The second half of Chapter 3 Service in the book "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman

From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman.  Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman.  Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

PART 1:  The Changing Heroics of Power

Introduction

Efficiency

Growth

Service

Maintenance

p. 74:

In recent years service has been imagined more in human than in heavenly terms.  Quality service has more and more come to be defined as "personalized service."  This is due to the influence of therapeutic psychology with its needling insistence on personal feelings and personal relationships, a focus that disturbs the formal codes of conduct in business affairs.  For business observes rituals that serve the task and the organization impersonally---cold, uncaring and patriarchal as that may seem.

When personalized service becomes the criterion of quality service, then more attention is paid to the relationship between receiver and provider than to the objective nature of the task.  "Would you do this for me?" says the cabin attendant, asking me to pull my seat to an upright position for landing.  Why do it for her?  As a favor?  As a personal kindness?  Instead, we are performing the impersonal rituals of landing, the correct procedures that approximate an ideal form and have little to do with the human relations between her and me.  The waiter's name does not bear upon the dinner for which I came to the restaurant---I'm not there to make his acquaintance.  His concern for my dining will be shown neither by his imperative, "enjoy," as I begin, nor by his interrogation about the dishes afterward, but by his precision consciousness regarding each and every act, the rituals that he is there to perform, thereby doing his job beautifully.

Personalized service puts the person before the service.  One person serves the other; I am in service to you, or you to me, so that the master/slave situation of servile servitude immediately lurks in the shadow, splitting surface sweetness on the one hand and aggressive resentment on the other.  Only a saintly Sister of Charity can perform personalized service without being caught by the suppressed hostility emanating from this shadow.

It is the job that demands service; the objectivity of the job turns service into a ritual activity.  Then we might regard service as less for the sake of a person than for a thing, an event or situation, less a dis-empowering servitude than an enhancement, less a subjective kindness than an objective ritual.  Like waxing the floor to enhance its luster, like airing a room after everyone else has gone to bed.

By objective ritual, I mean the way a nurse bathes an immobile patient, a priest says Mass, an interpreter translates the text, an actor plays the part.  In each of these cases the personal may interfere with the objective performance of the service and the specifications of the job.  Not only persons call for service; their things do, too---the oil changed, the VCR cleaned, the dryer repaired, the message transmitted.  Ceremonies of the repairman.  Objects have their own personalities that ask for attention, just as the ads show the smiling bathtub that enjoys the new cleanser or the wood siding that likes the fresh stain which protects it from decay.  Treating things as if they had souls, carefully, with good manners---that's quality service.

We have now sailed by, rather scornfully, the two main lines of discourse regarding service; the first, with reference to the deliverer's performance (the high-tech production model), and the second, with reference to the recipient's satisfaction (the model of personalized needs).  We have left the arguments and measurements of delivery, satisfaction, performance, personal and impersonal altogether in order to return to where this chapter began.  Let's look again into the old idea of service that is so abhorrent: service as servitude, inescapable bondage unto death.  Not to a technical system of productive efficiency (Stangl; and also what Japanese youth are beginning to rebel against), and not to a personal customer who is always right (Hegel's "master" becomes the consumer whose every wish one must obey).  Rather, an idea of servitude to the Other, the Other as the planet as a whole and in each of its smallest components.

The idea of service that I am imagining would derive from deep ecology.  The Gaia hypothesis holds that our world, this planet, is a breathing organism.  It is all and everywhere alive and enjoys degrees of consciousness, where consciousness is no longer defined as an exclusive property of human beings and so no longer restricted to location only inside human skins and skulls.  Although the Gaia hypothesis is recent and uses biological, physical and chemical evidence, the idea is as old as the pre-Socratic philosophers, Stoic cosmology, the Neoplatonic world soul (anima mundi), the universal dreaming Soul of Leibniz, and is founded in strata of myths of the earth which the name Gaia, Greek earth Goddess, deliberately indicates.

