who needs slavery when you have prison?

It is commonly known in our society that the prison system is inept. We all know the stories of minor theives who emerge from minor sentences as murderers and professional criminals. Often I've heard it commented on that jail is a good place to learn better skills by which to commit crimes. The funny thing is that this being common knowledge, nothing really changes. Surely we don't think this is just an unfortunate coincidence. After all, we pour billions of dollars yearly into the prison system. So, how is it then, that our society tolerates such inadequacy on the part of institutions which we put so much money into? The prison system as it stands, in spite of its impotence to "better" society, continually fails to improve. And the point is that there must be some reason for this.

People get out of prison and are followed by their criminal record. This record haunts them, preventing them from equal opportunity for employment, excluding them from certain social scenes and opportunities. So, let's consider this in light of the supposed purpose of the prison: to reform. If a man leaves a prison, a reforming institution, and enters a society where he is now at a serious disadvantage in terms of opportunity, he is thus precariously placed to continue on in a lifestyle of criminal activity. Reform the individual and then stigmatize them so that the reformed individual is naturally funneled back into the system which they are supposedly escaping . . . odd don't you think? It seems in this way that crime forms a sort of Sisyphean task for individuals who are trapped in a society that does not want them to reform, only to endlessly attempt to prove they have reformed. This is the setting in which the term 'delinquency' is born.

Delinquency is the idea of a certain "class" of people who perpetually perform crime in spite of the good graces of the ruling classes. Delinquents are the dogs who are genetically predisposed to biting the hands that feed them. Society incarcerates them with the 'good Christian intent' of reforming them to find a symbiotic role in society, and upon release they return to their old ways. Yet, let's return to the fact that delinquents are conveniently disadvantaged in many ways. Most well-paying jobs in society are closed off to them. After all, we wouldn't want convicts taking jobs from 'good up-standing citizens'. So, for instance, anyone convicted of a felony is barred from nursing and most other medical professions. These "convicts" (say it with disdain people . . ) are thus commited to the lower social classes, and even there are placed at disadvantage. So, naturally they are prime candidates to commit further crimes.

Another factor contributing to this is additional surveillance. Now, with the stigma of delinquency following them, it is likely that they will be monitored. They will be watched carefully by parole officers and social workers of various degree. So, if they commit a crime, even a small one, the likelihood of being caught is even higher. Their fingerprints are known. It is known where they live and the circles they probably run it. Thus we know that those who are released from prison have astronomically high chances of returning withing a year.

So, our prisons are running out of room. We build more. Those run out of room. Fewer and fewer are 'reformed', and more and more are entrapped in cycles of delinquency. We start noticing that the 'vicious circles' of our society carry with them an amazing centrifugal force that is growing to encompass more and more of our population.

One thing to keep in mind in regard to delinquency is that it seldom if ever effects the highest ranks of our society . . . convenient. Those billionaires in America might lose a few abstract numbers in relation to the value of their third trust fund in Geneva, but is their any chance they will suffer from a petty theft or mugging? So we find that the lower one's status the greater the chance is that they will be effected by delinquency. So delinquency becomes a cycle of the poor commiting crimes against the poor, and these crimes are generally commited due to the state of poverty the poor live in. Ahhh poverty . . that horrible plague that never gets cured since none of us are responsible for it.

There are lots of misconceptions about prison in our society. The most common is that prison exists for the sake of retribution. In truth our society (thankfully) is very opposed to the idea of punishment for the sake of justice. While this is commonly the plea on the part of those who have been wronged or their families, our culture as a whole has little tolerance for such stern justice. We cringe at the idea of torture, which was so common until 200 years ago. Large sectors of our society firmly oppose the death penalty, which is a prime indicator that our system of justice has left behind the idea of expiation. Beyond this, the largest misconception that is generally held is that the continual failure of our prisons to reform (as they are theoretically supposed to do) criminals is simply an accident. In fact, though it may not be an intentional flaw, it is nonetheless a opportune one for ruling classes to further their domination. To say it better: I don't believe in a conspiracy by rich people, only that since rich people have the opportunity and the political favorability, delinquency becomes a convenient tool to oppress the poor. When prisons turn out individuals who have adopted a thorough criminal intent, it is a matter of time before they act out. After all, prison was not intended to deter such crime by means of fear of just punishment. Nor does it appear that prison was truly indended to cure them of their criminal behavior (despite all the rhetoric otherwise). Rather is seems that prison is a station for the control and prepetuation of delinquency.

