Making a point

The Handover, by David Runciman, highlights and makes many good points and posits a fair few perspectives that get you thinking (and questioning) beyond the usual.

The long, quoted passage below is well worth reading and hopefully may compel a reader of it to read the full book. If it doesn’t, at least add the book to your reading list so that you may get around to reading it at some point.

Anyway, the words below suggest and reason about aspects of life and the world of work that we are part of, whether through or because of necessity or choice and may go someway to helping readers’ of it to understand some of the helplessness we might feel in this world and its current times.

Natural life is arbitrary: death and disaster come in forms we are powerless to control. We are not in charge of the fate of our own bodies if we let nature run its course. Yet as we gain more control over our natural fate, we can feel powerless in a different way. We become dependent on artificial decision-making machines for our survival: welfare states, health-insurance companies, big pharma, the medical profession. The transformation in our personal prospects has been driven by our growing dependence on vast, impersonal systems, and we can experience that as a loss too.

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Human Condition, characterises the essential arbitrariness of a natural human existence as the relentless struggle for survival. She calls this the world of ‘labour’, where what we do is driven by the short-term imperative of staving off starvation. For most human beings for most of human history this was what life entailed: back-breaking effort to keep the body alive. It extended into the modern age, as labour shifted from the land to the factory and individuals found themselves fighting a different kind of battle for survival. The life of a nineteenth-century factory labourer could be as arbitrary as that of a ninth-century peasant: enough to live on one day, nothing the next. And given the unfamiliarity of modern industrial conditions, it could feel far more chaotic.¹¹

Arendt contrasts the world of labour with the world of what she calls ‘work’, which is not natural but artificial. Work involves building things that last and it represents an escape from the relentless cycle of natural disease and decay. In that sense, it is a liberation. But it has an obvious downside: its artificiality means that we can become alienated from our experiences. When we build beautiful things with our hands or our minds, we are constructing lasting extensions of ourselves. But for most human beings in the modern age, the artificial world of work has meant being parts of mechanical systems that someone else has built, and over which we have little control.

The ‘job’, for instance, is a modern invention. The word originally meant something accidental or haphazard, barely worth doing at all – ‘petty, piddling work’, as Samuel Johnson defined it in his dictionary. Only in the nineteenth century did it start to denote something reliable or secure – a way of escaping from the arbitrariness of a subsistence existence with the promise of a steady income. Only in the twentieth century was that backed up by employment rights, won for workers by trade union activism, or, as it came to be known, ‘the labour movement’. The idea of ‘job security’ dates from 1936, in the immediate aftermath of the Great Depression. To get a job has come to mean an advance in life prospects, and to lose one a setback. For many it still represents a liberation, particularly from reliance on family. Entry into the workforce has been a key element of female emancipation over the last hundred years.

Yet running alongside that sense of freedom and enhancement has been the constant drumbeat of anxiety that work is a deadening experience because it makes us slaves to the machine. One reason that jobs are a modern invention is that so many of them have been created either by modern states or by corporations – what generates the possibility of security is working for something that has a lasting life of its own. That is also what creates the possibility of our redundancy. Working for another human being is more personal than working for a company – it's the difference between being a servant, or perhaps a subordinate, or if you are lucky a friend, and being an employee. Even friendship can be an arbitrary experience - here one day, gone the next, on a personal whim. We’ve all experienced that. Losing your job in a corporate restructuring exercise is different. It’s not whimsical. It’s not even personal. The machine simply chews you up and spits you out.

Arendt feared that the world of work had been corrupted by the things we have built to make us feel more secure: modern states and corporations. For this she blamed, among others, Hobbes, the philosopher who had turned the state into a giant decision-making machine. As a result, the human condition had increasingly been reduced to feeding these mechanical versions of ourselves with what they needed to subsist, often with disastrous results. Ordinary human beings might end up working for states that have no common humanity at all, as happened in Germany between 1933 and 1945. Or we might work for corporations that have no sense of how to preserve the natural habitat that humanity needs in order to flourish. Political and economic life risks becoming an inhuman enterprise if the artificial world of work defines us rather than being what we use to define our world.

The modern age has always been torn between our twin impulses towards security and emancipation. For each mechanically reliable version of the human condition we have constructed we have also looked for ways to humanise its impersonal, artificial qualities. We work for organisations that pay a wage and then we want to get out and work for ourselves, even if it means a more precarious living. If that succeeds, we might end up building a version of what we left behind as we start employing others. When it fails, we frequently fall again for the siren call of job security. We try to humanise states by democratising them, pushing for more involvement on a personal level, until we discover that doing politics is hard work, and we lose interest.

We succumb to leaders who promise to give the state a human face, but the more personal the state becomes, the less reliable it can seem, because it is subject to its leaders’ whims. They start employing their friends and forget about us. So we push for politics to be more impersonal again and try to reassert the authority of the experts, the impartial authorities, the machines.

Arendt’s own sense of loss was for what she called the world of human action, exemplified by the ancient Athenian state. Here, citizens could engage with each other on a personal level, through their capacity to communicate in a way that no machine can. When we tell each other stories about what might be possible if we act together – like the story Pericles told of what made the Athenian way of life worth dying for – we build a version of ourselves that is fragile but quintessentially human. Athenian politics was a deeply human enterprise. But it was also inhuman for many of the people who fell under its control and who had no voice within it. The purest forms of human politics only ever allow action for some: the lucky few. To give the many a consistent voice, much more artificiality is required.

Arendt knew it did no good to be nostalgic for what we have left behind. But she still believed it ought to be possible to build a more human politics in the modern world by focusing on the craft of living together, rather than just the mechanics. Craft is work too. She saw glimpses of it in the business of modern state-building, including the work that went into building the American state at the end of the eighteenth century. By the second half of the twentieth century she feared that American politics had become far too mechanical. It was too reliant on party machines to manage popular participation, on new computers to organise its information, on nuclear weapons to keep it safe. At the same time, the twentieth-century American state clearly had some big advantages over the eighteenth-century version. Women could vote. Slavery was no longer a part of its constitution.

The great transformation is an inescapably hybrid experience because it has made us more human by making us less so. Our ability to fulfil our potential – to live longer, richer, more varied lives - was made possible only by handing over some of our capabilities to artificial versions of ourselves, which do not suffer from our natural frailties. We have had to give up features of our essential humanity – some of what Arendt would call our capacity for independent action – to enjoy these other benefits. Because one of our cognitive biases is loss aversion – we tend to mind what we give up more than we relish what we gain – it has sometimes been a painful experience.

Seen from the outside, with the detachment of a social scientist, all this can seem absurd – who would want to go back to begging for relief from the threat of starvation, just for the sake of some long-lost ideal of natural freedom? Why aren’t we more grateful for having left all that behind? But seen from the inside it is entirely understandable. We are still human enough to know that we are not as fully human as we once were. Even if we are much better-off. As things stand, I see no reason to imagine that the next great transformation will be much different.