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I have a health screening today, an opportunity thoughtfully provided by my place of employment. It offers a small cash bonus for my participation, which I will admit informs my going to it, although I have to consider what it says about me that the money is a motivation, and I have to consider what it says about my place of employment that some kind of bonus *has* to be offered to get the employees to go to the screening. In neither event does it seem to me to be a good thing; the one suggests that financial concerns are or are becoming more important than others, while the other suggests that there are health problems among my colleagues and that few of us are concerned about them.

If I follow the latter thought further, though, I begin to see deeper implications. If the employer is concerned with employee health, it is doubtlessly due to financial worries. Healthy workers are more productive workers, after all, taking fewer sick days away from work and doing more with the days that they are at work. The attention to employee health can thus come across as something like maintenance of a machine--and if the employees see themselves as parts of a machine, reduced to being parts of a machine, it is not much of a stretch to think that they will not care so much for their own maintenance as might otherwise be the case. Being a replaceable cog is not entirely pleasant.

There are other reasons to think that the mechanistic view obtains. The prevalence of adjunct and contingent labor (noted here and here, among others) suggests it. So does the increasingly widely-held view of education as test-taking in the service of job preparation; education, even at the college level, is broadly seen as a service industry (attested here among others), and it is widely held that service ought to be provided in a predictable, efficient, ultimately mechanistic way. (Why else the success of franchises?) Education is seen as an investment on which a return is expected, again, much like manufacturing machines. Again, then, those who teach, who are in the work of making teaching available, have reason to think of themselves as being regarded as cogs, and reminders that cogs break and are replaced such as health screenings offer are not wholly comfortable.

It is something of a pessimistic view, I admit. Many I hold are; I am quick to see the problem, the cloud to the silver lining. (I forget who introduced me to that turn of phrase, but I am grateful to that person even so.) I look first to the left, seeking the sinister, and rarely do I look to the right thereafter. But if I do, it is because I recognize that Machiavelli is correct, even centuries later. There are deeper reasons to consider for the things that are offered, and even if they are not recognized on the part of those making the offer or those accepting it, they influence how the offer is made and the effects it has. And they are not always, or likely even often, happy.