by Lael Ewy
The assessment was born of mass alienation. If you know what you’re doing, if you know your craft, your art, your field of study, you know if you’re doing well or not. Assessment makes no sense outside of education or an industrial culture in which those actually invested and involved in the process of making and doing don’t “need” to have a complete understanding, or even a basic understanding, of that process or its final result.
As Matthew B. Crawford has pointed out, there is an ethic of doing that comes from an intimate knowledge of the tools and the techniques of the job. It is to this ethos that I suggest we return.
When the company owns your labor, it also owns your interest in that labor, in the quality of the work and the values invested in the process. Thus “labor” becomes a commodity outside of the actual job instead of integral to the task. Marx understood this as a foundational principle, but few collectivist schemes have been able to reinvest it in the activities of the people. That is because it is inherent not to capitalism as Marx suggested but to industrialism: large scale production separates work from product and expertise from process. It creates fictive worlds in which things are created and services delivered outside of the scale of individual agency: we can see how we fit the nut to the bolt, but we can’t see how the machine really works, where the resources are gathered, how the marketing gets made.
Those forms of collectivism that have succeeded have done so within the confines of traditional and often religiously-bound communities, such as the Hutterites, whose faith calls them to the tasks but whose understanding of the roles of each within the whole keeps them tied together and satisfied. It feels good to do good work. It feels good to see how what you do is beneficial to those you count your own.
Even quite simple assembly-line tasks can be reinfused with the notions of ownership and craft, and this is where management can play a role, but managers themselves must also become reinvested in their own roles. No matter what, the larger understanding of how one’s actions affect the overall task must not merely be allowed but encouraged. Part of the task of the company must be the continual education of its employees, much of which must happen by the employees for each other.
Because the labor of the worker is the property of the company, intellectual and ethical investment with the product or service must also be accompanied by literal investment in the company; labor must also mean an actual share in the enterprise. Too long have executives purposefully and often maliciously enhanced the alienation of the laborer by denying her her share in the overall endeavor. It is easier, after all, to get rid of a worker who has been convinced, and who has convinced herself, that her time there is worth only her time and not her hopes, much less her heart and sweat and soul.
Too many companies are like the current Hawker-Beech in Wichita, which went from a family-run airplane company to one that no one seems to really own, no matter one’s position within it or the value of one’s stock. So distanced are the principals from the task that the product line has stagnated, the traditions fallen fallow, the executives baffled when their latest ploys have failed.
When the worker is not merely entitled to stop the line when she sees a flaw float by but feels an urgent need, when she anticipates how that flaw will happen given the conditions, the resources, the processes in place, then assessments will be redundant and production again a worthwhile endeavor: an act of creation and not a mere set of actions within a set of procedures set against the stone hearts of an industry’s distant and disinterested captains.
by Hillary Hardcore and EW Wilder
1.Lo-Cajun
2.Astronomical Brindle Tarts
3.Spud Handle
4.Kredit-Müncher
5.Cranberry Battleship
6.Nip-Slip Weekend
7.Tabloid Brainphärt
8.The Dongle Kitties
9.Rogue’s Collar
10.Smugbanquer
11.damndirtyape
12.The Fluffycake Conspiracy
13.Mustard N?z
14.Paralegalz Nite Out
15.Simonize ur Sister
16.The Gland Bellies
17.Blood Muffin
18.Turnip Transit
19.Tinkül Balle
20.Tinker-Tron
21.Buck Sandwich
22.Butane Overcoat
23.Klesmer vs. Cthulu
24.The Tinsel-Fanciers
25.Glass Nickel
26.Bourgeois Pencil-Sharpener
27.Slaw Coaster
28.Dastardly Digital
29.Rick Ray Ban
30.Frosted Kumquat
31.Freez-R-Bürn
32.Necro-Klüster
33.The Drool-Mobsters
34.Kill Button
35.Kraken Charmer
36.B?n-Spindle
37.Jizz Mönkie
38.Thümbreth
39.Stürm Dancer
40.Lobster Bris
41.The Insect Crescendo
42.Hotpants Conspiracy
43.The Violation
44.Fistluvur
45.The Fur Dancers
46.Drooling Privileges
47.Scröt Candy
48.Strepto-Scrötus
49.Sizzle-Puppy
50.Loose Snooze
51.Spider Bucket
52.The Slender Whistle
53.Blat-tasm
54.Roar-Gasm
55.Gunny Snak
56.Scroatia
57.The Fur Burglars
The linden tree north of the administration building on the campus of Hesston College is one of those sprawling old souls that seems, in its weary sort of way, to be holding up the sky. The bigger branches vault above the green; the trunk is more round than tall—a stout, barrel-chested sort of fellow.
