wholepeace

Posts Tagged ‘culture’

, , , ,

6 Reasons We Should Stop Trying to Calculate the “Salary” of “Stay-at-Home Moms”

In No Particular Path on April 8, 2015 at 10:02 am

Every year for at least the last 15 years or so, someone has come out with an article claiming to calculate the dollar value of the work of a “stay-at-home mom,” or “homemaker.” But if we genuinely value and want to support the work that women do, then we should stop making pointless and arbitrary calculations. Here are six reasons why.

1. What is the Job Description?
These analyses all begin with some specific idea about what the job entails. These ideas are, to be blunt, unrealistic, gender-biased, and chauvinistic. One way to show this is to rethink the calculations using a gender-neutral argument. What we are really talking about is a family relationship involving two adults and at least one child. One of the adults, Adult A, has agreed to take employment outside the home for a salary or wage, and this employment will provide the family’s sole source of income. The other, Adult B, has agreed to remain at home with the couple’s child and not take paid outside employment. But what does that mean about the actual work each does in support of the family relationship? It is foolish to imagine that relationships in which one partner does nothing but go to a paid job and the other does everything else represent any kind of norm. The analyses also imply that Adult B is an employee of Adult A. One recent article made the claim that the author “can’t afford” his stay-at-home wife because of one of these “salary” computations.
2. Breaking Adult B’s Job Into Smaller Parts is Misleading.
These arguments always make the mistake of isolating out some of the tasks of the stay-at-home partner as though they are separate jobs rather than small parts of the overall job. Then they label those small parts as though they are separate and distinct jobs. A web site called Salary.com lists those jobs as daycare teacher, chief executive officer, psychologist, cook (some sites say chef), housekeeper, laundry operator, computer operator, facilities manager, janitor, and van driver (other sources call this a chauffeur). Another recent article included nannie, personal shopper, financial assistant and even PR assistant (because the author apparently expects his wife to serve as an adjunct to his own career by attending, and sometimes hosting dinners and parties related to his work).
But, to borrow the punch line from an old joke, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. I have, out of some necessity, become a fairly competent do-it-yourself-er. I have, for instance painted both the outside and the inside of my house. I am actually quite proud of my skill at cutting-in paint along the ceiling or the door and window trim. But I would never claim to be, in those moments, a painting contractor. Someone who straps the kids into their seats and heads for the mall, or dance lessons, or soccer practice, or the grocery store, or all of those does not suddenly become a chauffeur. If Adult B takes on the responsibility of keeping the checkbook balanced, and maintaining a simple family budget, this is not the equivalent of being a professional financial officer. Cooking the family’s meals does not make one a chef. And so on. Calling what I do at some point during my day a “computer operator” doesn’t actually make me one.
The analyses then make some claim as to the “average” number of hours a week spent on each of these jobs. Aside from the question of the validity and accuracy of these averages, there are few professional jobs that would ever be broken down this way. I was a college professor. The job involved a variety of tasks. I taught; I planned my classes; I assigned, collected, evaluated, and I graded assignments; I kept track of students’ progress and a record of their work in the class. I also did a certain amount of committee work related to the things such as the college curriculum, long-range planning, goals, and mission. But I got paid for the whole job. I didn’t get paid one amount as a group leader, something else as data analyst, another amount as computer operator or word processing specialist or lecturer. The job is the whole job, and the value of the job is not the sum of its parts. Even an attorney, who needs to document her time for each client by the separate tasks performed, charges for an hour’s worth of her time, not differently for each thing she does.
3. The Calculations Ignore Overlapping Work and Multi-tasking.
When Adult B packs the kid or kids into the van and heads for the store to pick up some groceries, several of the jobs overlap. But isn’t buying groceries one of the responsibilities of a chef; isn’t planning what food to have around part of child care; if there is a spontaneous side trip to the cleaners are we in the realm of laundry operator; and can we really separate out the driving necessary to get to the store and home again from the tasks of shopping and getting the cleaning?
4. The Calculations Ignore Everything Adult A Does Besides The Salaried Work.
This has two parts: first, the totality of Adult A’s contribution to the family is diminished, and the real value of what everyone in the family does is imbalanced. I think we can assume that, in a healthy family, the principle wage earner doesn’t simply go to work, come home, and do nothing else. So how do we figure A’s other contributions into the formula? Do we add value every time A stops at the store on the way home, cooks dinner, cares for the child, helps with homework, rakes leaves or replaces a washer in the kitchen faucet? Perhaps we could subtract those activities from Adult B’s “salary.” And let’s remember that the tasks of family life change over time, they aren’t a fixed set of chores or responsibilities. Do we reduce Adult B’s salary over time because as the child grows the time spent caring for and educating the child becomes less as those tasks are handed over to other people, such as the public school system? Do we increase the salary if the child is home schooled? If the family buys a lawn tractor shall we recalculate the contribution of the person who mows the lawn?
5. Who Works For Whom; And Who Pays For What?
The tasks of a marriage are not simply categorized into his-and-hers. If B’s work at home supports and supplements A’s work outside, then A’s salary is earned for B’s work as much as for A’s. Unless we make the calculations based on the idea that B is an employee of A; that everything B does is in the service of A; that, in effect, A is the boss. Since the perception of calculations that claim to value what “stay-at-home Moms” do, isn’t this just a perpetuation of the chauvinistic, male-centered idea that the wife is subservient to the husband? Given such a perception, why not go all the way and include “sex worker” in the list of job titles? If we are going to calculate how much A “owes” B for staying at home, how do we calculate what B owes A for A’s unsalaried contributions? And what of all the other costs of being a family? How do we figure in the cost of a mortgage, utilities, car payments, clothing, food, medical care, insurance, and contributions to a retirement account? Shall we simply divide all those costs in half and deduct B’s half from the salary we have calculated for B? Or do we simply assume that all those things are A’s responsibility because A earns an actual salary, not a virtual one?
6. Everyone Loses.
This sort of analysis, because it relies on rigidly categorized and arbitrarily assigned ideas about what the husband and the wife do in a marriage, is actually kind of insulting to everyone. It insults the women and those who stay in the home, whom it claims to be valuing, by calculating that value in monetary rather than personal terms. It insults wage-earners by reducing their contribution to a paycheck. It insults all the people who actually do the professional jobs on the list by ignoring the real complexity of their work, the extent of their professional training and experience, and the struggles they may have gone through to earn the kind of salaries imagined for them by those who do these analyses. It insults those who both work for a wage and do all those unpaid tasks as well by suggesting that one must either work outside the home or in it, but can’t do both. And it insults normal healthy families by dividing what they do into impersonal tasks rather than elements of a much richer and more meaningful relationship.

