Human Resources?

Led by commerce, personnel departments have generally been re-named as 'Human Resources'.  This change has been far-reaching indeed; the term personnel has all but disappeared, and the new designation is ubiquitous indeed.  Even in the Church of England (I say 'even' but it's hardly surprising), HR departments have sprung up everywhere.

It strikes me that this redesignation is a real retrograde step; or it is as far as 'persons' are concerned.  I imagine the term HR is a form of accountant-speak in which everything is reduced to a matter of pounds and pence.  The problem with the term is that it is, in a sense, de-humanising.  It implicitly (explicitly?) reduces persons (with all that the term implies in terms of inalienable rights and the like),  to mere 'resources'.  Human-beings, in this new milieu, are effectively reduced to merely instrumental value, like the photocopier or the fax machine.  As resources, they can be called upon, deployed, exploited (even in the best sense) in the furtherance of an end beyond themselves and in which they may have no share.  A resource is something essentially inert, and of no value until it is utilised.

The word 'personnel', by contrast, explicitly reminds those in positions of authority, that they are dealing with persons and not mere resources.  Persons have views, opinions and values.  Their very presence and status as persons serves as a reminder that the true value of any work or human enterprise derives from the value of those for whom that work is undertaken, an insight articulated memorably by Pope Paul VI in a homily on the feast of the Holy Family way back in 1964.

Persons, then, have  an intrinsic value.  Indeed, they are the end to which all human endeavour is oriented.  Resources have an instrumental, or relative, value.  Those who would wish to suggest that, over the past thirty years, most people's working lives have worsened in so many ways, might well argue that the change from 'personnel' to 'human resources' has the character of an uncorrected Freudian slip.

The Moral Life and the Metaphysics of Participation

Last Sunday, the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, the lectionary presented us with two scripture readings which are closely related.  The first was an extract from the so-called 'Holiness Code' of the book of Leviticus, which represents a landmark in the development of Jewish thought.  There is an analogical relationship between the character of the obedient Israelite and God's own nature:  Israel is called not simply to 'do this' or 'avoid that', but rather to reflect in its own collective life the pattern of God's holiness.  'Be holy', says the Lord, 'for I, the Lord your God, am holy'.  Then, in the reading from St Matthew's Gospel, the themes are pressed further: Jesus tells the disciples that they are to 'be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect'.  Those who follow Jesus are called to embrace an ethic that goes way beyond the call to love one's neighbour; they are to love their enemies, too.  In striving to do this, they reflect God's nature, albeit to a limited degree.

On the face of it, the call to perfection seems unrealistic and impossible.  But Christian salvation, in all its fullness, means to share the very life of God.  The Christian belief in the possibility of eternal life is a belief that our true and final destiny is perfect communion with God for all eternity.  Christians believe that they participate in this gift, to a limited degree, here and now, through baptism, eucharist and in the sacramental life generally.  Even more fundamentally, since not all people avail themselves of the sacraments, humans and creatures generally participate in the life of God through our very being, since we cannot bring ourselves to life and to birth.  Our very life is a participation in the life of the God who alone can give life.  The sacramental life of the Church builds up and nourishes this supernatural life in us. There is a very real sense in which we already reflect something of God.  So, for example, when a human being shows  genuine compassion, something of God's compassion is revealed.  Of course, God's compassion is of a higher order altogether, but the point is that our compassion is not wholly unrelated to that of God.  There is an analogical relationship between God's compassion and our own.

The two biblical passages are set firmly in the moral arena, though this arena should not be thought of as an enclosed realm, somehow separated from the generality of life.  One of the reasons we find the call to perfection conceptually difficult is that, in the West since the Enlightenment, morality has come to be seen as being to do with right and wrong action.  So our focus tends to be on what people do, or don't do, in a given situation.  From this, we see a convenient separation made all the time between the public and the private, as if the living of a kind of schizophrenic life is somehow normal.  This is evidenced by the argument prevalent today about how it doesn't matter what a public person is like in their so-called private life, so long as they do their job properly.  It's as if there is never, and can never be, any meaningful connection between these two apparently separate realms; there is an apparently wholly-acceptable caesura interposed by modernity right down the middle of the individual moral life.  So, on this basis, an acceptable public life could simply amount to a carefully-cultivated public life lived by someone whose so-called private behaviour is completely reprehensible.

Ancient Greek ethics was completely unlike this.  Rather than focussing on action, right and wrong, the focus was on the development of a person's character.  This character was built up patiently by the practice of the so-called virtues, such as bravery, self-control, gentleness, friendliness, truthfulness, justice and so on.  Practising these qualities, or excellences, would build up a person's character so that they would live (and act) virtuously because of the sort of person they were, or had become, or were becoming.

