The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

The Vision of Mercy - Reflections on Thomas Merton’s Climate of Mercy

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

In the preface to his most remarkable book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire comments that as a “handbook for radicals”, it is a work which will be dismissed by many, but nevertheless, will be read through to the end by “Christians and Marxists.” The remark is instructive for the surprise it may well elicit from readers in the United States in the early twenty-first century. For in this milieu Christianity is hardly thought of as a movement of the Left, leave alone a radical one.  Yet, the dominant impressions of our peculiar place and time notwithstanding, Freire is pointing to precisely the spirit of Christianity that designated it as a danger to the authorities of the first century: a spirit growing from not only a conviction, but perhaps an insight that the ground of the sacred is unfolded not in the worldly power of Rome, but an all redeeming Mercy which exceeds the bounds of mundane institution.This vision of this Mercy is recounted to us adeptly by Thomas Merton in an essay which he dedicated to Albert Schweitzer, The Climate of Mercy. And indeed from the outset, Merton points to the dramatic nature of mercy in a way that illumines its radical implications.

The mercy of God in Christ is more than forensic absolution from sin...Mercy is, then, not only forgiveness, but life...Mercy is, then, not simply something we deduce from a previously apprehended concept of the divine Essence...but an event in which God reveals himself to us in His redemptive love and in the great gift which is the outcome of this event: our mercy to others. (Merton 203)

In this characterization, one is immediately pulled out of the connotations of soap and water sentimentality which often attend the use of such words as mercy. Yet even more surprisingly, one is taken outside of the space where one considers mercy a mere virtue, or even a specifically moral sort of activity.Rather, Mercy is an event precipitated, to invoke the Christian language, by an action of Grace whereby one participates in God’s understanding  of ourselves.  Rather than it being an understanding of judgement, it is one of mercy. Merton elaborates,

God does not gaze with grim and implacable revulsion into the heart of the sinner to discern there is the “thing” or the “being” which He hates.He understands the sinner mercifully, that is to say, that His look penetrates the whole being of the sinner with mercy from within so that the inmost reality of the sinner is no longer sinfulness but sonship. (Merton 205)

That is to say, rather than being arrested by a conception of the human being as marred irrevocably by wrong or error, one is brought to understand the person born of the sacred itself. Participation in this vision then leads to a transcendence of alienation: “The sinful consciousness becomes capable of seeing itself face to face with the truth, without fear and without hate, because without division.” (Merton 205) That is, one is brought into a deep realization of communion...and that not merely with some divinity on high, but with one’s fellows, one’s brothers and sisters in Creation.

Within the space of this new vision… which is the metanoia of Matthew…one is liberated from the project of self-redemption that had been so central within the prior vantage of alienation. Crucially, this translates into a fundamental shift in one’s relationship to the Law. For, within the horizon of a project of self-redemption, legal virtuousness stands as a preeminent stratagem to carry forth the designs of the ego. This virtuousness can assume a multitude of different forms, many of a quasi-spiritual aspect: ‘self-purification’, or ‘good works’, or ‘elimination of desires’ or ‘a cleansing of concepts, and still others besides. Yet the pursuit of these efforts is at incommensurable odds with the attainment of a genuine freedom. For they all subject one to a finite standard which underwrites the alienation that is the root of one’s sense of bondage. Nevertheless, their allure remains.The pattern is insidious, and obtains its seductiveness by offering a false sense of freedom in a twofold fashion. Acutely, Merton describes the pattern’s action:

The promises, menaces, and demands of the Law are ambiguous  because they point to self-possession and suggest two conflicting possible ways to autonomy: one by following the Law and the other by defying it. It is always possible for man under the Law, in his fallenness and confusion, to outline projects of liberty “against” the Law...The very Law itself perversely and cruelly seems to define this void as “liberty” and “realization”...Why this illusion? Because at the same time the Law offers a deceptive promise of fulfillment to the self-seeking self in legal righteousness...The Law offers the self-seeking self the spurious autonomy which comes from creating a place for itself in the minds of men by human righteousness and achievements... (Merton 208-9)