The issues of equal pay for equal work, of the under-representation of women in the paid workforce, of our perceptions of “men’s work” and “women’s work” and gender roles generally all need serious discussion and resolution. The nature of marriage and the roles of men and women in relationships need to be addressed in order to deal with the reality that marriage is not a single thing, but as varied as the people who enter into it. Also, the reasons some people decide to leave salaried work are equally varied. The stay-at-home Mom may also be an artist, a gardener, a writer, a volunteer, or active in any number of activities outside the home. These days, the stay-at-home Mom might very well be a Dad.
Perhaps a good starting point might be to recognize and declare that we will no longer reduce the value of the work people do to nothing more than a wage or salary. If people really got paid what they are worth for the value of the work they do, then teachers would get paid more than baseball players, there would be no such thing as a “volunteer” fire department, and no executive would earn four hundred times as much as his average employee. And we should stop devaluing the work of people who don’t get a wage or salary. The worth of every human being and the work they do is always going to be more than the sum of the parts. And we need to recognize that healthy families are shared, common, and mutually supportive relationships that are harmed when the people in them are encouraged to think of them in reductive and mercenary terms.

, , , , , ,

If FB is a Marketplace, Why is Every Aisle Filled With So Much Junk Food?

In PeaceAble on December 10, 2014 at 12:29 pm

Now let me say that this is not intended as a rant. It is more of an observation, a public service message if you will, about the impact of Facebook, Tweeter and other social media platforms on the erosion of our sense of personal and social boundaries and appropriateness in our daily communication with others; and vice-versa.

Allow me to illustrate.