Upon parole or release, criminals are followed by their reputation, not to mention various officers. They are on many levels watched. Chances are that when they commit their next crime, other friends and acquaintances will also be involved. More are tried, more are sentenced, more are branded. Our culture has sufficiently managed to create a social class of delinquents; we have fabricated a caste which some are born into, and more and more are resigned to by our judiciary. We have found a way for justice to be perverted into a means of oppression, a court-ordered poverty. It is a system that keeps us safe, but would readily consume us for stepping out of line. Slavery is always in the shadow of safety.

the evolution of power

. . and back to Foucault. I've got about 80 pages left on this book. I just got up to the chapter which most of the overview books I'd read claimed to be the most ground-breaking conceptually. Here goes:

I was once informed by a friend not to start out blogs with fancy words, but I'm going to anyway; just stick with it, i'll explain.

Concept 1: Reification leads to economics.

Reification, loosely defined, is taking an abstract concept and acting as though it were concrete. The easiest example I can think of is Time. Time is not a tangible thing. We can't see or touch time. Yet, listening to the way we speak of time, it would seem like the opposite was the case. Western society is utterly encompassed by the idea of time as a measurable commodity. We devide up days into hours, into minutes, into seconds, and for engineers micro/nanoseconds. We speak of time as though it were something scarce, and with scarcity comes economics. We commonly leave activities undone for "lack of time". Still, where is this "treasury" of time? A band I like has a lyric that points out,
"Time exists just on your wrists so don't panic. Moments last, and lifetimes are lost in a day. So wind your watches down please, cause there is no time to lose."
Ultimately, time is really imaginary, it is an expression of the way humans experience existence, but there are other ways to express it. Eastern thought imagines time as a cyclical, seasonal pattern. There is no time line so to speak, instead there is a circle, or a track where existence goes around and around in circles for eternity. Consider that the next time you read Ecclesiastes 3: the mythic Solomon, the epidemy of wisdom, did not adhere to the concept of linear time.

Moving on, another example we can look to is the reification of value. This is the most obvious idea, and it's the first one that comes to mind when speaking of economics. Yet, what is value? This is question that is rarely answered because it is always anonymously under debate. Example: the concept of minimum wage is actually a debate over value. Time being a divisible commodity, and human life being a estimated amount of time, the question is really, how much is human life worth? How much is a person worth apart from their particular skills and talents? Or in other words, with no speicalized assets, what is the value of a person's commodified time?? This is essentially what is being debated with the concept of minimum wage. Obviously in the case of sweatshops overseas, or across our boarder with Mexico, human life is worth extremely little. Yet it becomes very hard to debate, since currency is a very inaccurate way to judge worth. How is it that a family in Latin America can live quite well on less than 2,000 American dollars a year, but an American with 15,000 can barely get by. But, at least this time, I'm not really intent on discussing currency; only on showing how we take abstract concepts and treat them as though they were tangible realities. Instead, I want to do a feeble job of introducing whoever the heck may read this to some of the ideas of Foucault.