In no small way, that illusion is sustained by a sense of scarcity not only materially, but existentially, a sense rooted perhaps in a awareness of one’s own death, or, to use another phrase of Merton’s, one’s own radical contingency. Within the atmosphere of such confinement, certain categories show with a certain prominence, a calculus of debt imposes a general opprobrium, and the logics of dominance and servility by turn insinuate themselves into even our most mundane of interactions. Thus, also, Merton tells us,

In the climate which is not of life and mercy, but of death and condemnation, the personal and collective guilts of men and groups wrestle with one another in death struggle. Men, tribes, nations, sects, parties set themselves up in forms of existence which are mutual accusations. They thus seek survival and self-affirmation by living demonically...A demonic existence is one which insistently diagnoses what it cannot cure, what is has no desire to cure, what it seeks to bring to full potency in order that it may cause the death of its victim. Yet this the temptation which besets the sin-ridden Dasein of man, for whom a resentful existence implies the need and the decision to accuse and to condemn all other existences. (Merton 213-214)

By the phrase, “Dasein of man”, Merton is drawing most explicitly on the German thinker, Martin Heidegger whose own work can be read as emphasizing the sense of alienation which can pervade our lives and which we most frequently seek to evade rather than overcome. In this connection, the power of the event of Mercy to liberate one from a sense of obligation before such evasions, or even overcoming is seen as truly momentous, for the climate of acceptance which it imports effectively dissolves the structure of alienation which grounds that obligation. Thus earlier in the essay we find the explication, “When the sinful Dasein is aware of itself as understood mercifully, and is ‘seen’ full of mercy by its Creator and Redeemer, then the evil of sin, the curse of death, are ‘forgotten utterly’.” (Merton 206) The dissolution of that structure in turn gives rise, as noted earlier to the possibility of profound connection with our fellows. Rather than the climate of totalism which suffuses the vantage of the “Old Law”, one encounters in the climate of Mercy a ‘New Law’ which “liberates us from the tyranny of natural weakness and of existential demands for self-assertion” (Merton 210) Now, this Law of Mercy,

...is a “Law” in a broad and analogical sense, because it is governed not so much by fixed, and abstract patterns as by the existential demands of personal love and loyalty: demands of grace and of the heart which are defined to a great extent by our own history of personal sin, need, and forgiveness. (Merton 210)

The climate engendered thus is one of dramatic acceptance, and “...depends on the realization that all men are acceptable before God.”  This realization gives rise to an inclusivity at gross odds with the imperatives of the “Old Law” wherein self assertion and thus domination or exclusion are its character in both subtle and gross manners.

The implicit demand which we formulate by asserting our own justice, setting ourselves up as a law by which to judge and evaluate other men, kills mercy in our hearts and in theirs. If I set myself up inexorably as a law to my brother, then I cannot help trying to interfere with his life by occult violence, malice, and deceit. I set myself up as a power to which I demand some form, be it only symbolic, of homage and submission…Nor is this power illusory. It is most real and most malevolent in strong collective groups whose ideologies can create a bad conscience and even a sense of guilt and self-hate in supposedly “lesser breeds without the law.” We have seen this at work in colonialism and racism, where arrogance and unscrupulousness and self-righteous power has deeply wounded the consciousness of millions of men...(Merton 213)

In addition, in our own society, the climate of the “Old Law” finds expression through the apotheosis of the financial. So it is is that, “...[t]he true “Law” of our day is the law of wealth and material power...It is the market that in reality determines the existence, indeed the survival, of all men and dictates the ideals and actualities of social life.  In our time the struggle of mercy is, then, not against rigid and inflexible morality but against a different and more subtle hardening of heart, a general loss of trust and of love that is rooted in greed and belief in money.” (Merton 217) We can see thus now why Freire casts Christians and Marxists has holding common cause. For they share a vision of a different world, one vivified by very different principles. Again, Merton:

The claims of mercy are demands in a totally new sense: demands not that the debt be properly measured and then generously paid, but that the whole root of indebtedness be laid open to the light “understandeth mercifully” and thus seen to be quite other than we thought. There can be no limit to pardon...We seek that divine mercy which, enduring forever (Psalms 106:1), and dynamically active as a leaven in history, has entirely changed the aspect of human existence, delivering it from its forfeiture to a syndrome of accusation, projection, resentment, and ultimate despair. We seek it not only in our hearts and minds but in man’s world, his common life on earth. (Merton 216)

The last phrase of this passage is crucial for it exhorts Christians to move beyond a merely personalistic theology to one which seeks social expression of an orientation of love and mercy. The remainder of his essay is an elaboration of that exhortation.