Christian morality has a similar background, except that it is recognised that we do not possess, in and of ourselves, the capacity to be good, unequivocally.  We are indeed, as humans, basically good (because we have been created by God), but we have marred his image in us through sin.  So, as St Thomas Aquinas taught, in the thirteenth century, we need grace in order that our nature may be perfected, by God.

So, through God's grace, we participate in God's life which, in turn, means that we participate in his perfection.  The call to perfection that Jesus issues is, then, not unreasonable and unrealistic, since it is clear that we cannot perfect ourselves, any more than we were able to bring ourselves into being in the first place.  It is a work of God in us.

Closed Shops

I imagine that most people of a certain age, say fifty or over, can remember the closed shops operated by the trades unions in the 1970s.  These meant that all the employees at certain factories had to belong to the particular union operating there in order to work there.  Even though this arrangement with the employers contributed much to the improvement of the lot of employees, there was the sense among many people that this was a good example of a restrictive practice.  In the early 1980, Margaret Thatcher's new government, in raft of anti-union legislation, made the union closed shop illegal.  It's fair to say that the government had widespread public support for this.

After its election to in 1997, new Labour did nothing to overturn any of the anti-union laws brought in by Mrs Thatcher's government, even though the rights of working people had been curtailed substantially.

It is easy to see the class-prejudice behind all this, since the anti-union legislation was predicated upon the idea that the closed shop had a restrictive effect on business - it could be seen to tie the hands of employers; and, in some cases, this was so.  But what it certainly meant was that employers could not simply ride rough-shod over their employees.  Where the class-prejudice becomes clear is that there is no such governmental objection to the closed shops and the consequent restrictive practices of the professions.  These have been left untouched by any inhibitive legislation at all, so that the professions can charge the rest of us what they like for their services.  Indeed, it seems to me that, if anything, they are thriving more now that at any time in the past.

I was speaking to someone recently who told me that he had consulted a solicitor and been charged £150.00 for a not-very-involved letter.  We have recently had a bill for £331.00 for some not-very-extensive vet treatment for a cat.  A few years ago, my NHS dentist decided that he was going to operate only under the Denplan scheme - this meant that instead of paying around £35.00 annually for my dental treament (nearly always only check-ups) I was now going to be asked for a monthly sum which I calculated would represent a 550% increase in the cost to me.  For this, I would be allowed to attend every three months instead of every six; but given that I hardly need to go every six, represents a fatuous offer indeed.  The same dentist recently charged an elderly and not very well-off woman I know £900.00 for some treatment and then told her not to worry because she could pay in instalments.  I told this dentist to keep his Denplan, and decided instead to go to a private dentist where I just pay at the time for the treatment I have; and whilst this has so far been cheaper to me than Denplan, I've only had check-ups.  I'm sure that if I needed say, a crown, I would have to save up for it.  At my last examination, I was in the chair for around ninety seconds (yes, I timed it) and then discovered that the fee had risen to £30.00 (it was £15.00 when I started there four years ago) - nice work if you can get it.  Our parish architect has an hourly rate of £77.00 for his services, merely for consultation.

I could, of course, go on.  I cannot escape the impression that, even as most people are really feeling the squeeze, the members of the various professions are getting richer and richer.  Their practices are restrictive, in that their basic fees are set down by their respective professional bodies, so that, if (for example) I decide to use a different vet next time, I shall find the same fee-rates wherever I go.  The inescapable truth is that the professions operate far more effective and tighly organised closed shops than the trades unions ever did; and not only do they do it with impunity, they do it with the support and encouragement of successive governments. 

Funerals and Death

I have just written, as I do every year, to our local funeral directors to inform them of the revised fees for funerals in the church building.  Funeral fees come in two parts: there is the statutory part, fixed centrally, of which the funeral directors are informed from 'the centre'; then there is the parochial part, fixed locally, and which covers such costs as organists, vergers and the like.

In addition to imparting this information, I also made a plea this year.  Over recent years, and probably traceable back to the time of the funeral of Princess Diana, there has been a move towards the description of a funeral service as 'A celebration of the life of...'  There has been an increase in the number of humanist/secular funeral services for people who want to avoid any religious context for the laying-to-rest of their loved ones.  I have no complaint about this; whilst I would like people in our culture to be fervent in faith, I recognise that this is generally not so, and that a non-religious service is more appropriate and has greater integrity for many.  But a service which is simply 'a celebration of the life' of a person is, in fact, a very different thing from a Christian funeral service, in which the departed person is commended to God in faith, accompanied by prayers offered in the Christian hope of God's mercy.  There is a 'vertical' dimension to any religious service which is absent, by definition, in a secular rite.