Foucault's basic point is that Power is also a reified concept, which has it's own economy. Generally this is the economy we refer to as "Politics". The book (Discipline and Punish), focuses its attention on the evolution of disciplinary institutions and acts, primarily prisons and also educational schools. The evolution goes something like this:

Towards the end of the Middle Ages, and even into the Renaissance, social punishment for crime or abnormality was amazingly different than what we are now accustomed to. Keep in mind that punishment is essentially the use of power. And, viewing power economically, it is thus the spending of power for desired results. In other words 'you have to spend money to make money. Power in the Middle Ages was located in the person of the monarch. The King or Queen, or Lord, was the "all-powerful", almighty ruler. In other words they possessed all the power: they in themselves represented the sole bank where power was invested. This followed out, meant that the mass of society was therefore 'powerless'. The monarch was therefore responsible for the protection of the helpless multitudes he ruled over. So apply this thinking to the realm of crime. The criminal represents a person using power that is not his own, it is the monarch's. Since the victim is merely a sheep that the Shepherd King owns and is responsible for, the crime not considered to be against the victim, but instead against the King himself. Since the Monarch owns all things, there is no crime that is not an indirect assault on the him/her. Therefore, punishment plays out as the all-powerful King, displaying his almighty power over the criminal whose menial power was actually stolen from the King. So, there comes a form of theater where the true economic standings are shown to society as a whole. Take for instance the punishment displayed at the end of Braveheart. William Wallace who has offended the King is placed on stage before the crowd, the crowd participates in the theatrical display of torture: they throw rotten food at him and spit at him. They take part in the display of Wallace's impotence at the power of the King, who is the only one with true power. Wallace is tortured in a wide variety of ways, all to display that the King's men, and more importantly the King himself can do whatever they want, because they hold all the power, and Wallace, or more importantly every individual in the crowd, held none. The thing to keep in mind is that the torture of William Wallace was extremely commonplace in those times. It was the norm.

Yet, let's give this some economic consideration to this. If power, being a commodity, is scarce then what could we say for such torturous displays except that they were extremely wasteful. The idea was that the King had to periodically pick criminals who posed him a legitimate threat to his monopoly of power and spend a good deal of it, to assure that none of the masses got any ideas of resisting his will. Spend power in dramatic fashion, and through the fear of the masses, receive greater quantities of power. In poker terms, bully the table since your pot is vast and theirs is miniscule. Throw out a big bluff whenever you want to since you can afford it and they can't. This is an economic strategy of power that is effective, but often wasteful, and always held the potential to backfire. Afterall, the criminal could call the king's bluff, and the hostile crowd at the gallows could quickly change sides and demand the king's head rather than the criminal's. Not to mention the idea that it is economically absurd to think there is justified value in giving the whole nation a day off to see a king display the extent of his power over against the pathetic criminal.

How different things are today. As children of the Enlightenment we have been raised to believe that people as individuals have inalienable rights, which no king can justifiably subvert. We are in the 'land of the free' afterall. We are now horrified at the atrocious torture that was so commonly employed to display the monarch's wealth of power. Yet, this is more than a revaluation of human worth, it is a shift to a new economy of power. On the one hand there is the concept of the equality of the value of human life, but more subtly on the other hand there is an appraisal that points out that, though equal, human worth is appraised mainly by its position in the 'social machine'. We have achieved freedom from human tyranny at the price of enslavement to great inhuman social constructions. No longer are we sheep for the great shephard kings with their impulsive behavior. Instead we opt for "democratic" society, where we suppose that power (being a divisible commodity) is distributed among the population, instead of horded by the monarchy. We assume that all individuals hold an equal share of power, and lend it towards the ends they think would be best. We would call this voting. Yet this is a notion of equality that most of realize is an ideal far from being realized. In fact, it is not the case at all.

In modern society, with the deposition of the monarchy, we note that the bank of power was not divided equally among all humanity who are of "equal vaule". Instead, power was distributed mostly among the 'upper classes'. Or perhaps we should say, since the upper classes were mostly responsible for the disposition of the king, they conveniently worked out new political systems that assured that wealth and power would naturally rest with them. Today we would most easily recognize these political forces as corporate America. It's the reason that Enron executives are paying for their crimes by playing golf while lower class people guilty of much lesser crimes are spending years in jail. Our society has decentralized from sovereign power, but simultaneously allowed power to float up. Power in this way is protected by anonymous entities, like corporate facades, trust funds, etc. It is thus distributed in various pools which the upper classes have secured access to. The upper classes in this situation have no need of playing any sort of tyrannical role, since the entire economy of power is set up to protect them from accusations 'from below'.

