Erik Baker writes in The New Yorker, May 1, 2024:
New books examine the place of work in our lives—and how people throughout history have tried to change it.
There’s a line in one of my favorite songs that’s been tripping me up recently. “We Take Care of Our Own” kicks off Bruce Springsteen’s 2012 album, “Wrecking Ball,” a late-career masterpiece that sifts through the rubble of the Great Recession. After a few verses lamenting the American political system’s abandonment of the working class, “from Chicago to New Orleans,” Springsteen launches into the bridge. “Where’re the eyes, the eyes with the will to see?” he thunders. “Where’re the hearts that run over with mercy? / Where’s the love that has not forsaken me?” And then the stumbling block: “Where’s the work that’ll set my hands, my soul free?”
I don’t think conservatives expect to find work that will set them free. This is a peculiar conception of part of the liberal-left Enlightenment worldview that understands the individual as the center of all things, wielding the capacity to develop meaning, purpose and morality on his own through the guidance of his rationality.
Trads of any stripe (Christian, Jewish, Japanese, etc) understand that people aren’t basically good, that reason is weak compared to the power of genes, imprinting and tribal incentives, that life isn’t easy, and that only in the words of Genesis 3:19, “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will.”
Throughout this New Yorker essay is a secularized Christian yearning for redemption and salvation. Woke is the ultimate etherealized development of the ethereal religion of Protestantism. As a convert to Orthodox Judaism, by contrast, I believe in sacred items, times, and places. I have concrete commitments of deed. My religion is physical more than conceptual.
I don’t share this Christian yearning for redemption and salvation. I regret some things I’ve done in the past and I am engaged in a process of making amends through superior behavior in areas where I was once slipshod and selfish. I see my good deeds as my ambassadors going on ahead of me to ease my way through life and removing the stains my careless self laid down in the past. I am not desperate for some baptism of my life through work or sex or drugs or therapy or religion or yoga or some other dramatic gesture that liberals turn to these days to feel whole.
As a non-liberal, I don’t view people as primarily individuals. Instead, I see us as primarily members of families and extended families. As a non-liberal, I don’t think primarily in terms of rights but in terms of obligations. One of the obligations of a man is to protect and to provide through accumulating resources via work. Only the rare man will get to enjoy his labor. When it happens, it is awesome, but it strikes me as absurd to regard work as a sacred right to dignity.
The best way for ordinary people to enjoy dignity is through their membership in a family, tribe, and nation. The normal person gets his meaning, purpose and morality from this bond, and not from government regulation regarding workplace speech.
“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,” said Friedrich Nietzsche. For the normal person, their “why” will come from their family, extended family, friends, nation, and passions.
“Do it for Australia!” is a common saying down under.
Neither hands nor soul were set free––and, come to think of it, wasn’t the idea of work
setting people free a little, well, ominous?
Not ominous. Just silly. Trads haven’t suffered from the Marxist delusion that one day we’ll all sit around writing poetry.
Intellectuals and activists on the left thought so, in increasing numbers. In 2015, the writer and art scholar Miya Tokumitsu debunked the notion in “Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness.” “No More Work,” the historian James Livingston demanded, in 2016, in a book explaining “Why Full Employment Is a Bad Idea.” Perhaps most influentially, the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber fired off a best-selling salvo in 2018 against the “Bullshit Jobs” that, he argued, were ubiquitous in the twenty-first century. The concept that work was necessary to our flourishing had tricked us into
forswearing the increased leisure that nearly two centuries of mounting economic productivity made available to us, Graeber said. Instead, we acquiesced to the schemes of capital to stuff our hours full of pointless and often pernicious work. This view gained even more traction when covid struck, and millions of people found out firsthand just how “inessential” their jobs really were. The “anti-work” forum became one of the most active communities on Reddit; the New York Times announced an “Age of Anti-Ambition”; New York
Review Books reissued Paul Lafargue’s nineteenth-century pamphlet “The Right to Be Lazy.” And I cringed when I got to the bridge on “We Take Care of Our Own.”
As a tribalist who thinks more about obligations than rights, the left-wing tendencies to alternately damn work or to seek redemption from it seems silly.
As a trad, I accept that we are all slaves. You either serve your own passions or your obligations. From a Jewish perspective, we are servants of God. When you go to work, you are a slave to your employer. When you bond with people, you develop obligations that override your wishes. If you love your spouse and your kids and a sick sibling who needs care, there’s no right to be lazy and you don’t hang out on anti-work forums. How could anyone who loves people and subsequently feels obligations then subscribe to an anti-work philosophy?
Some on the left still defend the idea that work is, or could be, an important site of self-realization. Leading the charge is Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher at the University of Michigan and a leading scholar and critic of workplace politics. In her 2017 book, “Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk About
It)”—in my view, one of this century’s most important works of political philosophy—Anderson argued that Americans have essentially outsourced totalitarianism to the private sector. For all our talk about the sacrosanct values of freedom and democracy, she pointed out, most of us spend our days toiling in subordination to bosses who wield
control over many aspects of our lives.
As a trad, I take it for granted that our freedoms consist largely in our willingness to live up to our obligations or to flee from them. One could complain about spouses who rule our lives, or children who rule our lives, or extended families who rule our lives, just as easily as one could complain about employers who rule our lives. For people who aren’t ruled by such characters, they are likely ruled by their out-of-control addictions.
Work might provide self-realization and self-actualization and when it does, that’s wonderful, but we primarily work to live up to our obligations as members of extended families (Jews, Christians, Japanese, Americans, Australians, etc).
To the extent that work sites are totalitarian it is due to that organizational structure is more efficient than the alternatives. For all the elevated talk we hear about democracy, the world runs on hierarchy.