Suppose you were in a public place with a lot of people, some of whom you knew well, others you knew only slightly, and a whole lot of others who were strangers to you but friends and acquaintances of the others in the gathering. Now suppose that someone suddenly, without any provocation, stood up on a soapbox and loudly announced, “Jesus is the only path to salvation! If you agree, raise your hands and repeat this. 99% of you won’t have the guts to repeat it, but I’m proud to be one of the 1% who are real Christians!”
What would your response be? Would you think, “Wow, that’s really inappropriate”? Would you feel embarrassed? Would you think the speaker was some kind of egotistical nutjob with a bad case of verbal diarrhea? Or would you think that this was clearly a sincere believer expressing his devout belief; and good for him?
Before you answer, take out “Jesus” and “Christian” and insert “Allah” and “Muslim.” Does that change your reaction any?
Now imagine that two people in the crowd began a discussion about some current issue of concern or interest; let’s say the minimum wage. Suddenly everyone within earshot began shouting about libtards and repugs, and making derogatory statements about lazy welfare moochers who should get a job and greedy rich people who are trying to destroy America. And let’s imagine that the discussion begins to spread throughout the whole crowd and turns into a shouting match in which every extreme position on every conceivable issue is turned into an obscenity laced rant, even though the obscenities are cleverly muffled just enough so you know what was said, you just can’t hear them clearly.
Now imagine that you are invited to return to the same place with the same people the next day and every day after that with the expectation, even the promise, of more of the same.

This is not to say that no one should ever talk about religion, money, politics or sex on Facebook. All of these are legitimate topics of public discussion, and it is through this public discussion that we all engage in a great ongoing cultural conversation that helps us to understand who we are.
But who are we?
Are we a civilized society capable of engaging one another about our diverse perspectives, experiences, beliefs and opinions? Are we a people who value the importance of honest, informed discussion of the issues that confront our society and require workable well-thought-out solutions? Or are we a nation, a world, of foul-mouthed, bullying, self-righteous, arrogant boors; who want everything our own way or not at all? If our democracy were a sport, would it be more like golf, or more like professional wrestling?
Social media have the potential to be a wonderfully liberating, truly democratic place. But they are also a distillation, a reflection, and an encouragement of all that is the worst of us. When we begin to break down the social boundaries that help us to work together and engage each other in peaceable ways, then the fabric of society gets unraveled a bit more every time we cross a line that our social conventions used to keep us from crossing. And we can see these things happening all around us, not just on line. Our social behavior is becoming less reasonable and democratic, and more confrontational and violent.
Sometimes these boundaries need to be crossed, of course; no fabric exists forever without some fraying, some normal wear and tear; and even the necessary regular laundering and ironing out of the wrinkles can do some damage; but these kinds of things develop the character of a nation, increase its value for us, and give it its history. The danger is that everyone has stopped caring about the fabric itself and we are instead just tearing it apart as we each try to claim it as our own, refusing to share any part of it. We are taking the scissors to it as we try to get rid of all those parts of the pattern we don’t like, as if it were a photograph of friends that includes our ex — to mix my metaphors some more.
Look, the point is this: engagement through social media, like our engagement in society itself, requires that we respect one another’s boundaries, show some restraint and personal discipline in our behavior, and treat others as we would like to be treated. So before we post something, or get caught up in the latest viral reposting of whatever is the latest outrageous meme or pointless hoax someone has decided to drop in our news feed; let’s take a moment to breathe, check our prejudices, check our facts, consider what sort of persons we want to be and what sort of society we want to have; and maybe not hit post or share quite so quickly.

, , , , , , , ,

The Question of Evil — Part 2

In A God of Infinite Possibility on October 12, 2012 at 5:20 pm

If everything that is, is God, then what is evil?  Is it part of God?  Did God create it?  What is the purpose of evil?

What if there were no “evil” in the world?  What if everything was equally “good?”  No matter what you chose, the consequences would be equally happy, equally beneficial.  How would you choose?  Even simple choices would have no meaning, no significance, no basis for evaluation.  Should I have coffee or tea?  Should I wear the blue shirt or the red?  Should I turn left or right?  What do I prefer?  And on what basis do I prefer it?  When all is good, judgment becomes impossible.  Now the same would be true if there were only evil, of course.  If we could not perceive both good and evil, then choice would be arbitrary and meaningless.

It is interesting to note that the thing that is forbidden in the Garden of Eden is knowledge; specifically, the knowledge of good and evil.  This makes sense only if Adam and Eve are ignorant of both.  They cannot know evil without knowing good, or good without evil, because one is necessary to the other.  Something is good to the extent that it is not evil and vice-versa.  Something is better to the extent that it is less evil and more good; it is worse to the extent that it is less good and more evil.  Now, if it seems I am using evil almost synonymously with “bad,” it’s because I am.  If we believe that there are degrees of evil , or if we simply believe that an evil thing is extremely bad, then we can talk about good and evil as directions rather than places.  And we can see that our ability to understand great good requires us to imagine great evil to compare it with.  Our ability to believe in the Devil as perfect evil requires us to believe in God as perfect good.  Otherwise, what does any of it mean?

