Basic Human Dignity

As an addendum to the previous discussion, Paul Krugman in a recent editorial (NYT, 2/101/12) writes, "so we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals."   He engages in his own form of snooty and dismissive argumentation familiar to most academics, but behind it is an implicit egalitarianism.  We shouldn't be too quick to reject the rationality of the uneducated.  If the legitimate jobs available are so poorly remunerated that they do not in themselves support a decent life, why then would one subject oneself to the often demeaning and demoralizing conditions of work?  It is a rational calculation that most would make, particularly when there are other means of support available, and there one can take one's pick -- the anemic socialism of the existing welfare state or the shadow capitalism of the drug trade.  It is a question of which comes first, the moral failings or the lack of meaningful opportunity, and how you answer that question, of course, puts you on one side or another of the ideological divide in this country.  Krugman, who falls off on the liberal side, tells us, "reject the [conservative] attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind.  Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe — and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause."

In American culture, if we are to look for a moral core, one that transcends the theocratic table thumping of comprehensive religious doctrines, one that transcends the ideological head thumping of comprehensive political doctrines, one that ultimately mitigates differences of ethnicity and race, it is the redemptive value of labor.   The hard working man, the productive man, is the good man, and one sees that mythos reflected in any number of cultural artifacts.  I am thinking at the moment of the Clint Eastwood film, Gran Torino.  It is set in a diminished Detroit.  The background is the sort of urban blight Murray describes in Coming Apart, and the story line is rather simple, a young Asian immigrant is subjected to every form of stereotypical bigotry imaginable from the white and retired auto-worker played by Eastwood, but the character is ostensibly sympathetic because he also represents a set of "traditional American values," the self-sacrifice of patriotism and hard work.  The young Asian is redeemed in Eastwood's eyes, not by a sudden conversion to Christianity and Christian values -- the folk religion practiced by the immigrant family was portrayed sympathetically as a set of traditional family centered values -- but by his willingness to work hard.  A pivotal scene shows the young immigrant struggling in the rain to remove a dead stump from his neighbor's yard.  In the end, the young immigrant inherits the Gran Torino, the symbolic exemplar of America's hardworking, industrial legacy.  The hardworking man, the productive man, is the good man, and while Krugman takes the argument one step further, suggesting that a good society is one which provides the opportunity for productive work, it is nevertheless the labor that redeems.

To be continued.