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Germanwings and the Philosophy of Work Music Like the ever-widening ripples of a pebble thrown into a pond, the aftermath of the Germanwings A320 tragedy leaves an endless succession of unanswered questions.Far beyond the horrifying minutiae of the disaster, one fact appears to me stark and disturbing. The relationship between the presumed perpetrator of the crash and his senior colleague was not characterized by any warmth or solidarity. On the surface, the interaction of the two appears to have been correct and collegial; but underneath, in the case of co-Pilot Andreas Lubitz, there was clearly a maelstrom of emotional disturbance.What is at fault, it seems to me, is not only an administrative structure which for all its focus on safety, could have allowed such an elementary security loophole as we witnessed to have been overlooked but (far more fundamentally) the whole philosophy of work within which such relationships are allowed to develop.And the entire focus, within the career structures of many professions, is far less on the ability to co-operate and be warm and friendly, than on the norms which must be reached and aspired to for individual advancement. One can look to law, medicine, teaching, the university life, sport and even the Church to find a culture of individual merit usually based on a surpassing intellectual or technical achievement of one kind or another as being the dominant value. This hiddenly, and probably blindly like an invisible and fateful magnetic field shapes the very nature of these professions, their recruitment strategies, their social standing, their cliques and customs, and all their other characteristics.Does it really have to be like this? A glance at employment-to-population rates in OECD countries suggests that, in this sample, roughly seven out of every ten people of employable age are employed; while poverty and inequality are elsewhere recorded as having grown recently in OECD countries.For non-OECD countries, of course, the figures are likely to be much worse.Fear of unemployment drives many people into career choices which evolve exclusively within the arena of personal achievement and the acquisition of technical accomplishment: almost no attempt is made to map peoples natural predilections towards one or other type of work, and to try and harmonize this data with their personal traits and potential for trancscendence.Paradoxically, just as the Christian religion leaves the individual soul alone and indeed lonely in its quest for individual salvation, so too, the work ethic deriving ultimately from Calvin alienates and marginalizes the specialist professional. He is trapped in a rat-race of endeavour, from which even retirement may not provide a solution in these days of reduced and evaporating pensions.In my article, Career Drift, I have quoted the educationalist, Lesley Perry, novelist Joseph Conrad, and Akenfield blacksmith Gregory Gladwell as key spokesmen on the true nature of work: enjoyable work, that is. Conrad speaks of what is in the work as as being its main attraction; Gregory Gladwell sees the shaping and forming discipline of the handworker the tradesman, as he calls him as being a value far transcending that of commerce; while Lesely Perry, in a slightly more Aristotelian fashion, wants to connect a persons innate interests with the beguiling routines of a work discipline out there.If their recommendations were to be followed, we would need to restructure the very reception of achievement in our societies. We would need to downplay the celebrity, the prodigy and the luminary as crucial heros in the dramatis personae of our Western life drama; and reinstate instead the humble, the ordinary and the sensitive person as a paradigm to be emulated.This could not be done, of course, without some considerable flight from the individual as hero narrative or trope, if my post-structuralist readers would like a free drink on me and some considerable return to New Testament parable values: where the labourer of the last hour receives recompense in proportion to the eagerness of his heart rather than to the amount of sweat which has dropped from his brow.The aim of course would be to track down and eliminate suicide, mental illness, disfunctionality of the human spirit of every kind, almost as if it were some new Ebola or Al Qaeda.There would be an economic price to pay of course; and our social relations would be completely transformed.We would also have to look at the seven ages of man and isolate the types of work which are non-remunerative and yet needed; and honour these also.Under this heading, I can think of ritual work, community- building work, self-enhancing voluntary work, non-remumerative mentoring, and all kinds of helpful teaching at many levels and in myriad guises as examples of some of the new work paradigms which will need to become salient if the old materialistic, post-Marxist model which ultimately brought down Flight A320 is to be defeated and repositioned.How ironic that the name Lufthansa of the parent company of the airline whose fate, perhaps, it is to become the crucible of this perhaps quantum leap in human emotional and employment development harks back to hansa, meaning league a word unattested in German prior to the fourteenth century.From the fourteenth century we must, I think, take our cue. Before in Europe nation states became powerful enemies, there was already in place a flexible system of benevolent co-operation which only occasionally fought wars and was intended for the good of all members: the Hanseatic League. It foreshadows as many have noted the development of the European Union in our own day. A migration from the confused vengefulness of Andreas Lubitz to the calm collectedness of Holbeins Georg Giese, a Hanseatic merchant pictured below, must begin at once. Notes