Once in my Australian childhood, during an election campaign, I asked my father how he was going to vote. He replied with a thump of his meaty fist on a nearby table.
“We’re workers,” he said, “so we votes Labor.”
I’ve never forgotten the way he defined himself, if only because it made me determined to clamber out of the working class and to shake off its bullying solidarity.
My father painted houses for a living; he would have thought it effete and futile to paint canvases. Since I went on to get paid for writing and for discussing books with students, he probably considered I didn’t know what work was. Nor, in his sense, do I: For me, it has always been a pleasure, indistinguishable from play.
But my father was a child of the Depression, who grew up with a ragged tribe of siblings in the backblocks in the 1930s. A job, when he finally found one, was a personal validation and a means of anchorage to society.
It seems odd to me now that he should have thought of work, which he actually hated and retired from early, citing a spurious war wound, as a stalwart proof of virtue and virility. In earlier times, our culture treated work as a curse or at least a lowly, shaming necessity like defecation. Adam and Eve spent the time in Eden cultivating their garden and were only condemned to earn a living after their expulsion from the good, happy, idle place. Christianity made work a consequence of the fall and for that reason afflicted women with what are penitentially known as labour pains. The Greeks took an even more disdainful view of work, which for them was beneath the dignity of a true human being.
The 12 labors of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labor-saving gadgets — not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.
REVOKING THE CURSE
The world we recognize as modern began by revoking the curse on work. As Alain de Botton argues in his new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, ours is the first society to believe that work should make us happy, “even in the absence of a financial imperative.”
The change dates from the Reformation. John Calvin sanctified capitalism by suggesting that salvation owed more to good works than to blind, trusting faith.
One of the puritans mocked by Ben Jonson in his play Bartholomew Fair is called Zeal-of-the-Land Busy: Zealotry and business, as Jonson recognized, had made a shrewd and lucrative merger. In 18th-century France, the compilers of the Encyclopedie laughed at the lassitude of the governing elite and treated artisans with unprecedented respect. Denis Diderot, one of the encyclopedists, was fascinated by specialized trades like glassblowing, masonry and silver-plating, which showed that menial men possessed rare, almost magical skills.
The philosopher John Locke challenged hereditary privilege when he declared that all property derived from “the labour of our body and the work of our hands.” We use those two terms interchangeably, but for Locke they were not synonyms. Labor remained carnal, still as much of an agonizing chore as a woman’s birth pangs, whereas work was performed by our nimble, ingenious fingers (which are also working when they are holding a pen or tapping a keyboard). In 1776, economist Adam Smith made such handiwork the foundation of what he called “the wealth of nations.”
Industrial society, geared for productivity, transformed work into a religion. For Karl Marx, what distinguished men from animals was not reason — the prerogative supposedly awarded to us by God — but labor. His theory did less than justice to the totalitarian toil of the beehive, to beavers building dams or to birds fabricating nests from twigs and bits of scavenged rubbish. Perhaps he should have said labor defined us as animals, creatures compelled to grub a livelihood from the soil rather than relying on divine benefactions.
In working, we metabolize nature, as if we were absorbing raw materials in order to regurgitate wealth: a lump of rock dug from the ground is cut, polished and transformed into a diamond. The biblical God claimed to have created the Earth. For the steam-powered, electrified 19th century, our world was actually made by men, who added value to crude, inert, boggy nature by harnessing the elements.
The age of work began in the mid-19th century and lasted no more than 100 years. As those who have recently lost their jobs will have noticed, it is already over. In its triumphant heyday, it preached an ennobling gospel. In Work (1852 to 1863), the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown painted a gang of laborers gutting Heath Street in Hampstead, north London, to lay a drain. No, these are not the kind of laborers you see digging up the street today, with radios louder than their jackhammers and anal clefts on view as they bend over their tools. Posing with their spades or swigging from their water bottles, Brown’s “navvies” might be idealized Greek statues who have stepped down from a temple frieze. They are embodiments of muscular force and determination, admired from the sidelines by philosopher Thomas Carlyle and the Reverend F.D. Maurice, who recognized the aspirations of such men by setting up the first colleges for workers.
WORK, NOT ‘JOB’
Work, as the painting proclaims, is a source not just of wealth but of contentment, pride and moral valor. The assiduity of the laborers reproaches the shiftless, high-born riders who pass by, having spent the morning trotting around the heath. In the 19th century, work became an alchemical miracle, transforming pain into profit, energy into cash. A new terminology was needed to keep up with the exhilarating hyperactivity of the times. “Job” is an old, coarse word, which originally overlapped with “jab”: a job is what you are prodded to do when hunger pains jab and you hire yourself out only until your belly is full.
McDonald’s was right, etymologically at least, to take umbrage at the use of the term “McJob” to describe dead-end chores that require no skill or talent and lead nowhere. Instead of jobs, people now had what they called careers.
“At work!” wrote journalist Blanchard Jerrold in a tour of Victorian London published in 1872. The exclamation was a rallying cry. Before dawn in the cold and gloomy streets, Jerrold saw “the vanguard of the army of Labour” mobilizing. These multitudes marched to work rather wearily trudging, eager to “add a new storey to a new terrace” or “another station to another railway,” raising the world to new heights or extending man’s reach through space.
The City of London swarmed with “money-making humanity,” and in the fetid slums Jerrold found extra evidence of industrious dedication: watchmakers in Clerkenwell, weavers in Spitalfields, sugar-refiners in Whitechapel, wood-workers in Aldersgate Street, shoemakers in Shoreditch. It is the survey of a lost world.
