Ownership, Access, and Freedom: The Role of Technology

Let me present a contrast between an ownership lifestyle and an access lifestyle.

Exhibit A for the ownership lifestyle is my late father-in-law Ben.  Following his marriage in 1946, he built not one, but three different small houses with his own hands, selling each one and building another while holding down surveying and drafting jobs.  Once he found steady employment with the Texas Highway Department, he bought a new contractor-built house in a growing subdivision and a new 1955 Oldsmobile, which he still owned when he died earlier this year.  From that point on, he lived the American dream of ownership.  Anything he needed and could afford, he bought:  TVs, lawnmowers, appliances, and (much later in life) computers for his wife to pursue her genealogy hobby with.  

Contrast that lifestyle with that of a hypothetical 30-something single living in Austin—call him Brad.  He rents a stylish apartment near the Metro rail that he rides to work, so he doesn't own a car.  He calls vehicle-for-hire services like Uber when he needs to go anywhere that he can't get to in the city with public transportation.  His biggest single expenditure this year was for a three-week European tour with some friends.  His most expensive single possession is a mechanical watch.  Brad spends most of his discretionary income on experiences and services rather than things.  He pays for access, not for stuff.

Brad is part of the reason that rates of new-vehicle ownership, home ownership, and even possession of a driver license are all declining in the age group of U. S. citizens centered around 30, according to an article by James Poulos in a recent issue of The New Atlantis.  Poulos is concerned that the decline of ownership among young people will lead to a corresponding decline in freedom.  Will it?

Before exploring that question, we should admit that technology has played a major role in the rise of the access economy.  Technically, software is leased, not owned.  "Buying" software (already a fading trend in contrast to ongoing service contracts favored by many software firms) really just gives you the privilege of using it.  The planned obsolescence of many products, whose useful life is measured in months rather than years, is enabled by rapid advances in digital technology and manufacturing techniques, even when hardware is involved.  The services so favored by Brad and his friends are usually intermediated by the Internet, and would be much harder or impossible to offer without it.  So if we are looking for guilty parties in the case of the movement from ownership to access, technology is a prime suspect.

To the question of whether Brad, the access guy, is more free than Ben, the ownership guy, one might respond, free to what?  And here we step into some deep philosophical waters. 

Superficially, Brad looks a lot more free—no burdensome car or house payments or other long-term obligations (unless you count student loans), free to up and run off to Antigua or Bermuda or you name it for a vacation—the ideal young-urban-professional life.  Only, if everybody in the country acts like Brad, with no wife or kids and no plans for same in the future, the country would die out in a generation.  Something like this is already happening in Japan, whose population declined by 268,000 (0.2%) in 2014. 

Even people Brad's age seem to have a sense that they are missing something that an earlier generation had, without knowing exactly what it is.  I've been invited to the upcoming wedding of a Brad-generation couple who have erected an elaborate wedding website, complete with a list of things to do for out-of-town guests coming to Dallas.  One of the items is a visit to a museum about the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, and the prospective couple attached this curious comment to it:  "As many of y'all know we were born in the wrong era."  What does it mean when a whole generation thinks it was born in the wrong era?

To answer the question of human freedom, you must have some idea of what human beings are for.  There are varying opinions on the purpose of human life.  In 1992, as part of its decision in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey, the U. S. Supreme Court regarded the core of liberty as the right to "define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”  That idea would be fine with Brad, whose concept of existence may change from year to year, or even month to month, as he ponders his next appealing experience. 

But there are others who regard human beings as marked with the divine image.  I came across a fine word the other day in a book by the English professor and translator of Dante, Anthony Esolen.  The word is "theomorphic," meaning "formed in the image of deity."  Esolen says that "the right of private property is grounded, not in practical economics, but in the theomorphic nature of man."  Because man is made in the image of God, anything that is a product of man's labor is owned, and ownership is something only humans can lay claim to.

And only people can choose whether to use their ownership of the fruits of their labor to live lives of superficial pleasure, spending their income on transient experiences and then ultimately passing out of existence, like Windows 98; or to found a family—either literally or by playing the role of father or mother to the younger generation—and serving those who come after us, passing the torch of human life and its best meanings to those who come after us. 

Doing the latter requires a longer-term vision than the next expensive vacation.  Those who work simply to enjoy the access to services provided by giant concentrations of ownership, are ultimately slaves to the owners of those service providers, whether it feels like slavery or not.  The classic image of this type of slavery is Aldous Huxley's dystopian novel Brave New World.  But those who work not just for themselves, but to provide for others, using ownership as a means of providing for a real or metaphorical family—they are those who, while appearing to lose their lives in service to others, can actually save them. 

Sources:  John Poulos's article "Losing Liberty in an Age of Access" appeared in the Summer/Fall 2014 issue (No. 42) of The New Atlantis, pp. 13-22.  The statistic on Japan's declining population was obtained from the website http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/01/01/374382369/japans-population-declined-in-2014-as-births-fell-to-a-new-low.  The Esolen quote appears on p. 140 of his book Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching (Manchester, NH:  Sophia Institute Press, 2014).  The U. S. Supreme Court decision Planned Parenthood vs. Casey (1992) contains the famous "mystery clause," which was quoted in the website http://www.heritage.org/initiatives/rule-of-law/judicial-activism/cases/planned-parenthood-v-casey.