The careful reader will already have noticed, and perhaps been disturbed by, a characteristic of this book's style which reflects the Gaia hypothesis.  The aberration endows all sorts of nouns with subjectivity.  You have been reading sentences that attribute consciousness and intention, power even, to ideas, to things and especially to words.  Words are given biographies, the book is said to have a task, and phenomena are described as displaying themselves without me or anyone else doing it for them.  The book shares the power of agency between the human as subject of the sentences and other kinds of subjects that in most prose, other than children's books and science-fiction fantasy, are not entitled to the right to life.  The very way the sentences are composed attempts to liberate the idea of soul from confinement in the human person, especially the first person singular, "I."

Service to a world ensouled implies that human life serves inescapably this large organic system.  Our exhalations, our excreta, our emotions---whatever we humans generate---serve in one way or another this interdependent complexity we call the biosphere, and which other cultures describe with the names of powers, gods and goddesses.  As servers in this organism we are inevitably both providers and recipients.  Good service would be defined by estimations of what's good for the world's soul and bad service by what is neglectful and diffident [lacking confidence or trust in someone or something].

These estimations of what is good or bad for the world of course cannot be objectified.  Who can say accurately that a disposable diaper serves the world's soul better than a cloth one.  How to weigh the water and detergent of washing cloth against the manufacture of disposal of plastic?  But you can make your choice with the ideal in mind that which way you go will be beneficial ecologically, and not only beneficial to your bank account or your personal convenience.  It is not a matter of inventing a new kind of consumers' guide that can estimate with benchmarks from one to ten what is best and worst for the world, but rather of feeling each decision with an ideal in mind so that your choices reflect an ecological consciousness.  This means not only what does this product, this activity, this purchase cost me, but what does it cost the world?

Furthermore, as we imagine the human soul to reside within each individual person, so the world soul may be imagined to have its locus in each individual thing.  Things then become subjects, too, rather than mere objects.  When they are treated as dead objects and left in neglect, they will reveal more and more toxicity.  What starts as "user-friendly" begins to emit "bad vibes."  How else call our attention to our disservice but for these articles to serve no longer as silent slaves.

This idea of service demands surrender, a continuous attention to the Other.  It feels like humiliation and servitude only when we identify with a ruling willful ego as mirror of a single dominating god.  But what if a God is in each thing, the other world distributed within this world?

Theology calls this distribution of the divine within all things the theory of immanence, and, sometimes, pantheism.  Whether God is right here in things, whether each thing has its own God, whether there is one God or many Gods, or 'any' Gods---these theological questions may fascinate but they are not immediately relevant to the practical point: service treats each particular thing as carrying its own specific value---including that airplane seat which I am asked to place in an upright position.  By treating that seat as if it were animated with its own spirit I will be less likely to rough it up and more likely to show care.  A cared-for seat will also perform better and provide longer-lasting service.

A theology of immanence means treating each thing, animate and inanimate (perhaps the distinction no longer clearly obtains), natural and man-made, as if it were alive, requiring what each living thing requires above all else: careful attention to its properties, their specific qualities.  This plant needs little water; this wood won't bear great weight and burns with a smoky fire.  Look at me carefully: I am an aspen, not an oak.  Notice differences, pay attention, give respect (re-spect = look again).  Notice what is right under your nose, at your fingertips, and attend to it as it asks, according to its needs.  Aesthetic sensitivity.  Precision consciousness.

These notions of attending and serving are the meanings of the Greek word 'therapeia,' from which our word "therapy" comes.  The Greek idea of a 'therapeutes' was one who attended, was a servant of, and thereby could heal.  A service relation to the planet could bring about its healing or at least maintain its health.

An aesthetic idea of service fits with what newer theory calls "high-touch" (rather than high-tech) service.  This idea is aesthetic because it requires a sensitivity to the nature of that which is, calling for careful perception and sensitive reactions.  These words, "sensation" and "perception," are the English translation of 'aisthesis,' which referred in Greek not to some abstract theory of beauty, but to the perception of the sensate (perceived by the senses) world as it appears.  I am proposing the idea that service can be relocated from a purely functional concept allied with mechanical efficiency to a qualitative participation of the senses in systemic relations.  Service then becomes 'fitting ecological response.'  Tasks now imagined mainly as duties, or penalties---cleaning up, detoxification, repair, scrubbing, recycling---become models for a therapeutic and aesthetic idea of service.