Until I noticed the plaque below, naming the tree as a linden, I’d never known what a linden looked like. The linden is the kind of tree that you read about as taking on some symbolic meaning or other. Perhaps the founders of a new nation met beneath a linden; maybe a new philosophy was born there.
I can see why: the boughs are rooflike and protective, the leaves like greaves of armor. It’s a very reassuring tree, the linden, and so a good place for those who may be unsure about their new ventures toward solidarity, toward solace.
I associate the linden not with Kansas but with the Old World and the East Coast. It seems like it might not be well suited to harsh winds and drought; out here, to survive as a tree is to lose parts of yourself in the process like the cottonwood or to grow small and gnarled, too twisted to care, like the Osage Orange. But this particular linden has been nurtured. And maybe that’s the lesson: you’ve got to cultivate that upon which you rely. This is the lesson of agriculture—of culture in general—of good governance, of responsive, responsible citizenship. The linden, with its greybrown bark and dark green leaves and forthright shape, could be a good symbol for us.
Not that we need a symbol. But we do need an idea about how we can cultivate citizenship, how we can work at becoming more strong instead of more fractious. We need an idea about how we are going to deal with our problems through individual agency, through responsibility that’s backed by support, through empowerment and mutual assistance instead of constant struggle. That’s the model for a functioning liberal democracy; it’s one that enlists the government as an asset, an arm making real, making strong, the will of the people, uplifting them and aiding their endeavors, “promot[ing] the general welfare, not sacrificing the individual at the altar of profit or security, power or privilege.
–Lael Ewy
Almost our entire response to mental health is reactive: we create hospitals and mental health centers; we develop drugs and apply therapies. Our response assumes that mental health problems come out of nowhere, have no discernable etiology other than perhaps a ”genetic propensity” that’s “poorly understood.”
Some “strengths-based” models have tried to correct the traditional “illness-based” approach to the understanding of psychological processes by asking what a healthy mind looks like. However, like the illness model, it is simply too limited: the strengths model places the locus of mental health too completely on the individual. It is not far to go from the strengths-based standpoint right back to a morality model in which suffering people are blamed for not maintaining their mental health, even in light of obvious stressors and triggers in their cultural environment.
If we approached the treatment of, say, cholera this way, we would spend incredible effort and copious amounts of cash coming up with drugs and treatments and therapies while utterly ignoring the place where the crap meets the well.
What I am suggesting is an approach that asks a simple question: “What are we doing to create mentally healthy communities?”
Progressive thinkers have long asked this of physical health and have influenced city planners to produce bike paths and green spaces, walkable town centers and recreation-friendly workplaces.
But a mentally healthy environment goes beyond these (though it does include them). In order for it to work, we must also look at how our public services deal with people. We must look at what our public schools do to our sense of self and agency, how they present the matter of possibility in our intellectual and social development. A mentally healthy environment would be one in which there are places for reflection, in which noise is smartly managed, in which public space is both welcoming and safe.
More controversially, a mentally healthy environment would be one in which work is organized so that people can manage its stresses, in which people’s livelihoods are, as much as possible, stabilized, but their aspirations are honored. A mentally healthy environment would therefore necessarily be one of managed risk and of individual control over how that risk is managed. A mentally healthy environment would be one in which the common abuses of the public sector are minimized not merely because they’re bad business but also because they’re bad form, properly the subject of social opprobrium, not lauded as the way “tough-minded” business people ought, really, to act.
This vision is far from utopian: our lives will never be perfect. There will still be disagreement and misunderstanding; there will still be conflicting egos and disease and privation and sadness and strife. A mentally healthy environment won’t keep us from being heartbroken or accident-free.
But it will make things easier when those difficult inevitabilities arise. And as humans, equipped with this great tool that is culture, is that not what we have worked eons to do?
–Lael Ewy