As an analogy, consider the idea that if everyone were rich, then no one would be.  An understanding of great wealth requires a contrasting understanding of great poverty.  But when does one become perfectly wealthy?  We have no agreement as to when someone would be so wealthy that no more wealth would be possible or necessary, because we have no contrasting image of someone so poor that greater poverty would be impossible.  Would ownership of literally everything make someone perfectly wealthy?  What if he owned everything and was owed an equal amount? Or twice as much?  Would that make everyone else perfectly poor?  Or would some owe more than others?  Would we have to adjust our understanding of wealth to mean “less in debt?”  At that point would it make any difference?  Perhaps we could even argue that at some point being even more in debt might be a form of wealth, because those who owed the most would be worth the most.  But what if we were to consider wealth and poverty not as places, but as directions?  We would be wealthy to the extent that our choices around wealth moved in a “wealthy” direction; poor to the extent that our wealth choices moved in the direction of “poverty.”

Consider also a bar magnet.  One end is “north,” and the other is “south.”  Or we might call one end “positive” and the other “negative.”  But these distinctions are arbitrary.  If the ends aren’t labeled, how do we know which is which?  And the “positive” and “negative” qualities are not just at the ends.  If we cut the magnet in half, we get two new magnets, each of which has the same qualities of positive and negative.  Cut the two magnets into four, or eight, or sixteen, or however many you want, and you will never reach a point where any piece is all one or the other.

This is the nature of good and evil in our choices.  All choices are actions, and all actions contain the possibility of both good and evil.  Large choices have greater possibilities for good or evil, smaller choices have smaller possibility, but no matter how you slice it, every choice has the potential for either.  In choosing, as in magnets, positive and negative aren’t ends, they are directions.  We can determine the “north” and “south” ends of the magnet if we can make it into a compass, which would allow us to position the magnet according to known, fixed points – one north and one south.  In the same way, we can know the directions our choices might lead us in if we can make magnets of them, orient them to some sort of fixed moral points labeled good and evil.

Morality is our compass.  Our particular standards of morality are the fixed points against which we can orient the positive and negative directions of our actions.  Morality is a set of judgments based on our perceptions of good and evil, of benefit or harm.  Something is evil to the extent that it causes harm, good to the extent that it creates benefit.  But these are arbitrary and human determinations.  That which benefits me might harm you, for instance.  That which I think is good, you might find to be evil.  Each of us has her or his own compass, and they do not all point to the same fixed pole.  And so we gather into communities of various kinds, both spiritual and secular, where we can be with others who have similar compasses to our own.  This doesn’t make the compasses any less arbitrary or human, but it does give us support for our moral judgments.

, , , , , , ,

The Eden Dilemma and the Question of Evil — Part 1

In A God of Infinite Possibility on October 12, 2012 at 5:16 pm

THE EDEN DILEMMA

                If we try to imagine life in the Biblical Garden of Eden, we run into a major problem.  Adam and Eve are depicted as living in a paradise of Godly perfection.  Until the appearance of the serpent, there is no evil: no violence, no corruption, neither illness nor death.  The inhabitants can look forward to an eternity of constant goodness.  But they are also both ignorant and naïve, and purposeless.  Adam is apparently given the task of naming everything in the garden, but why?  Is it just busy-work?  He is incapable of failing at the task, because there are no standards against which to judge his efforts.  Making a mistake is impossible, because a mistake would suggest that there are ”better” or “worse” choices; but this is Eden where there is only good.  But what does “good” mean without anything else to compare it to?  And what of Eve?  Except to provide companionship for Adam, she has no purpose at all.  And what sort of companionship can she provide?  What will they talk about?  There is no point in discussing the names Adam is giving the animals, because there is no basis for discussing them.  After Adam says that this animal is a “sheep,” for instance, and Eve acknowledges the name, what more is there to discuss?  It is impossible to ask whether it is a good name, because it must be.  She can’t even ask “why,” because there is no particular reason for any of it.  And if there were reasons they would all be good reasons.  It is an endless, eternal cycle of unrelenting “goodness.”