Suzi Gablik's book on the role of art in an ecologically conscious society describes compassionate action toward things as a new mode for Western art---art in service to the world (Suzi Gablik, "The Reenchantment of Art,"  New York: Thames & Hudson, 1991).  One chapter, describing an artist's devotion to the regular cleaning of the banks of the upper Rio Grande, portrays a ritual of service that is in keeping with a definition of art in its most extreme old-fashioned sense, "art for art's sake," but here no longer a private "creation" by a socially detached elite, separate from life and the surroundings, but in dedication to life and the surroundings.  It is pure art, without compensation.  It has no motive beyond the act, no program, no tendentious (controversial) message---for the river cannot be cleaned by one person, if ever cleaned at all.  It is ritual gesture, meditative devotion and service for its own sake, unprofitable and pleasing no customer.

We are now past conflicting definitions of our topic: one measured by corporate profitability, the other by consumer satisfaction, and have landed on a wider shore.  Here I would risk defining service with two fundamentals: first, as 'harmlessness'; second, as 'enhancement.'  The best service does the least harm and enhances as value or beauty.  It offers the least possible offense to the gods in its performance, its materials and its purpose.  Such service follows the ancient medical caution 'primum nihil nocere' (first, to do no harm), allowing us to imagine service as a way of healing the world's ills, which it does by raising the quality of whatever it touches.  Such service also fulfills the oldest idea of the Hero who once was imagined to be a person who sought the ideal and whose courage and extraordinary gifts were in service to the Gods for the welfare of the community.

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The first half of Chapter 3 Service in the book "Kinds of Power" by James Hillman

From the book "Kinds of power : a guide to its intelligent uses" by James Hillman.  Copyright © 1995 by James Hillman.  Published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036.

PART 1:  The Changing Heroics of Power
Introduction
Efficiency
Growth
Service
Maintenance

p. 66:

Chapter 3  Service

By proposing that we alter our perspective on efficiency and growth, I am aiming to take down the old heroics of business as battle, conquest, victory and reward, and their shadows, passivity, imprisonment, defeat and loss.  I am seeking to adapt to the actualities of a coming century in which another sort of courage, another style of enterprise will have to obtain: a style that is also heroic but cast in another mold.  To be bold and brave, to set forth into unknown country, to rescue the endangered city, may mean taking the risk of letting go of the old ideas of heroics, such as going it alone, keeping others in line, stone-walling and wielding a ruthless ax.  If the GNP of the United States has shifted from the heroics of production to a primarily service economy which provides, it is said 100 percent of all new jobs, then we have to do some serious reevaluation of service.  Yet the very idea of service stands in the way of optimizing service itself.

Service offends deep strata of human dignity.  We may all want service, but who wants to give it?  For service still means 'menial' service (not banking, brokering, telephoning, teaching, installing, diagnosing or writing).  The first trouble lies in the word, which invites in its cousins---serf, servile, servant, servitude, servility, all descendants from the common Latin ancestor, 'servus,' slave.  Service, as it is defined in our culture, is hardly empowering, or empowering only to those persons who can command service and the system for which we slave.  Political promises to get the country moving again cannot be delivered unless the service sector delivers good service.  But what is good service?  How can we think about a service economy if the idea echoes back to a slave economy?

From what we have just seen in regard to efficiency, we cannot improve service merely by making it more efficient---that is, fast, frictionless and fault-free.  If that was all there was to improving service, then reliable digital equipment, optic fiber, satellites, robots, software---in other words, more productive impersonal systems (gas chambers and cremation ovens?)---would take care of the problem.  In fact, the personal factor would be more and more eliminated---but then what about "jobs"?

Moreover, can improved systems of service delivery, better hardware and software, alone improve the quality of service?  When a restaurant owner puts in a second door side by side with the sole existing one between dining room and kitchen, thereby facilitating single-direction traffic through each door, he is probably making faster, and less subject to friction and fault, the delivery of food to table and bussing dishes to washer.  But does this necessarily improve the quality of relations between diner and waiter?  In Stangl's concentration camp there were great technological refinements; using the goals of fast, frictionless and fault-free, Treblinka provided superb service.  Ingenuity, technical efficiency, impersonal objectivity may implement delivery, but do they complete the picture of good service?  Are there benchmarks?  Models?

