John cites Guyer's notion that, "the United States has shifted from a consequential focus on reasoning toward the near future to a combination of response to immediate situations and orientation to a very long-term horizon."
Immediate situation = taxes Very long-term horizon = death Certainty.Joking aside, it's interesting to consider how those temporal concerns could lead people to ignore "thoughtful interest in such issues as poverty..."?
One assumes "thoughtful interest" comes from empathy, and empathy comes most forcefully from the experience of those closest.
Poverty, in a global economy, is a distinct short-term possibility for many people. (If you are a financial editor at Reuters in Hoboken, your job could be outsourced to Bombay ... oops that already happened. For those guys it became the present emergency.) For most workers, poverty looms an outsource or illness away.
Previously, one could exercise medium-term plans. Moreover, under the paternalistic corporations of yore, one could exercise seven-ages-of-man plans, complete with company pensions independent of the DJIA.
So rather than linking subjective temporal compression to postmodern narrativity or the 24/hour news cycle, one could simply say that under globalism most US workers now face "the present emergency" and see things getting worse. People don't make middle-term plans because they may be fired, fall ill, be forced to move. And this uncertainty makes us more like medieval peasants -- though now we are technopeasants -- as the nasty brutish and short increases. Or is that too simple?
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