I doubt that Jerrold would have thought that the artists currently headquartered in Hackney contributed much to the nation’s wealth. And who in the TV show EastEnders actually works, as opposed to grousing and gossiping in the pub?
For as long as this faith lasted, the noise made by workers could be reclassified as music: the clattering of the subterranean smiths at their anvils in Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, the hammering of the cobbler-poet Hans Sachs in his Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg.
In Il tabarro, Puccini wrote an aria for an aching stevedore who spends his day loading sacks onto a barge in the Seine. The tenor’s complaint about this back-breaking labor ends with a resonant high note. The character may be degraded by his heavy lifting, but the singer’s vocal climax, also the result of muscular strain and bodily strength, wrests a fierce, defiant joy from straining muscles, tumescent veins and vocal cords stretched taut.
A labor theory of value, summed up by the proverbial remark that genius consists of 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration, invaded aesthetics. Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac competed with the printing presses that manufactured their work, driving themselves so relentlessly that their health broke down. To be any less industrious was offensive.
When James McNeill Whistler exhibited his self-consciously sketchy Nocturnes in 1871, critic John Ruskin deplored their slapdash technique and accused him of “cockney impudence.” Whistler sued for libel and at the trial admitted — or perhaps boasted — that one of the paintings had taken him only two days to complete. The judge, assuming that artistic merit and commercial worth were both functions of effort expended, asked whether 200 guineas was not too high a price for so little work.
Such thinking made sense so long as society depended on the output of factories and foundries, mills and sweatshops. But with the decline of manufacturing, our economy changed irrevocably and our conception of work altered as well. The very idea has become metaphorical, no longer attached to the drab, diligent reality of employment.
A while ago in New York, a young man passed me in the street, bellowing into his mobile phone as he scuttled toward the gym on the corner.
“I just got outta work,” he was saying, “and now I’m gonna go work out.”
He had uttered a perfect sentence, almost a palindrome, which summed up the disorienting social change we have lived through.
Those who once might have been steelworkers now pump iron, but only as a pastime; muscles gained through toil are replaced by muscles that are ornamental. We work harder at leisure activities like weight training than we do at our jobs, which are tolerated only because they help to pay for gym subscriptions.
Ricky Gervais’ comedy TV series The Office samples the contemporary workplace: a playground where the members of the so-called “team” tell unfunny jokes, bend paper clips out of shape, use their computers to cruise dating sites, fuss about the positioning of their desks, flirt at the water cooler and keep an impatient eye on the clock. We leave productivity to China or India; the speciality of Western economies is what the slippery bankers and brokers who bankrupted us classify as “financial products” — valueless commodities such as subprime mortgages and fund-linked derivatives, the produce of some venal twister’s larcenous brain.
ROWS OF NOUGHTS
The wealth of nations has lost that connection with the body’s sweat and the Earth’s abundance that Locke and Adam Smith emphasised. It now consists of rows of noughts flickering on screens, numbers that have been conjured out of the air and are apt, as recent events demonstrate, to vanish back into it.
When manufacturing turned rusty and decrepit, service became the new goal. But just what does a job in the service economy entail? Like an estate agent, you are selling your personality, a slickly cheery manner with a line of patter to match. Like a waiter who prefers to call himself a resting actor, you perform the actual service grudgingly, resenting it because it’s so humbly useful.
The service economy, more’s the pity, is never servile. Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman, urges a return to an earlier model of economic activity, ousted when machines took control of production. Craft has fallen into disrepute: something “craftsy” is amateurish and one who is “crafty” is untrustworthy.
But Sennett sings the praises of potters, brickmakers, metalworkers and weavers, who, for him, are the true makers because they leave a personal imprint on a world they have helped to construct. Even musical virtuosi, as he points out, flashily demonstrate the virtue of craft, giving displays of “finger dexerity” as they manipulate keys, strings and stops.
Classical philosophers despised trade, which they saw as unfit for free, intelligent, autonomous citizens. Cicero sniffed at fishermen, fishmongers, butchers, poulterers and cooks, all of whom soiled their hands by dealing with food. Would he have considered it finer to be a public relations expert, a political consultant, a talk-show host or a day trader on the stock exchange?
We suffer from a disconnection between value and utility. The only cooks we take seriously are those who call themselves chefs and dish up food that is conceptual and un-nutritious — British chef Heston Blumenthal’s snail porridge, Ferran Adria’s vapid concoctions of “culinary foam.”
Those aerated, overpriced tidbits are a symbol of what’s wrong with our society and with the desires it fosters. In 1917, American sociologist Thorstein Veblen noticed a paradox.
“The lasting evidence of productive labour,” he said, “is its material product — commonly some article of consumption.”
We produce in order to consume; overproduction obliges us to consume items we don’t need. Hence the built-in obsolescence of fashionable clothes or of the electronic equipment that we replace before it wears out.
And if we consume something, what happens to the “material evidence” of our toil? It disappears into our digestive tracts like one of Adria’s molecular snacks, leaving behind only the emptiness known as buyer’s remorse. The government has attempted to repair the financial system by giving us incentives to spend. But should the nation’s health and wealth depend on turnover in its shopping malls?
For too long, we have been enslaved to an economy that exists to churn out superfluous wares and calls us redundant if we don’t contribute to its self-defeating cycle of production and consumption, binge and bust. Marx told workers that they had nothing to lose but their chains. All that consumers have to lose is their artificially bloated appetites.
The present emergency is our chance to think again about the significance of work and its centrality to our lives. Man the worker was supposed to be perfecting a world left unfinished and unfurnished by God the creator; instead, our industrial rapacity has come close to destroying that world. This alone is reason enough to down tools, whether we want to or not.
Peter Conrad teaches English literature at Oxford University.
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