Now through the course of this reflection, the vision offered by Merton is offered in a thoroughly Christian vocabulary. However, it does not strike me as merely a Christian vision. For its most crucial point is one that has found expression in quarters around the world: the freeing and fulfilling power of mercy. By mercy, we are no longer bound by our past and thus are liberated to move into a new and different world, not only in the future, but in this very moment.

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I encountered Merton's essay, The Climate of Mercy, in the collection, Love and Living on which I did a Youtube video here: Thomas Merton, Freedom, Love and Living

Sources Cited

Paulo Freier (author), Myra Bergman Ramos (trans.), Donald Macedo (introduction), The Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Academic. 2000.

Thomas Merton (author), Naomi Burton Stone and Br. Patrick Hart (eds.), Love and Living “A Harvest Book”. New York: Harcourt, 1979.

On Gaston Bachelard and the Subversive Freedom of Poetry

On Gaston Bachelard and the Subversive Freedom of Poetry

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

That there is a temptation to dismiss the contemporary world as a dreary one stands as something of a cliché. This, though, hardly constitutes a refutation of the sentiment. In fact, it is an index of its veracity, though one to be read advisedly. To put the matter alternatively, the contemporary world is a prosaic one:  it seeks refuge in the corner of the ordinary, the expected, the controlled. Perhaps the most convincing evidence of this impulse can be found in the particular temporality that the cultures and institutions of our upbringing… at least here in North America... would have us embrace. The startling insights of Einstein’s theories of relativity notwithstanding - its realization that there is not a timeline, but that there are timelines, or, if you like, timeframes - we are still called to walk in lockstep with a Newtonian metronome of invariant pace, our gazes ever transfixed by the uniform motion of the clock’s hand. That colour almost naturally bleeds out of  our reflections on this world then is hardly surprising. Even the shadings of black and white prove almost too ebullient to describe it. For colour is surprising, and the maintenance of fidelity to this constriction of our Lebenswelt, or Lifeworld can scarcely tolerate surprise.  Or, to spiral back upon our initial note, the prosaic forbids the poetic.

And, it is here we arrive then at one of the great values of Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space (La Poétique de L’Espace). For sometime now, it has been received as a work whose offerings can powerfully inform architecture, and indeed this is the case. For through Bachelard’s thoughts on the house as a space of evocative potency, through his drawing of its lines, its corners and curves, its verticality, its doors and windows, even its furniture, the architect is reminded of the profound responsibility of his task: it becomes not merely to serve the ‘function of reality’, but to blend that service with the ‘function of unreality’ to elicit an entering upon our freedom.  But these reflections have a relevance not only for the architect, for they point to a shift not merely in the imagining of buildings, but in our imagining of the world, or, indeed, even ourselves.  The Newtonian metronome has set us into a rationalist trance that has forgotten what may prove to be of greater moment to the human nature than ratiocination - imagination. Counterposing the lesser significance attributed to this faculty by Henri Bergson (who stands as a representative of Rationalism more generally), Bachelard relays,

I propose, on the contrary, to consider the imagination as a major power of human nature… By the swiftness of its actions, the imagination separates us from reality; it faces the future.  To the function of reality, wise in experience of the past, as it is defined by traditional psychology, should be added a function of unreality, which is equally positive...If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee. (Bachelard, xxx)

The full import of this revaluation becomes apparent when it is considered in connection specifically with the question of poetic imagination. For the imagination is also called forth to subsidiary or less momentous purposes, such as in the outlining of memory, or the task of  mimetic productions. But in its poetic aspect, what is witnessed is not mere recollection, or reproduction, but creation.  This unfolds in a twofold wise. It occurs through the action, the utterance, the writing of the poet. But it also recurs in our encounter with the poem, where the reverberation with being it evokes in turn compels personal resonances, personal repercussions such that one is left with the impression that it is a piece that one could have composed oneself. Or, to recall Bachelard again,

...The reverberations bring about a change of being. It is as though the poet’s being were our being. The multiplicity of resonances then issues from the reverberations’ unity of being. Or, to put  it more simply, this is an impression that all impassioned poetry lovers know well: the poem possesses us entirely.

