Anything Wrong in Job

J. B., A Modern Version
of the Book of Job

I came across a reference to MacLeish's play J.B., and decided to post an entry on it to my blog so as to remind myself that I need to get and read the entire play:

If Yhwh, the śāṭān, Job, and the omniscient narrator agree upon anything, it is that Job was righteous – though they may differ as to whether his righteousness is unconditional or "bought and paid for like a waiter's smirk."[31]

[Footnote 31] The phrase is employed by Nickels in Archibald MacLeish's play J. B., a modern version of the Book of Job. See Archibald MacLeish, J. B.: A Play in Verse. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston 1958. In the Book of Job, the narrator (1:1) and God (1:8, 2:3) claim Job to be blameless, upright, god-fearing, and avoiding wrong. The śātan admits that Job has "feared" God at least thus far (1:9; ירא , a stative, functions not as a participle but as a finite verb here; see Samuel Rolles Driver and George Buchanan Gray, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Job. T and T Clark, Edinburgh 1921, 1.13).

Nice quote. Nickels is the Satan figure in this play, so the name meaning a sort of money is apt. God is named Zuss, which sounds like the German word for sweet. Keep in mind that MacLeish seems to intentionally set out to address 'cosmic' issues.

Private Joke:

God: Have you seen my servant J.B.?

Satan: Why? Have you misplaced him?

Shannon Hodges: One of My More Successful Brothers . . .

Dr. J. Shannon Hodges

and

Shoshanna Cogan

The photo above is of my brother Shan and his wife Shoshanna, who sent me the picture and bragged on Shan:

Here's a photo taken minutes after Shannon's Keynote Address to a sold-out crowd of 350 professionals at NY Statewide Mental Health Conference. I'm so proud of his amazing work . . .

He deserves the boasting! Keynote speaker! Wow! I'll certainly never attain that status! Shan himself is modest:

Pretty good for a guy from Salem, Arkansas who once was considered the dumbest kid in his class.

I'd say it's even pretty good for somebody at the top of his class, too. Due to his modesty, he therefore needs a woman like Shoshanna to promote him. He has several areas of expertise, so I was naturally curious to see what he had spoken on, and a quick Google later, I found this:

Keynote Speaker: Dr. J. Shannon Hodges

Dr. Hodges will talk to us about "101 Careers in Counseling". He will illustrate the broad range of counseling careers open to Mental Health Counselors and counselors in general and has recently published a book titled 101 Careers in Counseling. The talk will include occupational information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the wide variation in occupational possibilities for Mental Health Counselors (e.g., agencies, university counseling centers, human resource positions, counseling in a foreign country, etc.). A significant aspect of his keynote speech is to make prognostications of the future of the counseling profession and what this means for Mental Health Counselors and Counselor Educators. Because an important part of his address deals with change, emphasis on multicultural competence will be emphasized as the emerging global profession necessitates such.

Dr. Hodges will also tell us about his experiences working in the Australian outback with Aborigines!!

Shan has long now overtaken me as a world traveler! Next, he'll be visiting Antarctica to work with penguins, counseling them on their unwarranted fear of polar bears . . . More seriously, he also conducted a workshop:

Pre-Convention Workshops: (12-3 pm on Friday, April 11th)

101 Careers in Counseling

Presenter: Dr. J. Shannon Hodges, LMHC

The workshop will include ways Mental Health Counselors and future Mental Health Counselors can prepare for future changes brought on by technology and an ever expanding counseling profession.

The session will cover concrete information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook regarding rapidly growing counseling professions, the emerging international counseling profession, cultural competence, traditional and non-traditional counseling careers, changes due to technology (e.g., Skype counseling, ethical issues related to social media, international collaboration - particularly for counselor educators, etc.), adapting to a dynamic future. The session will also address the value of promoting and advocating for the counseling profession (and Mental Health Counseling profession).

Those of you interested in what sort of things Shan probably discussed might want to watch this video.

Interview at the Asan Institute

Seoul

I was interviewed yesterday at the Asan Institute for a position as editor in charge of their English publications. A couple of good scholars whose papers I've edited recommended me on the basis of my editing skills. I have the rare combination of wide-ranging knowledge, writing ability, attentiveness to detail, and years of experience. The job probably could have been mine for the taking . . . but I lack administrative skills, and I know it. I'm not a people person and just wouldn't be good at directing personnel. I told them the truth, so they appreciated my honesty and seemed to like me anyway. They asked if I knew anybody I could recommend. I reflected but couldn't think of anyone with my combination of abilities, not even to mention the skills that I lack, so I told them that, unfortunately, I didn't know anyone. Handshakes all around, and I left.