As C.S. Lewis said, “The price of freedom is loneliness. To be happy is to be tied.”
Yet Anderson believes that it’s possible to redeem work from managerial autocracy.
The good life for most people exists outside of work. It lies with family. We work to take care of ourselves and the ones we love. Work is a means, not an ends.
For some of my life, I’ve earned my living as a writer. In that precious case, my work was, at times, an end in itself. This is not to be expected.
The pitfall of optimists is to hope to earn a living by the pen (or through one’s ideas). Intellectual production rarely pays for itself.
…The case against the dictatorship of bosses is, in fact, so ironclad that some business leaders have adopted it as a talking point. Their solution, however, is not union power or collective worker ownership of the means of production but, rather, self-employment. Benjamin C. Waterhouse, a historian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a deft chronicler of executive-class escapades, tells the history of this clever ideological maneuver in his new book, “One Day I’ll Work for Myself: The Dream and Delusion That Conquered America.” The rise of neoliberal policymaking in the U.S. channelled the conservative work ethic––preaching submission to higher-ups and the embrace of drudgery––and, as Waterhouse shows, it also channelled what I call the entrepreneurial work ethic, the idealization of the self-employed and self-actualizing job creator as a model for much of the workforce to emulate.
Contrary to popular belief, the aspiration to self-employment is not intrinsic to the American character—it has a history. In Waterhouse’s telling, it is a product of the late twentieth century, particularly the economic crises of the seventies and eighties. During the prosperous decades after the Second World War, Waterhouse states, working for oneself wasn’t particularly appealing. Large corporations could afford to be relatively generous, at least to those workers (mostly white, mostly male) who executives felt were entitled to a decent standard of living. Workers desired, above all, a piece of this pie, which meant they often dreamed about “working for someone else.” In the March on Washington, Waterhouse writes, poor Black workers demanded not only “freedom” but “jobs,” a slogan which he contrasts with Richard Nixon’s program, a few years later, for “minority business enterprise.” At the other end of the class hierarchy, the young élites featured by William Whyte in “The Organization Man” evinced little interest in going into business by themselves, focussing their energies instead on climbing the corporate ladder.
Then, in the seventies, things fell apart: stagflation, oil shocks, jobless recoveries, financial turmoil. “The big, hierarchical corporations that had bestrode the business landscape in the 1950s and 1960s looked like outdated relics,” Waterhouse writes. The nation began to hearken to a new generation of business gurus and management experts who claimed that “the road to renewed growth would be paved by those brave risk-takers who embraced change and started their own companies.” The M.I.T. economist David Birch produced widely cited statistics popularizing the idea that small businesses were responsible for the vast majority of job creation in the U.S.––as high as eighty per cent. Birch’s studies had major methodological issues, as critics soon pointed out, and his findings were difficult to replicate, but the basic idea still rang true for a lot of Americans. “When upward promotion at a traditional job became out of reach for so many people,” as Waterhouse explains, the American Dream seemed to require “building a business yourself (or buying one), and reaping the rewards.”
Major corporations in industries like fast food and direct selling adopted organizational schemes such as franchising and independent contracting to depict themselves as engines of small-business creation, even when they continued to exert significant control over the working conditions and decision-making of their ostensibly “entrepreneurial” workforce. (The parallels to today’s gig-economy platforms are impossible to miss.) People who actually gave self-employment a try often found more of the same toil and precarity from which they hoped business ownership would allow them to escape.
In his forthcoming work Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression, Rony Guldmann writes:
* Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not. The former have the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism. The latter lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the drawbacks of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge. If this hierarchy goes overlooked by “thinking people,” by the “educated,” this is because liberals’ near-monopoly on the means of cultural reproduction allows their own kind of identity politics pass under the radar, camouflaged in an aura of thoughtfulness and education. Thoughtfulness and education have themselves become ideological tools of liberalism, mere badges of honor to be conferred on some and withheld from others.
* The conservative magazine Chronicles explains: “Once upon a time in America, you could say you loved your country, believed in God, and held your marriage sacred…and not be snickered at as a simple-minded simpleton. You could believe in honesty, hard work, and self-reliance; you could speak of human responsibilities in the same breath as human rights…and not be derided an as an insensitive fool.”
* The conservative is thus akin to the proverbial Latino immigrant or first-generation American, who is immersed in white/Anglo ways at work or school while also being anchored in a foreign language and culture that affords him a special perspective unavailable to monocultural natives. In a similar ethnicization of political difference, Goldberg compares conservatives to Blacks, Canadians, and Jews. These groups make for some of the best comedians because they are “each in their own way, insider-outsiders” who “share both a fascination with and alienation from mainstream American culture.” Conservatives are in much the same position because they must master their own culture while also learning to live in an alienating majority culture dominated by liberals. These formulations are no accident. Though some conservatives will dismiss talk of “latté liberals” as a distraction from more serious issues, conservatives are united in the conviction that liberals hide behind a façade of disingenuous rationalism that conceals their ethnocentric hostility toward ordinary Americans and their rude and crude folkways. “Latté liberals” is just a very glib articulation of this conviction.
* No less than its monopoly over the cause of racial equality, liberalism’s reputation as the selfless ally of ordinary workers against powerful business interests is seen by conservatives as a social illusion, which must be overthrown if they are to reestablish cultural and rhetorical equality with liberals. Conservative claims of cultural oppression pursue this end by casting liberals in the role of anti-democratic aristocrats, which conservatives will no longer accept for themselves. As we saw, conservative claims of cultural oppression attribute the rise of “ultra-liberalism” to the mass bohemianization of society.