...The image offered us by reading the poem now becomes really our own. It takes root in us. It has been given us by another, but we begin to have the impression that we could have created it, that we should have created it. It becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is as at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being…

...When considered in transmission from one soul to another, it becomes evident that a poetic image eludes causality. (Bachelard xviii-xx)

The trans-subjectivity of this experience has dramatic consequence. For one, it suggests that the touchstone of empathy or solidarity is not a conditioned affectivity, but rather a kinship in being itself. The human adventure is an adventure in a creative being, or, better yet, a creative becoming. The connection with that process then is embodiment of freedom.

The prosaic understanding would stunt that embodiment, confining the implications of the reverberations of poetic experience to what can be drawn from the antecedents of an arid biology, or tangled personal narrative. Yet Bachelard avers that this is but an inversion of what is occurring, an inversion which is revealed when we approach the poetic experience phenomenologically, when we allow the image to speak for itself. It is in this allowance, this openness  that the reverberations of being unfold, a reawakening to the elan vital enabled. Thus, Bachelard also conveys,

The phenomenological situation with regard to psychoanalytical investigation will perhaps be more precisely stated if, in connection with poetic images, we are able to isolate a sphere of pure sublimation; of a sublimation which sublimates nothing, which is relieved of the burden of passion, and freed from the pressure of desire. (Bachelard xxv)

And in this space, to quote from Bachelard’s sequel work The Poetics of Reverie (La Poétique de la Rêverie), “...like a forgotten fire, a childhood can always flare up again within us.”

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Here is a video reflection upon Gaston Bachelard and The Poetics of Space of greater scope:

https://youtu.be/vFSpeD2GVtw

Sources:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Far Better To Have Existed

Far Better To Have Existed

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

Earlier today, I encountered a provocatively entitled piece of Natalie Shoemaker on Big Think, Humans Have A Moral Duty To Stop Procreating. What is being advanced here? The thesis, evidently, that antinatalism, or the position that we should no longer bring children into the world such that the human species itself enters upon a fate of extinction is somehow a ‘fair’ view. The predicate upon which the author is advancing this rather charitable assessment seems to be twofold. For one part, there is an appeal to current ecological crisis. For the other, there is the more, one might say ‘essentialist’ framing of David Benatar. Yet neither of these lines of support can be viewed as ‘fair’ unless one is willing to countenance considerable lassitude with regard to logical or emotional coherence.

The Malthusian trope that the population must be ‘culled’ out of deference to the finitude of resource is an old one, likely older than Malthus himself. It is also convenient for misidentifying the ultimate or distal causes of ecological crisis in a manner which both forestalls the attainment of substantial solutions to that crisis, and preserves the iniquities so profitable to its beneficiaries.  What are the ultimate or distal causes of ecological crisis? To begin though with the proximate causes, In physical terms, we may look at such factors as the large scale emission of fossil fuel gases, or the suffusion of waterways with chemicals exogenous to local habitats, or the irradiation of certain vicinities with the toxic byproduct of nuclear power. What is notable is the fact that these stressors derive not from human procreativity, but the imperatives of a particular system of economic production, capitalism. By subordinating the determination of social production to a logic of unrestrained expansion, it engenders a relationship with technology, and on a deeper level, an antagonism with nature that  are more correctly the ultimate and distal causes of the problem.  This is not to aver, incidentally, that technology is to be rejected out of hand. Rather, it is to offer that our relationship with it needs to change that it can harnessed to reflect precisely a sounder relationship with nature.  In this connection, the deleterious consequences of capitalist imperatives are thrown into quick relief.