Any of you out there with all of the relevant skills might want to look into the Asan position . . .

No One is Automatically Irreplaceable?

Erik Brynjolfsson
MIT Sloan Management

Bad news for technophiles who automatically expect robotization to solve the world's burgeoning demographic problem by increasing productivity as birth rates plunge (e.g., the Japanese). David Rotman reports on "How Technology Is Destroying Jobs" (MIT Technology Review, June 12, 2013), a close look at the pessimistic insights of Erik Brynjolfsson:

Erik Brynjolfsson . . . , a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology . . . . [have] been destroying jobs faster than . . . creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States [and] . . . . other technologically advanced countries . . . . In economics, productivity -- the amount of economic value created for a given unit of input, such as an hour of labor -- is a crucial indicator of growth and wealth creation . . . . [P]roductivity and total employment in the United States . . . . after World War II . . . closely tracked each other, with increases in jobs corresponding to increases in productivity . . . . Then, beginning in 2000, . . . productivity continues to rise robustly, but employment suddenly wilts. By 2011, a significant gap appears . . . , showing economic growth with no parallel increase in job creation. Brynjolfsson and McAfee call it the "great decoupling." And Brynjolfsson says he is confident that technology is behind both the healthy growth in productivity and the weak growth in jobs . . . . [This is] a startling assertion because it threatens the faith that many economists place in technological progress. Brynjolfsson and McAfee still believe that technology boosts productivity and makes societies wealthier, but they think that it can also have a dark side: technological progress is eliminating the need for many types of jobs and leaving the typical worker worse off than before. ­Brynjolfsson can point to . . . . [the fact] that median income is failing to rise even as the gross domestic product soars. "It's the great paradox of our era," he says. "Productivity is at record levels, innovation has never been faster, and yet at the same time, we have a falling median income and we have fewer jobs. People are falling behind because technology is advancing so fast and our skills and organizations aren't keeping up."

Not everybody agrees with Brynjolfsson, as Rotman goes on to show, but the possibility that robot automation 'steals' jobs from workers is intuitively plausible, even wholly persuasive. The big question is whether or not it will eventually give rise to more jobs, as technology has done in the past.

Read the article to form your own opinion . . .

George Bradt: Only Three Interview Questions

George Bradt

Forbes

I've never been the sort of person to delve into self-help books, which won't surprise the folks who know me since they will already have noticed, but a good friend got me linked in to Linked-In a couple of years ago, and that site sends out weekly e-circulars with links to various articles, including some with tips on self-help.

I ignore those.

Or I usually do. But not this morning. The self-help link posted to the circular this morning claimed "Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions," and since I appreciate conciseness, I took the time to check out the article, which was an old one for Forbes (April 27, 2011) by George Bradt, and the three questions were placed at the opening of the article:

The only three true job interview questions are:

1. Can you do the job?
2. Will you love the job?
3. Can we tolerate working with you?

That's it. Those three. Think back, every question you've ever posed to others or had asked of you in a job interview is a subset of a deeper in-depth follow-up to one of these three key questions.

I've not had so many interviews, but from most of these, I recall only the first question, which probably means that I was oblivious to the other two. But I have learned the central importance of the latter two questions through my experience on the job. My weakness up until recent years had been number three. I used to be a bit irascible, more concerned with getting at the truth than with getting along. I've since learned the necessity of showing that one is both friendly and helpful. Those go a long way, and they're primarily a matter of attitude.

As for loving one's job, I've found that if I don't complain so much, but instead focus upon the good things about what I have to do, then I come to like my job.

If you click over to Bradt's article, you might want to scroll down to a two-minute video on making an interview effective through transparency by stopping the games and getting down to the three points.

Hans Blumenberg: Philo Judaeus as Augustine's Predecessor (Curiositas)

Philo of Alexandria

aka "Philo Judaeus"

(Image from Wikipedia)

Hans Blumenberg devotes one chapter of his Legitimacy of the Modern Age to preparing his argument on how curiosity came to be enrolled in the category of vices by looking at a predecessor to Augustine, Philo of Alexandria -- also known as Philo Judaeus (Philo the Jew), who clad Jewish belief in the garments of Greek thought.