So my plea to the funeral directors was to avoid the phrase 'A celebration of the life of..' whenever they are asked by a family to prepare an order of service (such 'orders of service' are generally not orders of service at all; they just contain the words of the hymns chosen).  Instead, I've asked them to describe the service according to what it actually is: a 'Funeral Service for..'.  I understand that the 'celebration of the life of' model is now prevalent everywhere, even within the church, though i have to say that it amazes me that the Church so easily lapses into a secular default position instead of upholding its principles.

'A celebration of the life of...'speaks to me of the secular understanding of death as the complete negation of what 'life' is about, and of the way in which death remains a kind of taboo subject in modern western culture.  This understanding, incidentally, also underpins the common practice in our hospitals of pumping into terminally-ill patients large doses of very aggressive (and expensive) chemotherapy with no prospect of cure but only the hope of a slightly lenghthened life lived in misery because the treatment is so unpleasant.  For Christians, though, death is understood as a part of life and as the gateway to the ultimate fulfilment of life.  This doesn't mean, of course, that there is no place for sorrow when a loved one dies; but it does throw the emphasis upon the virtue of hope in the midst of sorrow, loss and death.  Happily, it is nearly always the case that there is a place for thanksgiving (to God) for the life of a person who has died, and this should and must find a place in the funeral rites.  But there is a lot more to a Christian funeral service than this.  To describe such a service as a celebration of the life of a person is reductive in the extreme, and a tendency that all Christian priests, ministers and people should resist.

Cameron and Happiness

This past week, David Cameron has told us that he wishes to measure happiness and so help people to achieve 'the good life'.  He says that measures of purely economic well-being are not enough and too simplistic.  Cameron appears to be shifting his concern from a pre-occupation with material prosperity of the kind that the modern Conservative Party has fetishized for the past thirty years to a more holisitic appreciation of the good life for humans.  In itself, this is to be applauded.

Cameron's announcement should strike chords with most people, even those (like myself) who greeted his remarks with a smidgin of cynicism.  It would have been more heartening to hear the Prime Minister speaking in such terms during a time of economic prosperity but, even today, most people still say that the really important components of a good life are good health, the love of others, a sense of purpose, interior and exterior freedom, and the like.

So, to be fair, Cameron might be on to something.  I hope, as he does his research, that he will look to Aristotle, who offers happiness (eudamonia) as the supreme good.  The Greek word does not have a precise English equivalent, and it is sometimes rendered as 'human flourishing'.  For Aristotle, this good life requires the exercise of the ethical virtues (arete) such as, for example, self-control (sophrosune), generosity (eleutheriotes), self-respect (megalopsychia), friendliness (philia), justice (dikaiosune), among others.  The possession and exercise of these virtues points to the excellence of a person's character.  However, Aristotle concedes that the exercise of good character, as well as the enjoyment of eudamonia, is vulnerable to events which lie beyond the control of the agent (tuche).  Such events can poison all the excellences , or virtues, of character, grinding a person down so that they come to accept a more mundane conception of life.  There is a very real sense, then, that the good life for humans is fragile, and vulnerable to events which are external to the agent.

David Cameron would do well to ponder this ancient wisdom, since the policies of this new coalition government would appear to be introducing all kinds of additional impediments to human flourishing.  It is certainly the case that some groups of people are going to be far more affected than others.  Those most adversely affected are in general those who benefitted least from the boom years.  It is no good identifying 'happiness' in such as way that it is something understood to lie somehow outside a social context.  The soon-to-take-effect of the latest hike in the regressive VAT to 20%, the removal or reduction of essential benefits to people in vulnerable situations and the effective closing-off of higher education to the poor along with the consequent frustration of their aspirations will all militate against true human flourishing for many thousands of people.

Aristotle's eudamonia, and Plato's Idea of the Good are both presented in terms of their being ultimately situated in intellectual or philosophical contemplation, suggesting that they are invulnerable to external events.  But Aristotle, especially, acknowledges that relational goods (such as some of the virtues listed above) lie in the common life lived with others.  This common life, Aristotle stresses repeatedly, has a necessary instrumental role in the development of the good character essential to a happy life.  We need to belong.  Social impediments can corrode good character and, in turn, diminish eudamonia.  Deprivation from what is generally regarded as normal conditions for living causes frustration and, ultimately, alienation from what we are as human beings.  Our prisons are full of people who cannot flourish.  Some of our poorest communities are not so very different in this regard.  Government policy which serves to exacerbate hopelesness, frustration and alienation militates against Cameron's new project.

What is education for?

The student protests in London over the issue of tuition fees prompts again the question of the purpose and value of education. 

