JONTILLMAN.COM | part of the problem since 1976

What is the point of speaking about the future in a society where Immediatism has become the new state religion (arriving just in time to replace anti-communism)? Richard Sennett asks, in The Corrosion of Character: the Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism, “How can long term goals be pursued in an economy devoted to the short term?” How indeed. How is it any longer possible to be the ‘authors of our lives’, given the constant disloyalty and paranoias sold to us under the title of “flexibilty”?

In the past, from St. Paul (If any would not work, neither shall he eat), through Thomas Carlyle (Labour is life) to the present day with Gordon Brown (Work is the…ethical basis [of the Sate]), politicians and thinkers have asserted that man must earn his place at the communal table through his work, his labour. My question is; does this ancient rhetoric have any moral or ethical base, or does it exist mostly if not wholly as a means of social control; of preserving structural inequality?

Additionally, do those like Gordon Brown who advocate a “return to the historical work-ethic that made us great” have any goal other than attempting to manage the basic contradictions of ’social cohesion’ and ‘economic dynamism’? And will New Labour’s hodgepodge of Christian Socialism, evolutionary psychology and Foucaultian anti-humanism makes the hop across the Atlantic? The “Compassionate Conservatism” of “faith-based initiatives” in “Communities of Character” that leave no child behind sound awfully close to me.

I know that these questions are connected to each other by only the most ephemeral of threads, but I hope to be able to draw them together, to present some coherent critique of this new(?) and menacing attempt to keep citizens constantly on their heels and afraid to ask questions. Stay tuned.