Concerning the status of curiosity (Greek: periergia) in Philo's De migratione Abrahami (On the Migration of Abraham), we read the following by Blumenberg:

The Augustinian conceptualization of curiositas had its most suggestive precedent in Philo's allegory De migratione Abrahami, even if we cannot assume that it directly influenced Augustine. Abraham's travels from Chaldea via Haran to Sichem and finally to Egypt give Philo the ground plan for a representation of the spiritual path from self-estrangement to self-appropriation. Chaldea is the land of curiosity (periergia), and specifically in the form of astronomy. Curiosity is understood as the independence of the senses, which have evaded their subordination to the intellect and instead of this deliver man up to what accords with them. Abraham's path leads from sense perception to spiritual wisdom. The sojourn in Haran represents a turning from astronomical curiosity to self-knowledge, which in turn leads through the self's discovery of its ignorance to recognition of God, and finally through this last to recognition of the world as God's work. The requirement of this detour on the way to the cosmos is explained as legitimate because of the Author's 'ownership' of the truth of His work, which can become accessible only through Himself. Philo's God does not, like the Platonic demiurge, find the cosmos already in existence in the form of the ideal reality of an independent objective sphere; rather He Himself produces even the spiritual plan of His Creation, the science of its coming into being.

This is a train of thought that leads to the critical epistemological principle of the identity of verum and factum [truth and fact], to the solus scire potest qui fecit [only he can know who makes (the object)]; but here it still stops with the metaphor of property and its reserved character: Legitimate knowledge can only derive from God, the origin and source of all skills and sciences, and should not try to found itself on unmediated, as it were, unauthorized inspection of the cosmos. The pseudowise men of Egypt stand for the dishonest and unjust claim to have seen 'directly': Their theories about the cosmos rest on the eyewitness claim to truth, since they presume to know the grounds of everything, "as if they had been present at the origin of the cosmos or had even helped the world's master builder with advice in his work."

God's sovereign right to the secret of His creation, which is communicated by Him alone on the condition of knowing and acknowledging His authorship, is one of the most enduring themes that were to enter into the curiositas complex. It found a place in the exegetical question why man came into existence as the last in the order of creation, the answer to which could be, so that he should not witness the work of creation and its secrets. This theme has not outgrown the mythical idea of the gods' jealousy of man. It still plays a role in the ideas of divine majesty held by late-medieval nominalism, to which admittedly man was no longer to submit with humble resignation, but which he would rather oppose with a new epistemological conception of the possibilities left open to him even with this reservation. (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pages 284-285).

Blumenberg's quote from Philo critcizing the arrogance of the Egyptian 'pseudowise' men, who talk "as if they had been present at the origin of the cosmos or had even helped the world's master builder with advice in his work," recalls God's criticism of Job, who claims that he is suffering despite having done no wrong for which he should be punished, to which God counters:

Who is this that darkens my counsel
with words without knowledge?
Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

Where were you when I laid the earth's foundation?
Tell me, if you understand. (Job 38:2-4, New International Version, 1984; cf. Judaica Press)

God then procedes to overwhelm Job with the complexity of His creation, overtaxing Job's knowledge and implicitly charging Job with ignorance. Job admits his insufficiency:

I am unworthy -- how can I reply to you?
I put my hand over my mouth.
I spoke once, but I have no answer --
twice, but I will say no more. (Job 40:4-5, NIV, cf. Judaica Press)

God then repeats his earlier challenge to take a different tack:

Brace yourself like a man;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.

Would you discredit my justice?
Would you condemn me to justify yourself? (Job 40:7-8, NIV, cf. Judaica Press)

The point seems to be that Job is far too limited in his knowledge of God's purposes in creation even to question the justice of his own seemingly unjustified suffering. The point is not easily countered, for if God is infinite in his knowledge and wisdom, then how can one knowingly assert that one is suffering unjustly? God might have some good reason for allowing suffering . . . though an innocent one engulfed in suffering might have doubts. At any rate, Job is persuaded:

I know that you can do all things;
no plan of yours can be thwarted.
You asked,
'Who is this that obscures my counsel without knowledge?'
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know. (Job 42:2-3, NIV, cf. Judaica Press)

Job, of course, hadn't made any claims to knowledge of the cosmos, nor had he exhibited much curiosity about such things, but implicit in God's retort about Job's ignorance would seem to be that it is an ignorance invincible, for if Job could provide answers to any of the questions, the rhetorical effect -- grounded in the assumption of Job's ignorance -- would be lessened.

In such a complex of thought, curiosity might well be taken as an affront to God, a presumptiveness that one has the right to know what God has implied that one simply cannot know.

Blumenberg does not cite Job at this point, however, nor does the name "Job" appear in the "Name Index" to Legitimacy of the Modern Age, so I will stop at this point today but perhaps return tomorrow.