (2019) implicitly explains how forcing employees into crisis through opaque structural changes severs the bonds they have connecting them to the company. Buckingham and Goodall developed an 8 question survey that they recount in Chapter 1 to confirm or deny attachment from the employee to their contributions, to their team, and to the company. Making a decision to wipe out a project team that was meeting its commitments instantly turns 6 of those 8 questions to a “No”: the 2 elements of team alignment are gone, the 3 elements of active contribution at work are gone, and the 1 element of being aligned to the company mission is gone. It is also likely that confidence in the future of the company is undermined, which was another 1 of the key survey points, such that the only thing preserving a redeployed employee’s loyalty to their employer is that they are “challenged to grow”—and that’s the one thing the intrinsically-motivated self-starters that every employer is trying to hire doesn’t need from their employer. So unless there are outside factors pinning a redeployed employee in place, a hiring manager should anticipate a lack of loyalty when hiring from the pool.

It is also worth noting that any sufficiently disruptive reorganization will also set at least 4 of those 8 questions to an immediate “No” as well as undermine the individual autonomy that is a precondition for intrinsically-motivated self-starters. So while every reorganization is intended to improve alignment and performance manageability, the first thing it does is disrupts alignment and performance manageability. Yet when the decline in employee performance is revealed, it is seen as a flaw in how the reorganization was implemented rather than a consequence of implementing a reorganization. After all, the thing that’s missing-ergo-not-missed when upper management is looking at organizational charts is the employees’ momentum which is the grave irony of a management-improving re-organization: the actual value an organizational model has does not show up in an organizational diagram.

None of this is to say that reorganizations are never necessary or that all projects should be funded to completion lest employees be disrupted. But it is to say that the damage of failures of leadership and management that result in project cancellations and reorganizations needs to be recognized and balanced by actively investing in keeping employees focused on how they can contribute to the mission and future of the company while new interpersonal bonds are formed, as well as investing heavily in forming new interpersonal bonds.

Lopp (2010) tells the story of how he failed to ensure the loyalty of somebody he’d recruited to his team. He advocates that managers be actively engaged with filling their requisitions because “Your daily hands-on management of your hiring isn’t just going to improve your hiring process, it’s going to improve your career because you’ll demonstrate from the first moment you interact with your future employee that you care.” He also tells the counter-point story to his failure, about a woman who recruited “Two hires I thought we had absolutely no chance of hiring. Both on the team in a matter of months. Your question is, “What’s her secret?” and the answer is dangerously simple – deliberate, consistently expressed and reinforced want.”

The funny thing about telling people that you want what they can do for you is that it works outside of having requisitions and formal teams and official organizational charts in a slide deck. There is a job in an organization that is adjacent to mine that I’m certain I could do well in and my current manager (who is flailing in turbulence that our previous CIO caused with aggressively under-managed disruptions years ago) has encouraged me to pursue it—but that hiring manager has, uniquely among hiring managers I’ve talked to over the years, not responded to my inquiries at all. He is the polar opposite of another manager who makes a point of telling me that she needs me to work for her if only she can get the headcount approved. I walked past him the other day on my way to help her team, and also brew them coffee as a cultural-enhancement practice (Factor, 2007).

Even if something changes, though, they’ll both have loyalty difficulties that are not of their making. And the problem starts at the top of the company where we have a finance-oriented CEO who is unable to articulate what he expects from the company other than “profit” and flows through a variety of vice presidents who undercut projects with reorganizations and layoffs because immediate-term financial targets are the first-and-only thing that is worth delivering. This shouldn’t be true, of course, but our singled-minded CEO is lacking a broader capacity to compellingly explain how it’s not true.

This is not to say that our current CEO is absolutely a bad leader: as Buckingham and Goodall explain, leadership is not really a specific thing or defined set of qualities, it is instead a particular resonance that attracts particular followers. Our CEO can attract people who care about corporate profitability, whoever they happen to be; he just doesn’t have much standing with people who want to create products or make the world a better place or even get a vaingloriously large pay raise (since that detracts from corporate profitability). Indeed, my former student will be comparatively well-rewarded by his new employers, a point he mentioned as contributing to his departure.

Highly financialized companies like my employer and my student’s new employer, companies that rely so heavily on stock to pay their executives that the executives focus on their market cap rather than their mission, contributes heavily to Buckingham and Goodall’s assertion that people don’t care which company they work for. After all, outside of a rogue’s gallery of actively unethical and borderline-criminal organizations, what company wouldn’t you work for? At the point where the CEO is incapable of seeing the company as producing anything but money, I may as well take my portable skills and go work for some place like Charles Schwab or Fidelity where we can more-fully focus on money instead of being bothered by having actual products that people use.

About a decade ago, our then-CEO (since deceased) told us that our mission over the next 10 years would be to touch and improve the lives of everybody on the planet with our products. I remember this even now. I remember laughing at it, the goofy, nerdy enthusiasm with which he presented it to us. I remember thinking “Sure, we’ll get right on that” with no small amount of sarcasm. But I also remember that when I took my previous job (that I was disruptively reorganized out of) that I was excited to grow and deliver continuously improving results because it felt like I was doing a small part of making the world a better place. My co-workers also remember that mission, remember being a bit too cynical to really buy into it, but also now feel its absence in their grinding lack of pride in their current work.

I could be convinced to take another job with my current company, particularly for a manager that tells me she wants what I can do for her, but I also expect my next career move to come with a mission statement.

Condensing all that down, here’s the take-aways:

  1. Companies under-value the momentum that employee loyalty can bring to the pursuit of organizational objectives.
  2. To this end, they under-invest in improving loyalty to company and team missions or even proactively directing momentum to where contributions will be most valued
  3. And will instead, conversely/perversely, allow leaders to demonstrate their executive functions through disruptive and disorienting actions such as reorganizations, project cancellations, and layoffs that cause employees to reactively bring their momentum to a sudden halt.
  4. This is perhaps partially a natural consequence of not having a larger mission for managers throughout the organization to proactively direct contributory momentum towards.

References

Buckingham, M. & Goodall, A. (2019). Nine lies about work: A freethinking leader’s guide to the real world. Harvard Business Review Press. Cambridge, MA.

Factor, P. (2007, April 15). At half-past three, it’s time for tea. Red Gate: Simple Talk. Retrieved from https://www.red-gate.com/simple-talk/blogs/at-half-past-three-its-time-for-tea/

Lopp, M. (2010). Wanted. Rands in Repose. Retrieved from https://randsinrepose.com/archives/wanted/

Roberts, J. J. (2015, Sept 3). Tech workers will get average of $5,770 under final anti-poaching settlement. Fortune. Retrieved from https://fortune.com/2015/09/03/koh-anti-poach-order/