For patently, the raw capacity to produce energy from such sources as solar, or wind, or small hydro have been extant for decades. Yet the pace of their adoption has been glacial. Whither so? The stated ‘practical’ reason is cost of production. That is, the constraints upon or decisions deriving of the current system of economy.  This though is not the end of the matter. For intimately connected with the broad attachment to that system is a thoroughly conditioned belief in scarcity as the very horizon of our existence.  Indeed, the discipline of economics itself frequently is defined as concerned with responding to scarcity as the very situation which should limit our decisions of production and distribution. Now, it is not merely a syllogistic reality, but one which incarnates palpably that institutions and disciplines rely for their existence on the very problems for which they are set to resolve (e.g., pharmaceutical companies thrive on disease and are allergic to cures). Thus the tragic irony of classical economy that the categories whereby it would have us approach a situation of scarcity, actually perpetuate and create it. Thus billions are hungry in a world where food is thrown out at offensive scales. And, hence, pollution is seen as solvable by trading it as a commodity, and hence the adoption of sustainable strategies and approaches to energy production (e.g., distributed electricity generation, small hydro, et al.) are rejected for the question of their profitability. Moreover, the potential abundance of the world is actually concealed, masked not simply by the veil of ‘economic thinking’, but by the disastrous social relations which constitute the regime of capitalism.  Perhaps it will be seem that we’ve meandered somewhat afield. But actually, we return to the original point. The problem of ecological crisis derives not from a situation of overpopulation, but a system of production and distribution which creates iniquity and ravages nature. It is the system that is the problem, and not the people.

And it is to be added that within the antinatalist view is a not so latent racism worthy of the colonial pretensions of the nineteenth century. For it will be asked from what portions of the globe does the growth of the human population derive? The bulk of that growth by most accounts is to be found in Africa and India, and, now to a lesser extent, in China. Presumably, then, any project of ‘population reduction’ would then focus its efforts on the historical quarry of imperialism, the racially marginalize and impoverished. Thus the ‘humanitarian’ veneer of antinatalism is revealed to be a hideous sham, a patina put upon a view which would encourage the worst sort of cultural violence, while preserving the structural injustices of the current modes of economy and state.

All said, there remains the second plank to the author’s congenial view of the uncongenial antinatalism, namely the account of it offered by David Benatar.  Within the article to which we are directed, Benatar (in a large way using the character Rust Cohle of True Detective as a qualified template) goes further than to offer antinatalism as a response to the ecological challenges of the present, but as a response to life itself.  Thus this choice expostulation:

When we look closely we notice just how much suffering there is. Consider, for example, the millions living in poverty or subjected to violence or the threat thereof. Psychological distress and disturbance is widespread. Rates of depression are high. Everybody suffers frustrations and bereavements. Life is often punctuated by periods of ill-health. Some of these pass without enduring effects but others have long-term sequelae. In poorer parts of the world, infectious diseases account for most of the burden of disease. However, those in the developed world are not exempt from appalling diseases. They suffer from strokes, from various degenerative diseases and from cancer...

This homage to the maudlin reflects an evasion both of the very problems that it cites, and an evasion of life itself.  Let it be quickly remarked, in respect to the former, that the greater part of the distresses and disturbances which it so laments  are founded not upon anything innate to life itself, but by  institutions, frameworks, cultural variables that are themselves fluid and subject to amelioration, and that amelioration by the very human agency which Benatar  would dismiss.Quite obviously,  it is true that pain and death are part and parcel of life. But to judge the weight of those difficulties which life presents before us as grounds for its total rejection is to court a worse than fatal myopia. Benatar, is at least ‘honest’ on this latter point. Thus the title of his 2006 book, and his claim that it is ‘better not to have existed at all’.  For Benatar, ‘consciousness is a curse’ and ‘self-consciousness’ a second and added one.

