In my last few columns, I have been taking stock of some of the societal shifts that have landed us in our current situation. I described that situation recently as the outsourcing of production from within local communities to the external systems that manage our lives for us, both keeping us fragmented and assuring their indispensability.
I’ve promised to show how the Gospel offers an alternative to this subhuman predicament — and I want to assure the reader that this is where future columns are headed. We’re describing the bad news now so that we can see how the Church is — very practically — the hope for the world today. We live under a totalizing way of life that the popes have called “technocracy” — the regime of technology. By this, we don’t have any conspiracy theories in mind; just that technology takes the lead in decisions that shape our world from top to bottom. As we’ll see, the Church stands to this regime as a total alternative way of life. This is very good news.
But before we get to this good news, we have to spend a little more time appreciating how much we need it.
I’ve written before about how everything in our society tends to become quantified to be able to manage it. Efficiency for the sake of profitability — which I call “Taylorism” after the factory management pioneer Frederick Taylor — is today perhaps our highest value. So, we turn as much as we can of the world into statistics, for the sake of maximizing effectiveness. In the process, more of the world becomes quantified, labeled, and so made into a “thing” — walks with friends become “steps,” and dinner becomes a certain number of calories.
As more of the world is made into “things,” the result is that more of it is available to be bought and sold. We increasingly turn our world into commodities. Even the statistics that help sell commodities — such as how many times you look at a product on Amazon — are themselves sold as commodities, so that ever more of our world has a price tag on it, even our desires. I mentioned in an earlier column that today’s web-based, digital society is not a move away from Taylorism; it’s in fact Taylorism beyond Taylor’s wildest dreams. Society has progressively become one large metaphorical factory, and we are constantly inventing new ways to make productivity as high as can possibly be.
Most of us don’t work in factories anymore, but we still spend our days trying to make something more effective. It’s how most of us earn our living — and so the effectiveness mentality can’t help but soak down deep into our consciousness, even when we’re not at work. Taylorism deeply shapes how we think, what we do, how we live, and who we are. We all are running little factories in our heads most of the time.
At this point it’s worth reflecting on some of the toll this has on us.
For one thing, it blinds us to the beauty and mystery in the world. Who would want a world without the intangible glory of fall leaves, my children’s wry smiles, or, on the other hand, the paradoxical attractiveness of Christ’s cross? But when effectiveness is all that matters, we tend to only recognize things we can measure as real. Taylorism trains us to turn quality into quantity, and can leave us with an inhuman, mechanical world.
It also transforms relationships. In our drive to “thing-ify” in order to manage, we inevitably begin to do this to people. As we live Taylorism, our friends and neighbors get treated as objects we use to accomplish some goal, rather than as the unique images of God that they are. I subsume my friends into my own projects.
Finally, we disciples of Taylor are always in a rush. Nothing ever goes fast enough; we’re always trying to get a little more done. We are always trying to fit one more thing into our day. So, we’re always harried, and we don’t ever feel like we can rest. No wonder we have an epidemic of clinical anxiety. We treat our world like a factory we are always trying to optimize, and it’s taking a massive toll on our psychological well-being.
In the next columns we’ll see that this effectiveness mentality doesn’t just shape the world around us. We are increasingly applying it to ourselves as well, so that we make our very lives into commodities that become the stock and trade of those external systems that have come to manage our lives for us.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” published by Ave Maria Press.
