What really devastated my generation was the spiritual malaise inherent in Taylorism's perfectly mechanized human labor. But Taylor had never seen a robot or a computer perfect his methods of being human. By the 1980s, we had. In the age of robots we reinvented the idea of being robots ourselves. We wanted to program our minds and bodies and have them obey clocks and routines. In this age of the human robot, of the materialist mind, being efficient took the pre-eminent spot, beyond goodness or power or wisdom or even cruel greed.
Ouch.
We are productive without price. Not because people aren't dying, they surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is no price because there's no measure to quantify what we are losing.
This makes me wonder how history will look on our mental health issues, as we look back on alcoholism in early 20th century America.
For those sympathetic to the views of the article, I can't recommend enough Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft for a fuller and prescriptive discussion of the history and philosophy of these issues of work and meaning and mental health.
Ouch.
We are productive without price. Not because people aren't dying, they surely are, uncounted lives and families are smothered with despair. There is no price because there's no measure to quantify what we are losing.
This makes me wonder how history will look on our mental health issues, as we look back on alcoholism in early 20th century America.
For those sympathetic to the views of the article, I can't recommend enough Matthew Crawford's book Shop Class as Soulcraft for a fuller and prescriptive discussion of the history and philosophy of these issues of work and meaning and mental health.