Here is the fundamental contradiction. Antinatalism constitutes a project, a recommendation for action. As such, it posits implicitly that there is some good which should guide our way through life, a moral compass. Consciousness is that very dimension of being which enables our awareness of, our comportment towards that good. Consciousness is the very condition whereby life itself enters upon meaning.  To designate it somehow a curse, is in effect to deny life itself, and, really,  being altogether.  In fact, this is a more grievous position than nihilism. Nihilism, questioning the basis of any valuation, argues for a kind of suspension of commitment. And, indeed, nihilism suffers from its own difficulties. Yet antinatalism is not so humble as to argue for any such suspension. It is rather very actively committed to a rejection of life itself…and not merely human life if its premises are consistently followed, for indeed it apparently sees sentience itself as the enemy.  

I shall be a bit old fashioned here, and respond as a simple existentialist. The condition of our lives is one of condemnation to freedom. Who and what we are is yet indeterminate. At the proverbial end of the day, what remains is to lend a contour, a shape, a determinacy that moves beyond, or even transcends that initial anomie. The task is to forge an identity, and, in that forging, to realize meaning.  There is, thus, a profound excitement in the possibilities which stand forth before us, both as individuals and as a society. There is in those possibilities a doorway to great and redeeming adventure.  There is also the possibility for great and profound generosity. To have a child and to raise that child to participate in life, in consciousness, in the great and redeeming adventure can be ultimately one of the most magnificent expressions of that generosity.  To close ourselves off from that expression is to cut deeply into the very heart of what it can be to be human.

For, again, that is the question.  What is it to be human?  And we are all involved in the determination of this question’s answer. For my part, I stake with not only an affirmation of life, but of humanity, of human beings as capable of responding to the difficulties of our age, and of creating a future which can, as it were, exceed the present. I can only encourage you to join me in that reply.

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See my YouTube Channel for an exploration of the alternative conception of nature offered by Social Ecology and its implications for the question of the human relationship with nature...

Nature - Static or Dialectical? Murray Bookchin and Social Ecology

Reflections on Jens Rushing, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit

Reflections on Jens Rushing, and Marx’s Value, Price and Profit

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

A point of encouragement was the broad sharing of Jens Rushing's remarks about the issues surrounding the  the similarity in pay of fast food workers and Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). By dint of a certain synchronicity, this came up as I was revisiting a talk of Marx that he gave in 1865. Entitled Value, Price, and Profit,  reading it in tandem with the present focus on minimum wage provoked a measure of astonishment. This was in virtue of that the contours of the question of worker compensation have persisted remarkably  since even the middle nineteenth century into the present.The talk was given to a Working Man's Association. In it, Marx responds directly to the claims of  John Weston that a general raise in wages would be detrimental to the working class, inviting retaliatory action from capitalists that would raise prices across the board. Today, the movement to hike the minimum wage, even to a rather anemic $15.00/hr, has elicited a very similar  resistance from many (e.g.,the Cato Institute).

Among the lines which their objections take, we may take two here for our consideration. One of these is precisely a recapitulation of Weston’s point from 1865 that raising the minimum wage would provoke  a spike in prices to compensate for the resultant loss of profit margin. There is a granule of truth here as indeed a raise in wages would translate into a diminution of that fraction of the surplus value from which profit is derived. However, if one maintains, as those who oppose the raise of minimum wage often do, that the market is an adequate assessor of value, the coherence of this line of reasoning is open to serious question. This is in virtue of the circumstance that the value of a commodity is not a function of the capitalist's whim, but rather is founded upon the cost of its production and reproduction. As such, its determination is distinct from the relative proportion of value allocated to wage or profit.  To recall Marx:

The value of a commodity is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of that quantity of labour is realized in a value for which and equivalent has been paid in the form of wages; part of it is realized in a value for which NO equivalent has been paid. Part of the labour contained in the commodity is paid labour; part is unpaid labour. By selling, therefore, the commodity at its value, that is, as the crystallization of the total quantity of labour bestowed upon it, the capitalist must necessarily sell it at a profit. He sells not only what has cost him an equivalent, but he sells also what has cost him nothing, although it has cost his workman labour. The cost of the commodity to the capitalist and its real cost are different things.

