Basic Human Dignity Conclusion

It would seem, in short, that the redemptive value of labor, and the mythologies that support it, are being challenged on a number of fronts.  This may still be the land of opportunity, but it is a land of significantly diminished opportunity.  For some, of course, diminished opportunity means no opportunity, at least not within the legitimate economy, and this is particularly true of uneducated males, those who would have performed unskilled or semi-skilled labor in the past.  It is not surprising that an economy lagging the population in the creation of jobs with decent wages and benefits conversely, and perversely, creates greater and greater opportunity for the sorts of moral decay that Murray and others point out.  If the need for basic human dignity cannot be satisfied in one context, it is likely to be satisfied within another, and it is perhaps not surprising that those who populate the drug gangs of Detroit and the militias of the upper peninsula are largely under-educated, marginalized males.

The problem, such as it is, will not be solved with the repatriation of factory jobs.  The factory is not your grandfather's factory, which demanded and paid reasonably well for unskilled and semi-skilled labor of the sort that could be learned on the job. It worth reminding ourselves that life on the factory floor was not peaches and roses.  Inter-generational upward mobility, in the pop culture mythologies, was often about escaping the mind numbing, soul destroying work on the factory floor.  As someone has said (I forget who) Marx was wrong about communism and the sweeping imperatives of history, but he was right in his observations about the industrialized capitalism that exploited labor.  If the factory jobs requiring unskilled and semi-skilled labor were repatriated from China and India, it is quite likely that we would need to import labor for exploitation, as we do now for those farm jobs that cannot be mechanized, in part because few Americans would submit to the conditions of life required by those jobs.  The factories today do provide good jobs, but they are jobs that require education, and rather sophisticated education at that.  When someone like Nicholas Kristof writes that "eighty percent of the people in my high school cohort dropped out or didn't pursue college because it used to be possible to earn a solid living at the steel mill, the glove factory or sawmill," the economic pressures that sent the glove factory elsewhere is only half the picture.  The eighty percent made a choice that may well mask another reality.  For them, the immediate opportunities of "glove work" was preferable to the deferred opportunities of "school-work," but why?

The answers to that question are varied, and complex, and structural, and difficult, and that is part of the problem.  If Kristof and others are correct, if we are "facing a crisis in which a chunk of working class America risks being calcified into an underclass, marked by drugs, despair, family decline, high incarceration rates and a diminishing role of jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility," then we also need more, not less social policy.  While there is reason to avoid discussion of an "underclass," there is also a mounting body of evidence to suggest that war zone trauma is real, and many of our children are being raised in the equivalent of a war zone where the damage done is perhaps more real, more extensive, and more permanent than we might want to imagine.  As Kristof put it, "the pathologies are achingly real," and for many those pathologies may put jobs and education as escalators of upward mobility, the intellectual and cultural skills necessary to pursue jobs and education, as permanently out of reach as the escalators to the third floor of Tiffanys.  Moral disapprobation will not solve their problems, and may well exacerbate them, though again I hardly need to point out that, within our political discourse, there is an ever greater tendency to assign blame, not to structural deficiencies within within our economic systems and social structures, but to the moral failings of those individuals trapped in violent neighborhoods, with decaying schools, and fewer and fewer opportunities of escape.  When Kristof counsels us to "get real" and suggests that "the solution isn't finger wagging, or averting our eyes -- but opportunity," he points to a crises of faith, of liberal faith.  It is the faith that has animated American secular life and provided a center that allowed various religious and cultural backgrounds to flourish under the same flag.  If our gods were disparate, we could all believe and seek some measure of redemption in the eyes of others from meaningful and productive labor.  If there is a crises of faith in America today, it is not that we have fallen away from "traditional Christian values" or anything of the sort.  It is rather the growing realization that a growing number of Americans have no path to redemption -- the way has been permanently closed -- and it is easier and more satisfying to blame them than find solutions.