Foucault gets really detailed in describing the methods used to cause this, but I'll spare you the technical explanations for now. His book has been quite revealing to me. I believe it has massive implicaitons for Christian thought, but i'll save all that for another time.

the posture of being

"We are funny creatures. We don't see the stars as they are, so why do we love them? They are not small gold objects but endless fire."

I just finished Henderson the Rain King by Saul Bellow the other day. It's a good story with a dramatically beautiful ending. In short it's about a 50 year old millionaire who has never truly understood himself, and in the midst of a last suicidal identity crisis sets out for the remote African interior in hopes of "bursting his spirit's sleep". He claims that he is sick of becoming, and wants to simply 'be', and is convinced that if it doesn't happen in this excursion he'll die before his spirit ever wakes. I think most of us could relate.

A lot of things in my life have pointed me toward the idea of 'being' lately. A few months back I tried to read a book entitled 'Being and Time' by Martin Heidegger. It took me about 100 pages to realize that I got lost on page 40, where I proceeded to shelve it. I hope to get back to it before I'm 50, maybe I'll find the time for it to make sense. It was a ground breaking book that marked the emergence of existentialism from the shadows of phenomenology, which is why it required far more intense attention than I was able to give it. The basic idea, before I got so terribly lost in the intricasies of his argment, is that human being is inevitably unified with the perception of time. Another way to say it, our concept of 'existence' is inseperable to our concept of time, and both of these precede our ability to discern our 'essence'. Existence precedes essence. Therefore we exist before we are, or "being" hinges on "existing". And existing according to Heidegger is only understood inasmuch as one understands 'time'. Thus existentialsm began to unfold for the next few decades until it too became eclipsed by many of the newer postmodern philosophies after the 1960's. The great existential questions of death and suffering, as well as those of meaning and connectedness arose. Before getting lost in phenomenological subleties, I saw Heideggers point as saying that our essence (Being) is trapped within the Western concept of linear time. We can only say what we "are" in relation to what we have "been", with our eyes set on what we are becoming.

Ahh, becoming. How sick all of us are of becoming, as Bellow's Henderson points out so vividly in the book. It seems so plain that Western society as a whole is tormented by the concept of lack. We are always incomplete, always waiting for wholeness. Always driven to the desperate pursuit of that which will let us 'be' rather than continually 'become'. It strikes me as an illness . . one which other societies don't seem to be so tormented by. And it seems that we are prepetually reminded of this, our imperfection. Consumer society lives by it. Materialism is a sponge with vinegar held to the mouth of a society crucified by guilt at the thought of its own lack. We buy cars and clothes and the latest technology to serve as a pathetic cover up, as fig leaves, for the shame of our fractured reality. We are insecure. On an existential level we are terrified by the thought of the meaninglessness of our own existence. We cringe in the face of death, as the loss of time, the loss of meaning, the resulting lack of essence or being. This is a fair summary of the continuing state of Western intellectual culture.

And from here I could take hundreds of lines of thought, based on which questions we could ask from there, but I want to talk about being. Existentialism, as well as other lines of philosophy, moved on from there. There have been plenty of answers offered that to one extent or another, offered some possible answers to the crisis of existence as well as essence. No doubt, there are hundreds of dogmatic answers provided by various religions, Christianity possibly more than all.

I think one possible answer to the problem of being, is a different understanding of being. I see being simply as an extension of one's attitude.

Attitude: comes from the Latin 'aptus' meaning 'fitness', also employed in our word aptitude, like an aptitude (ability) test. 'Aptus', was adopted in French for the word 'attitudine' which refered to one's posture which they saw as an indicator of a person's fitness. Then English came up with attitude, referring to one's mental posture. What about mental fitness? Hmmm.