I repeat, therefore, that normal and average profits are made by selling commodities not above, but at their real values.  (Value, Price and Profit, Sec.X)

There is some subtlety here. For reflection shows though that what transpires in a raising of wage does curtail how much of a produced commodity’s value is available for extracting profit. Yet this does not change the overall value of the commodity, but rather merely how that value is subsequently allocated upon its realization in sale.  Thus, if one endeavors to raise the price of that commodity in response to more of that value being disbursed to labor, one will actually be swimming against the current of the market. This, of course, doesn’t prevent an effort to effect such a raise nevertheless. However, over time such efforts would founder upon the very shores where they seek refuge. For to offer  an item or service at a price above its value will discourage its sale.   Additionally, there are plenty of complications to muddy the water. In fact, if the general wage is raised, this should in principle translate to an increased effective demand for those commodities which are sought more specifically by the working class. But this would actually result in an enhanced profitability in the industries providing those goods and services, an enhanced profitability which would effect a shift in the distribution of investment capital in general. This would then provoke greater competition within those industries which would equilibriate the initial spike, returning it to its original level in real terms. And thus, the ultimately beneficial character of the raised wage is preserved.

This, it is worth repeating, is the outcome which derives from an adherence to the very principles of classical political economy as espoused by Adam Smith, or David Ricardo. What is seen thus is that the call for more robust remuneration of workers then is actually a rather conservative position, a reformist position. For simply to call for a raise in the general wage, especially the general minimum wage, is to leave intact the logic of the wage system itself. It is this latter which plays so essential a role in preserving class stratification by subordinating people to an economic rationality. To spell that out, one may recall that the wage is the price of labour-time, which is treated accordingly a commodity. The price of commodities is reflective of the value involved in their production and reproduction. Hence we arrive syllogistically to see that the proper level of a wage is what it would take to enable the worker to return to work the next day. In fact, the contract form whereby one one enters into such a wage agreement strictly insulates one from participation in the fruits of one’s own creative efforts. In this connection, a portal to volumes of elaboration is opened. Yet here we will restrict ourselves but one.  Namely, it is the concern to which Jens was speaking in his own happily distributed remarks.

There are many who have expressed grief that the gains made by fast food workers (yet still minimal, but at least emergent) result in a rather unfair situation for those in other professions, such as, but not exclusively, EMTs. As Rushing points out, this is a rather inverse manner in which to see the situation.  The problem is not that fast food workers make too much, but that EMTs, and indeed most people make too little. The more appropriate response then should be one of solidarity, not antagonism. And we may recall to avail Rushing’s own remark. “Look, if any job is going to take up someone's life, it deserves a living wage. If a job exists and you have to hire someone to do it, they deserve a living wage. End of story.”  I may hazard to append to this the additional, technical point: within a classical, or neo-classical economic framework, the function of a wage is not to provide reward for one’s efforts, but simply to enable the perpetuation of work. Thus, we see, that by and large, the notion of jobs being differentially rewarded actually is at odds with the imperatives of a commodity logic. Under that logic, the worker’s s  ontological status, or rather our status ontological status  is commensurate with that of mere machines requiring maintenance and fuel for operation. As we are human beings and not mere machines, though, we do not fit well on the Procrustean table of that rationality. And hence when its full implications begin to unfold we are drawn to revolt against its absurdity. To this point we shall return presently. But first, to complete the thought started in this paragraph, anxieties about how different sorts of works are in fact valued err, I would contend, in fixating upon wage or remuneration as the locus where upon to focus their concern.  For one, such fixation misunderstands the function of the wage. But of far greater significance, it also distracts from appreciating the more substantial roots of the troubles which confront us in the very system of economy whereof the wage is but emblematic.

Yet even the system is not the bottom line. It is but the material expression of our  relationships. And as such it very largely masks the dynamics of power which constitute them. It is in fact the distortions within those dynamics where the glaring tragedies of our time originate, manifesting macroscopically in the gross class stratification of our cultures and societies. And those we return to the question of revolt. Here is not meant some adolescent reactivity. Rather, it is the notion emergent from our very hearts, the perception that this state of affairs is simply incongruent with what we are and with what we are capable of being. It is thus not only against the oppressive structures that we inherit. Indeed, the opposition is secondary. Rather it is a movement to create a different world, the different world which Charles Eisenstein has eloquently called the more beautiful one that we know in our hearts to be possible. This world’s birth though is not to be found as macroscopically originated. Instead, it’s birth, its naissance is found within our immediate lives. That is, it originates in how we treat each other.  Let us, in that, err on the side of the generous.