Dear Deceased

Bureaucracies are technology, you know.  When you hear the word "technology," the first thing that springs to your mind may be a piece of machinery, or a technical discipline such as electrical engineering, but probably not the U. S. Postal Service or Medicare.  Nevertheless, just like pieces of machinery, bureaucracies are designed by experts to achieve certain purposes, and if they fail to achieve those purposes, you can have a disaster that is fully as harmful as an explosion or a fire due to purely mechanical causes.  Think Hurricane Katrina and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

The little bureaucratic malfunction I will draw your attention to today is not a disaster.  Some may not even see any problem at all with it.  But to me, it is evidence that the bureaucracies we increasingly deal with as citizens of modern societies are failing to treat us like people, and more like machines or units of production in a giant factory.

As many readers of this blog already know, my father-in-law Ben Simons passed away last Feb. 7, after living with my wife and myself at our house for over eight years.  We were with him more or less constantly for the last few days of his life.  To the extent possible, we made his passing as comfortable as we could make it.  At a memorial service for him held at our church, dozens of friends and relatives shared their memories of his good nature, and we heard encouraging words about meeting him again in Heaven.

Contrast all that with a letter I received yesterday, from which I quote:

"Dear Ben Simons:

Thank you for having a Humana Group Medicare plan. It was our pleasure to serve you.

Medicare confirmed your disenrollment from your Humana Group Medicare Advantage plan.  After 02/28/2015, Humana won't cover your healthcare.  If a provider needs to send your claims to Medicare, tell him or her there could be a short delay in updating your records. . . . "

Now, it can be said in defense of Humana that their bureaucracy faces the difficult task of serving thousands, if not millions, of customers with a minimum of needless expense.  So the expedient they have chosen, after advice from lawyers, efficiency experts, and computer programmers, is to respond to a customer's death by sending out the form letter from which I have quoted above. 

It is written to cover any and all cases in which a person "disenrolls" from Humana Group Medicare Advantage—switching to another plan, winning the lottery and not needing any kind of health insurance, leaving the country to join the French Foreign Legion, or dying.  And I suppose it works, in the sense that it lets survivors know that Humana knows that the party in question has died.

But if they knew he died, and not simply that he disenrolled for some other reason, you would think that somehow, someone could come up with a better form letter than this one.  It could start with "Dear Survivors" and say a little about how sorry the firm is that they have lost a customer this way. 

No, death does not fit into the bureaucratic picture.  The great German sociologist Max Weber recognized bureaucracies as one of the most significant developments of the nineteenth century.  The ideal Weberian bureaucrat can function like a machine.  One of Weber's nine main principles of his "legal-rational model" for bureaucracies is the supremacy of abstract rules, which machines can obey better than people can.  If minimizing expenses is a high priority, and one form letter can cover all cases of disenrollment, then the rules say to go with it, even if the survivors of dead customers get letters addressed to the deceased as though they were not only living, but that their chief concern was what Humana was going to do with them now. 

And of course, this letter had virtually no contact with human hands.  Some programmer wrote it with nobody particular in mind, another programmer determined the situations under which it is printed and mailed, and it would be a hard thing to find out exactly who, if anyone, was responsible for sending it.  It is signed only "Humana's Enrollment Team."  There is no doubt some person or committee in charge of Humana's enrollment team, and if I brought this matter to their attention, they might give it some thought.  But if they are under cost pressures, they would decide that, however tacky such letters look in the hands of survivors, it would be too much trouble to come up with a special letter sent only to survivors of deceased clients.  So they wouldn't bother with my little issue, and I'm not going to bother them with it.

There is an engineering ethics lesson here, I believe.  Bureaucrats and programmers and systems analysts everywhere need to remember that their ultimate job is to serve people—not the boss, not the system, but people.  I'm currently reading a book by Anthony Esolen called Reclaiming Catholic SocialTeaching.  The gist so far is that if you leave God out of your social calculations and plans, you will go far, far astray.  Maybe not all at once, but you will inevitably end up, not with a society, but with simply an ant-hill-like heap of individuals.  And you will be tempted to treat members of society not as people, but as faceless units of production or profit. 

As a bureaucracy, Humana did its job well.  They dealt with hospital bills so obscure and complicated as to make the most mysterious passages in the Book of Revelation look as plain as day by comparison.  They helped provide good health care for my father-in-law during his lifetime.  However, man does not live by bread, or health care, alone.  And it is perhaps too much to expect acknowledgment of loss or sympathy from a bureaucracy designed mainly for efficiency.  We have received many messages of sympathy and concern from our friends and fellow worshippers, for which we are thankful.  And I think we have learned a lesson about where help can really come from.

Sources:  In writing this blog, I consulted the Wikipedia article on Max Weber.  Anthony Esolen's Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching:  A Defense of the Church's True Teachings on Marriage, Family, and the State was published in 2014 by Sophia Institute Press.