Read Online Monoculture: How One Story is Changing Everything by F.S. Michaels - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: F.S. Michaels
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Book-buying for the library is outsourced to corporations. Critics worry that outsourcing the development of the library collection is akin to corporations deciding which books are available to you in the library at all, and question whether books that challenge the status quo or that criticize business itself will find their way onto the shelves. 47 Even so, in 1997, the city of Riverside, California became the first documented library system to outsource the operation of its 25 library branches to a private company called Library Systems & Services, LCC (LSSI). Critics say the company runs libraries for less than cities can by hiring fewer trained librarians, and by paying lower salaries and offering fewer benefits to employees. 48 Yet by 2010, LSSI was America’s fifth-largest library system, having “taken over public libraries in ailing cities in California, Oregon, Tennessee and Texas.” In late 2010, LSSI won its first contract to run libraries in the financially-healthy city of Santa Clarita, California; the $4 million deal was described as “a chance for the company to demonstrate that a dose of private management can be good for communities, whatever their financial situation.” 49
After all, in the economic story, the public sector and the private sector are no longer distinct areas of activity that ought to be managed differently. In the economic story, the public sector and the private sector are the same sector: private.
YOUR PHYSICAL
AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH
To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. Not surprisingly, therefore, if economic thinking pervades the whole of society, even simply non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be ‘economic.’
—E.F. SCHUMACHER
You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the poor much more than you have the physically poor. Often among the rich are very spiritually poor people. I find it is easy to give a plate of rice to a hungry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually deprived, that takes a long time.
—MOTHER TERESA
FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, the human value at the center of medicine was health, says biomedical ethicist Daniel Callahan, “the integrated well-being of mind and body” — the healing of the sick, the compassionate relief of suffering. Doctors were expected to act in the best interests of their patients. Plato wrote, “The physician, as such, studies only the patient’s interest, not his own…The business of the physician, in the strict sense, is not to make money for himself, but to exercise his power over the patient’s body…All that he says and does will be said and done with a view to what is good and proper for the subject for whom he practices his art.” 1
Even so, doctors weren’t always respected. In Roman times, doctors were decidedly low in status: they were slaves, freedmen, or foreigners. Until as late as 1745, surgeons were considered craftspeople who belonged to the same guild as barbers since both worked with their hands. A medical journal of the time remarked that when a promising young man chose to become a doctor, “the feeling among the majority of his cultivated friends is that he has thrown himself away.” 2
In the 1800s in England, doctors hovered around the edges of the gentry, trying to look and act like the upper class since professional success was about having the right aristocratic patrons and displaying the right social graces. In America, the aristocracy didn’t exist, so medical schools and societies were launched, often by doctors themselves, to bolster the status of the profession. At the same time, legislation was enacted that controlled who could and couldn’t open a medical practice.
As a
After all, in the economic story, the public sector and the private sector are no longer distinct areas of activity that ought to be managed differently. In the economic story, the public sector and the private sector are the same sector: private.
YOUR PHYSICAL
AND SPIRITUAL HEALTH
To the extent that economic thinking is based on the market, it takes the sacredness out of life, because there can be nothing sacred in something that has a price. Not surprisingly, therefore, if economic thinking pervades the whole of society, even simply non-economic values like beauty, health, or cleanliness can survive only if they prove to be ‘economic.’
—E.F. SCHUMACHER
You in the West have the spiritually poorest of the poor much more than you have the physically poor. Often among the rich are very spiritually poor people. I find it is easy to give a plate of rice to a hungry person, to furnish a bed to a person who has no bed, but to console or to remove the bitterness, anger, and loneliness that comes from being spiritually deprived, that takes a long time.
—MOTHER TERESA
FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, the human value at the center of medicine was health, says biomedical ethicist Daniel Callahan, “the integrated well-being of mind and body” — the healing of the sick, the compassionate relief of suffering. Doctors were expected to act in the best interests of their patients. Plato wrote, “The physician, as such, studies only the patient’s interest, not his own…The business of the physician, in the strict sense, is not to make money for himself, but to exercise his power over the patient’s body…All that he says and does will be said and done with a view to what is good and proper for the subject for whom he practices his art.” 1
Even so, doctors weren’t always respected. In Roman times, doctors were decidedly low in status: they were slaves, freedmen, or foreigners. Until as late as 1745, surgeons were considered craftspeople who belonged to the same guild as barbers since both worked with their hands. A medical journal of the time remarked that when a promising young man chose to become a doctor, “the feeling among the majority of his cultivated friends is that he has thrown himself away.” 2
In the 1800s in England, doctors hovered around the edges of the gentry, trying to look and act like the upper class since professional success was about having the right aristocratic patrons and displaying the right social graces. In America, the aristocracy didn’t exist, so medical schools and societies were launched, often by doctors themselves, to bolster the status of the profession. At the same time, legislation was enacted that controlled who could and couldn’t open a medical practice.
As a
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