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Here is a video reflection of similar themes from my YouTube Channel:
Karl Marx, Minimum Wage and Questions of Power

A Brief Reflection on Existentialism and Political Correctness

A Brief Reflection on Existentialism and Political Correctness

Thomas L. Lynn, Jr.

To realize that one is free is to realize in the like instant that one is radically responsible… and that not only for one’s own self, but for all human beings: that one exists is only possible in virtue of that one’s identity, one’s being is, from the start, both indeterminate, and yet proceeding to some concrete determination. Or, as Sartre put it more concisely, “Man is at the start a plan which is aware of itself.” (Sartre 16)  If the situation was otherwise, if one was ruled inexorably by some essence, some nature, some specified definition...then one would merely be.  Such a bare being is dishonest as it flees from the very fact that I am aware, and that I act; and that you are aware and that you act. What lends to our actions a power which ramifies for all people is that is precisely through the election of those actions, those decisions that human being moves beyond its origin towards concrete determination, towards its meaning. This though, is not a process which unfolds but once with finality, but rather which recurs in every moment.  Thus even the most mundane of our gestures assume a great significance. Or, to recall Sartre again,

If...existence precedes essence, and if we grant that we exist and fashion our image at one and the same time, the image is valid for everybody and for our whole age. Thus, our responsibility is much greater than we might have supposed, because it involves all mankind…Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man. (Sartre 18)

From this point of departure, I would like to draw out a quick line of implication for our current public discourse.

The plaint that ‘political correctness’ hampers effective or honest communication has been a staple refuge on the American scene for some time now, and most recently has resurged with the distressing candidacy of Donald Trump. Where it is invoked, caution and sensitivity in language is generally dismissed as but an inauthentic posturing, or even as participation in a regime of thought control. As such, to invoke the charge of political correctness is often an effective rhetorical stratagem for evading the question at hand by displacing the focus from a statement’s content to questions about the speaker (It is, in effect, a version of ad hominem fallacy.).Concommitent to the denouncement of ‘politically correct’ speech is often the exhortation to a kind of roughness of talk that is unconcerned with the potential offensiveness to some involved.  There is no small irony in this, when one recalls the original charge that forward conversation has been impeded. For is it not precisely offensive tone which translates into an alienation which nullifies the possibility of a deeper mutual understanding?

The question is forthcoming though as to what we are really seeking to accomplish in our speech.  For the tacit presumption that has operated here so far is that by such speech we are seeking to in fact effect a deeper mutual understanding. However, it must be granted that this is not always the case. There remains the possibility of a talk that is in bad faith.  And thus, the realization of our radical responsibility then assumes a marked poignancy in connection with our words, our speech. For within our words, our speech the determination of human being arrives in an all but explicit manner. Through our utterances, we are expressing an evaluation of the human project itself.  As such, to insist upon preserving manners of articulation which carry within them implications which demean, or which ratify prejudice is to insist upon a diminished or truncated view of our potential.  

And so, to be sure, bad faith is also a possibility within speech delicately chosen. And perhaps, at the end of the day, an ‘authentic roughness’ is preferable to a ‘refined insincerity’. Yet, while this logical possibility remains, in the great preponderance of situations the use of mere force in speech is an escapism. As a rule, forceful speech aims to present a curtailed or simplified reality, an easier reality than the one which confronts us.  It aims, ultimately, to reduce the terms of choice, and perhaps even to eliminate the very fact of choice under the guise of providing certitude. Certitude, though, is a luxury not afforded to the free.

Source Cited

Sartre, Jean Paul (Bernard Frechtman, trans.). Existentialism and Human Emotion. New York: Kensington Publishing Corp., 1957, 1985.

And here is a brief gloss on Sartre's essay Existentialism which I did for YouTube: 

Existentialism by the Lights of Jean Paul Sartre