Over recent years, we have seen the question answered in an increasingly reductive way.  You get educated so that you become better able to get a good, well-paid job at the end of it, thus securing for yourself a better life.  Education has increasingly become defined in purely instrumental terms; the principle of utility has become paramount.  Education is no longer intrinsically valuable; it is simply the means to an end.

The establishment of this principle allowed the Blair government to replace a system of grants with the requirement for students and their families to pay tuition fees, a policy now extended by the present government, in spite of its claims to a greater progressiveness.  The policy is predicated upon two assumptions:  firstly, that graduates can be expected to earn better salaries and so be able to pay the fees back as they embark upon their working lives; secondly, that the only beneficiary of the education provided is the person who has been educated, in spite of the fact that Blair repeatedly said that 'the country' needed to have a greater number of graduates and hence the expansion of the university sector.

This extreme individualism hasn't always held sway.  In times past, there was something of a sense of education conducing to a notion of the public good.  There have always been those who have seen education as being mainly to do with an end product defined in terms of comparative material prosperity; and indeed, seen like this, it has provided pathways out of poverty for some.  But we seem today to have lost any widespread notion that education has an inherent value, and that a good education system makes a country a better place.

Now education has been reduced to something of merely economic worth, oriented towards providing the educated with a greater capacity to consume (and thereby in their turn made instrumental in the perpetuation of liberal capitalism), we see 'useful' subjects (defined as those which produce material wealth) preferenced over 'useless' ones in the arts and humanities.  Yet these latter subjects produce greater civility and humanity in society.  Their value cannot be stated in economic terms, yet they help to foster the healthy societal ethos which we have already largely lost, but which must be restored if people in this country are to rediscover a real sense of the shared or common good.

Contra Pelagius

Thanks to the willing availability of my two excellent priest-colleagues, I have had a very light day of duties today.  Indeed, I sung the main Mass at 10.00am, and that was it!  I didn't even have to give a homily, or celebrate the early Mass, or take the Blessed Sacrament to the sick and housebound.  I got back home after the Sung Mass, put on my recording of yesterday's FA Cup First Round highlights and then had a light lunch.

After lunch, Karen and I then went out in the car for a drive.  Even when we stopped at Greenlands Farm to look at all the middle class frippery they sell, along with the various Christmas gift options, I was engaged and relaxed and would like to go back on another occasion and get some of the stuff.  After this, we went on up to Windermere, where I got towed around the big Lakeland shop they have there, where we looked at kitchen knives and bought a cheese box for the fridge.  It was all very relaxing, refreshing and renewing, though I'm not sure I'd have set off had I known that we would be effectively shopping all afternoon.

The we went off to Morland church, in the middle of nowhere (well, near Penrith) for a choral evensong.  There was a large assembled choir which had rehearsed all afternoon for this celebration to mark the centenary of the birth of the recently departed Canon Gervase Markham, the founder of the annual Morland Choristers' Camp.  In spite of one or two minor anomalies, this was pretty tolerable even if it wasn't something I'd normally trek miles for.  Then, on the way home, we called in at the Raj takeaway in Milnthorpe.  I now feel ultra relaxed, after a very agreeable day, and fully prepared for the rather full week's work that lies ahead.

Back at the end of the fourth/beginning of the fifth century, there was a lay theologian called Pelagius who propagated the belief that human beings can achieve personal salvation by their own efforts.  This teaching effectively rendered God's grace redundant, and was condemned as erroneous and heretical by the Church.  If there is an established religion in Britain, it is arguable that it is Pelagianism.  People speak to me regularly, at visits prior to funerals, about the virtues of the deceased person; how they would help anyone and all the rest.  Others tell me that 'you don't have to go to church to be a Christian', or that 'Christians are no better than anyone else' (has anyone said they were?).  Behind all these expressions is the idea that we can somehow justify ourselves before God by being good and especially by doing good works, with the implication that we can deserve or earn our eternal salvation.  As if.

In spite of Pelagianism having the status of heresy, we priests often go about our business like good Pelagians.  Priests often feel guilty about having time off, or setting aside time for reading or for our hobbies and interests, as if we really should be doing something, and as if everything depends upon us.  But, of course, the Christian life is about being - it's about standing consciously in a particular relationship to God.  Anything we do, as Christians, springs from this relationship of being, from this ontology of Being to being, Creator to creature, self-subsistent Being to contingent being.

Scripture tells us that Christ came to give us abundant life, not to enslave us in guilt or to flog us so hard that we never take time for ourselves and those near and dear to us.  I would never have guessed that I could be reminded of this though a visit to a farm shop, a Lakeland shop and a visit to a village church for evensong.