Good service as measured by the standards of the well-heeled elite moves away from impersonal delivery toward a more personal and individualized touch.  A concierge on each hotel floor, private hospital room with private nurse, more attendants per passenger in first-class air travel, chauffeured car or valet parking, a flow of personal hands-on attention:  decorators, hair-stylists, tailors, masseurs, financial planners.  Good service by this standard simply wants "someone to talk with who can do well, and respectfully, what I ask for."  Notice the five components in this definition:  a human person, with language skills and sensitivity, adequate to the task, as judged by the recipient or customer.  This is a far cry from automatic electronic devices.  So which way do we go in thinking about service:  more systematized or more personalized?

According to the Swedish thinker Evert Gummesson, the main mistake in all thinking about service is that we are hardly thinking about it at all.  The first research centers focusing on the subject in business and public affairs were started only in the mid eighties (Karlstad, Sweden, and Arizona State, Tempe), so that 'most ideas of service have been imported from ideas of production,' as if good service could be defined by criteria of productivity. [Evert Gummesson, "Service Productivity: A Blasphemous Approach," Dept. of Business Administration, University of Stockholm, 1992; and "Can Implementation Be Taught?" ibid., 1991.]

I am contesting this approach with all the vigor I can muster by drawing an exaggerated opposition between productivity and service.  They need to be kept clearly distinct because they grow out of fundamentally different psychological attitudes, even archetypally different styles of existence.  Our habitual ideas insist that to serve is closer to surrender; to produce, more like conquering.  Production masters material; service submits to it.  In the language of myth, our ideas of productive employment indicate the influence of Prometheus, the Greek Titan, upon the do-it-yourself ego, or of Hephaistos, the Olympian craftsman and arms maker, because production constructs: whereas service employment, because it protects, conserves and furthers, more likely indicates Hestia, the Goddess of the hearth.  She is almost invisible in her service, although instrumental in maintaining the daily round.  Or our idea of service could also be more Hermetic, after Hermes, the God and master of media and mediation, because service deals, exchanges and communicates messages impersonally without involvement in the message itself.

Gummesson's main complaint is that to think adequately about service, we must free it from the productivity paradigm.  Moreover, we must first recognize how entrenched we are in the paradigms that have worked so well so far, even when these paradigms force services on the recipient who feels these innovations as impositions.

Here I am referring to service that anticipates needs for a product, even invents needs, entrapping the consumer into wanting what he does not need.  Good service becomes defined as delivery of product that links, or chains, the consumer to the production facilities and their over-capacity.  Production, rather than scaled to meet the needs of the market and harnessed by these actual needs, sets the pace, requiring the market to serve the needs of production.  Good service can hardly be defined by delivery of product without the consuming population being thrown into an Orwellian nightmare of forced consumption trying to satisfy the increase of invented needs.  ("You can never get enough of what you don't really want," said Eric Hoffer.)  In short, the production model of thinking about service serves consumption (as a last stage of the production process), but not the consumer.

Because we have had more than a hundred and fifty years of rapid, innovative, technological solutions that improve service delivery, we continue to imagine along the same paths, sometimes deaf to suggestions that service can improve by 'non'- technological means.  The old cliche holds:  new wars are fought with the last war's weapons and by the last war's generals.  Past ideas that once worked determine approaches to new problems.

As service machines replace physical labor---washing clothes, washing cars, washing floors---and as computer chips and software replace mental labor, our ideas of service remain tied to labor-saving devices.  At the same time, surplus and inadequately paid labor have become the major concerns of futurists as well as the major parasite sucking the vitality of Western capitalism.

In the 1950s the Western idea of an efficient steel mill employed the fewest people per ton of product:  in China the most efficient steel plant gave the most employment and had the highest ratio of persons per ton.  Today we may tilting toward that Chinese thinking as employment becomes as important as productivity for the well-being of the nation.  And it is in the service sector where the new jobs are found even as the imagination of that sector remains fastened to the old paradigms of productivity.