In Eastern thought posture is a good indicator of 'being'. Take for instance the glorious example of Kung Fu, not so much the cheesy movies as the actual martial art. Kung Fu trains people to take on the style of various animals. Students can spend years simply learning the "posture" of whichever animal they are emulating. In their eyes they essentially "become" the animal they are fighting as, their posture as a bear, or a monkey determines what they are, how they move, how they think and react. I thought this a joke until I once had to spar with someone who had a basic knowledge of a couple of Kung Fu styles and he beat the crap out of me.

Yoga is another Eastern example. In Yoga, one empties the mind while assuming the posture of various mythic or natural realities. In a sense yoga arrose as a means of acting out the local mythology, and many believed that as they performed yoga routines the myths were actually happening in them. In assuming the mountain pose, one actually was the referred to mountain. Based on the position they were in, their existence, their being changed.

Perhaps it is not altogether different for us in the West. Even if we do so in reference to the position of our mind or our spirit, it is this posture within us that determines what we "are". Perhaps we too often listen when people speak of us as a lovely tiny gold object, and let that determine our being, when in reality we have all the potential to burn like an endless fire. It is our choice how to live regardless of what other people see, we choose the position, the attitude by which our essence is determined. We do so in the midst of existence, of time, however we manage to conceive it.

(spoiler warning)
In the book, Henderson, the true Westerner: culturally insensitive, blunt, and irreverent, stumbles through Africa into the palace of a king, who perceives the depth and possibility of his character. The king sees a becomer, and sees the heart that wants to be. Henderson wants life and life abundantly. Henderson reveals that he had been a pig farmer, and the king sees one who has taken on the qualities of a pig. And the world too has seen this, and called him as such. He has offended everyone he could. He has suffered, and wallowed in this suffering. He has worn his pain like mud and then spread it on everything in sight. Henderson is enamored with the character of this king who in essence is full of grace and power, but who declares that he too is a becomer. He is not yet a full king, and is waiting for his opportunity to become. He reveals that he had captured a lion which he kept in a den below his castle, and that his study of this lion had allowed him to take on its traits. He forces Henderson to do the same. To crouch and roar and attempt to move gracefully. He attempts to show him how to take on the attitude of a lion, but Henderson is trapped in traits of the pigs he had emulated for far to long. He is entrapped by his sufferings, he is in the posture of a pig and all he knows to do is to ruin all aesthetics and wallow in their loss.

In the end he leaves Africa still under the burden of feeling more like a pig than a lion. In essence Henderson has none of the grace of a lion, only a physical and spiritual power that shares its resemblence. He somehow knows that his friend the king would not have wasted his time with a pig. The experience of Africa jogs his memory, and he recalls that his first experience with an animal was much earlier. He had run away and worked at a carnival, where he did a show with a tamed bear: powerful, but with a body that absorbed the abuse life inflicted rather than gracefully dodging it. Henderson finds himself, freed from what others had thought and he too had believed. Fifty years old and finds himself homebound with a clean white canvas in front of him. He has finally come to "be"; his attitude has shaken off the posture of a pig, and found internally the posture of a kind and fearsome bear.

And I can't help but think of myself in Henderson's shoes, continually looking outwards to know internally what is already there, asleep, aching to come to life. It can all seem so desperate sometimes, the quest to find that missing piece that will make me whole. But are we ever whole? Wouldn't wholeness make us God? Instead maybe "wholeness" is not a state or achievement, but instead, an attitude. And I wonder in all this if maybe that is what is infinitely unique about Jesus. Perhaps he lived out the posture of fullness. He was sinless in that he took on the attitude of wholeness, he refused to carry the weight of 'lack' on his shoulders. Quite a statement considering he spent his whole life bellow the poverty line. In so far as I have ever assumed to be a Christian, this is what I realize that I have intended: I'll never be perfect, for God alone is perfect. I'll never be orthodox, for I deny there is one correct means to worship. I'll never be moral enough, learned enough, obedient enough, or disciplined enough to be worthy of 'being' perfect . . . and I doubt that's what Jesus or God would ever want of me. I think rather, my spirit awoke in the peace of knowing that in my love for Jesus, awkward as that relationship may be, I have seen past the golden facade, and more than 'becoming' I 'am' him inside, proceding outward.