The cause of job instability and rapid change is the streamlining that corporate America underwent in the 1980s, when foreign competition wrought havoc with the old-style gray-flannel-suit world of lifetime employment. The new-model corporation emerged leaner, meaner, and more efficient, if you measure efficiency (productivity, really) by the return on investment in capital and labor. Engineers made these productivity gains possible with all the technology, communications systems, and automation improvements that have come online in the last several decades.
The essence of this meaning of the word “communication,” O’Donovan says, is work. By “work,” he means “every human activity that enhances the material of communication, developing its social meaning, converting material goods into spiritual forces by the alchemy of communication.”
To O’Donovan, just as “work is the essence of social communication, unemployment is the paradigm of social breakdown.” O’Donovan means by unemployment not simply being out of a job, but not having a job that makes the world a better place. Mr. Friedman’s underlying basis for his discussion is GNP—in other words, the economy—as it is for most politicians these days. But every discussion that starts by assuming economics is the highest good, mistakes a means (money) for an end. That end, in O’Donovan’s view, is not making money, but social communication, the fruitful interaction of people who have something in common.
We may be facing a future in which the coming generation increasingly cannot find work that allows them an adequate means of social communication. A big factor in this problem is the deterioration of the family structure, which is both a cause and an effect of economic changes. The family is probably the most vital and intimate form of social communication of all. Any nation which neglects the preservation and encouragement of the family will sooner or later end up running on fumes, because mentally and physically healthy, disciplined, competent workers capable of long-range planning do not simply grow on trees. They typically come from healthy families, and the fewer of those there are, the fewer upstanding citizens we will have to work with in the future.
I have no grand plans or solutions that will give enough meaningful, remunerative work to enough people that we in America can continue to hope for a better future for most, if not all, of our children. But if we find a way to do this, I have a feeling it will be the kind of thing that happens not with a government program, or a clever academic insight, but by changing one soul at a time.
Sources: George Friedman’s article “Crisis that afflicts middle class threatens root of U. S. power” appeared in the Feb. 17, 2013 print edition of the Austin American-Statesman. The quotations from Oliver O’Donovan’s book The Way of Judgment (Eerdmans, 2005) appear on pp. 250-251.