Because the imagination of business and industry remains under the spell of the productivity paradigm, a paradigm that favors high tech/low touch employment, we continue to devalue the obverse side of the coin so necessary for service:  high touch/low tech.  And so our society continues to foment an under-rewarded, disrespected, resentful and recalcitrant workforce, waiting for the lottery to lift them from the degradation inherent in the very idea of their jobs.  So long as good service means "eliminating what does not need to be done" (the "form follows function" theory of modernist architecture applied to human services), we will have barren no-frills service stripped of fantasy, restricting the imaginative power in those who serve.  Good service "takes the extra step," "goes out of its way," shows imaginative variations, finds precise ways of pleasing.  It calls on imagination and delights the imagination as well as the senses.  It is more Baroque (Vivaldi, Bach, and Handel; Caravaggio and Rubens) than Bauhaus (functionalism and simplicity).

To move our ideas of service, we will have to clear away the usual discourse obsessively focused on delivery, implementation, rationalization and performance, with models drawn from McDonald's quick-serve systems and Federal Express's quick telephone response rule.  The reduction to simplistics of the human delight in serving---caring, mending, nursing, teaching, cleaning, answering, helping, fixing, greeting, conserving, easing, feeding, leading---can only vitiate (spoil or impair) all our attempts at quality improvement on which the economy depends.

What after all is "quality" but the approximation to an ideal---that is, the idea of quality closes the gap between an actual material event and an idealized perfect form.  By aiming at perfection, quality reminds the soul of ideal beauty.  "Perfect service," we say.  A quality chemical has not been degraded by substitutes, attempting to be 100 percent pure.  A quality machine tool tolerates only micro-dimensional imperfections.  A quality service brings otherworldly expressions of praise:  superb, graceful, beautiful, divine, marvelous, wonderful.  As an 'aesthetic' gesture, good service pleases both giver and recipient by the beauty of the performance, thereby enhancing life and adding value to an event that would otherwise be only a transaction.

This aesthetic (artistic, beautiful) idea of quality offers a different base for the acknowledged superiority of Japanese quality.  I believe we have wrongly attributed that superiority to a set of economic and psychological factors only:  the conformity of their workforce and the homogeneity of their population; their intense school pressure assuring habits of concentration and long attention span; their management-labor teamwork; their disciplined competitiveness from top to bottom; their traditions of obedience to rules (specifications), even to their "shame culture," in which errors become psychologically intolerable.

To these factors supposedly accounting for Japanese quality, I would add their aesthetic sensibility that is essential both to the decorum of Japanese daily life and to the complexities of their imagistic language.  From the beginning, the Japanese mind is set in a culture that pays devout attention to sensate details.  Their hobbies in the refined arts---flower arrangement, tea ceremony, calligraphy, martial arts and weapons, miniaturization, painstaking handcrafts, garden appreciation, food preparation, traditional dance---as well as the subtle infinitesimal (extremely small) variety of gestures in the Noh (traditional Japanese masked drama with dance and song) performances bespeak a "precision consciousness" of sensate aesthetic qualities in an attempt at the ideal.  Precision consciousness is what we call "quality control."

Of course, this objective, aesthetic impersonality can lead to empty formalism and the stultifying stiff mannerism that Americans see all too often in Japanese procedures.  Any mode casts its shadow.  I am not suggesting that we imitate the Japanese mode of service because it is better.  I am rather suggesting that we notice that Japanese delivery of quality results from a precision consciousness based in an aesthetic tradition.

Quality service, then, enhances life by keeping one eye always on the ideal, striving for the purity of perfection.  Of course the ideal cannot be achieved, for that is the nature of "ideal," which explains why an ideal is not simply a benchmark standard.  "Ideal" implies qualities that are beyond any preset description.  They are only pointers to how things should be and, perhaps, how they desire to be, as if something in each moment of life wants to transcend itself.  Perhaps improvement is not only a human desire.  Perhaps progress toward perfection, toward the realization of the ideal, is inherent in the very nature of things, which service recognizes by doing what it can to support this desire for enhancement, bringing out of each thing its best possible performance.  This is the spiritual impulse that is the true root of service.  Our service in life and our service to life attempt to return whatever we do to a utopic vision, the ideal of heaven, which each of us feels in the heart as an aesthetic joy whenever something is done really right.

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