Except for three important details.  There is forbidden fruit, there is the ability to make a choice, and there is a possibility of desire.

Without knowledge of good and evil, choice becomes meaningless; and without choice there is no point in knowing about good and evil.  So Adam and Eve must have been given the ability to choose.  They must have had free will.  Otherwise, there would have been no reason for God to deny them access to the Tree of Knowledge, because they could not have chosen to eat from it anyway.  But the ability to choose requires that there be a choice to make.  What choices did Adam and Eve actually have?  They could choose to go to this place or that within Eden, but all places were equally perfect.  They could choose to eat any of the fruit from any tree in the garden, but all fruits were equally perfect.  They could interact with any of the animals in the garden, but all animals and all interactions were equally perfect.  Without the forbidden fruit, without a choice, free will had no meaning.  So how could they choose?

In the absence of reason as a basis for choice, we have to have desire.  If it is equally good to eat a peach or a fig, then perhaps we simply need to desire one or the other.  “I think I would like a peach today,” doesn’t require us to denigrate the choice of a fig, only to recognize a momentary preference.  If we do not think about our preferences, but simply respond to them, act on them, then knowledge of good and evil is only necessary if there is the possibility of evil in a choice we might desire.  This is the real meaning of the serpent.  The serpent doesn’t make Eve aware of the choice – she already knows that the fruit is forbidden – the serpent’s role is to convince Eve that she desires the fruit, so that she has a reason to choose it.  And the fact that the fruit is forbidden is an argument in favor of desire, because unless the thing is desirable, there is no reason to choose it, and consequently no reason to forbid the choice.

But there is still a problem.  The forbidden fruit gives Adam and Eve the knowledge that there is both good and evil in the world, but it doesn’t give them clear knowledge of which is which.  This they have to figure out as they go along.  They quickly understand that things have changed; but they have no solid basis for judging those changes.  They find that they are naked, and become ashamed by the knowledge.  Why?  They have been naked all along in Eden, and Eden is perfect, so why should nakedness be shameful?  Apparently, it is the knowledge of their nakedness that is shameful, not the nakedness itself.  Things get topsy-turvy pretty quickly after that.  In Eden, there is no death.  The lion and the lamb lie down together and both eat grass.  Adam and Eve eat only fruit.  But after they eat of the Tree of Knowledge, and know that they are naked, Got clothes them in animal skins.  They learn that not only are the animals now killing each other for survival, but that they must also kill in order to survive.  Before the fall, God had created a world in which killing was not possible; after the fall, the descendants of Adam and Eve kill each other – beginning with Adam and Eve’s first born sons – in order to have the things they need and desire;  and even more than that, they kill other animals, make sacrifices, to honor God.  So is killing evil, or good?

Before the fall, Adam and Eve are ignorant of sex.  There is no need for sex, because there is no need for procreation.  In fact, procreation would be a problem, because there is no death.  There is no desire for sex, because there is no knowledge of sex.  Knowledge of sex would be a problem in Eden unless procreation was impossible, because if sexual activity is a choice, then desire may lead us to choose it, and in the absence of pregnancy prevention, choosing it would inevitably lead to procreation.  But is sex, therefore, evil?  Is procreation?  Is everything that did not exist in Eden before the fall evil by definition?  Note that eating the forbidden fruit doesn’t creategood and evil, it simply allows Adam and Eve to know that they exist.  It allows them to see the possibilities for good and evil in the choices they might make, and to consider those possibilities as they choose.

Thus, the lesson of the Garden of Eden becomes not the emergence of evil, or original sin, but the attainment of knowledge, and with it full humanity.  It is, after all, our ability to choose and to give meaning to our choices that makes us human.  Why would God set it up that way?  Perhaps because if good is the direction of God, then maybe God wants us to choose it; to go toward God consciously; to know what it is we are doing.  And we cannot always know which choice is the “good” one because life is more complex than that, and because the experience of life is, itself, essential to understanding the choices.  If it were easier, it wouldn’t mean so much.

An old folk song praises the day that Eve got Adam to eat the apple, because without that we wouldn’t be here at all.  The fruit of the tree of knowledge, in Eden, was the only fruit (other than eternal life) that was not to be eaten.  Now it is the only fruit we must eat.  We must not go ignorantly or accidently toward God (except of course in the case of children or other innocents), but must eat daily of the fruit of knowledge and then choose.