Basic Human Dignity Continued

If labor is indeed to be redemptive, both materially and ethically, it must be available, and therein lies the first rub.   There is, of course, the persistent belief that America is the land of opportunity.   I won't unpack it fully, but the basic outline is this:  the American economy may not produce equal results, but it does offer up equal opportunity to all who apply themselves, those who are able and willing to work hard in pursuit of happiness or as the contestants of American idol, one after another, put it, "in pursuit of my dream."  Anyone who spends over five minutes thinking about it realizes that the American economy produces neither equal results, nor does it offer up equal opportunity, if by opportunity we mean something less grandiose than rock stardom and more conducive to day-to-day life -- the availability of "jobs with decent wages and good benefits."  Even though employment of late has shown some signs of recovery after the great recession of 2008, there remain significant causes of concern.  The Economic Policy Institute headlined a recent report that "The US labor market starts 2012 with solid positive signs, but fewer jobs than it had in 2001."   The most discouraging sign is job growth relative to population.  As the Institute reports, "the labor force has grown by less than half a million workers since the recession started, though working age population has grown by 10 million in that time."  If the number of jobs available does not keep pace with the population, and it shows few signs of doing so, then a significant percentage of our population does not now, and may never have opportunity for legal employment of any sort, much less "jobs with decent wages and benefits."

I should point out that a significant percentage of our population has not had access to work for some time now, and the disappearance of opportunity disproportionately afflicts those who have been historically at the bottom rungs of the economic ladder, particularly the African American community.  In this regard William Julius Wilson's study, When Work Disappears: the World of the New Urban Poor, is instructive.  He describes what is, in effect, a vicious cycle of despair, noting "where jobs are scarce, where people rarely, if ever, have the opportunity to help their friends and neighbors find jobs, and where there is a disruptive or degraded school life purporting to prepare youngsters for eventual participation in the workforce, many people eventually lose their feeling of connectedness to work in the formal economy."  When pundits like Krugman express alarm that "long-term unemployment -- the percentage of workers who have been out of work for six months or more -- remains at levels not seen since the Great Depression," there is a clear and present danger that more and more neighborhoods will be sucked into the vortex, described by Wilson, that more and more Americans will "no longer expect work to be a regular, and regulating, force in their lives," and that such "circumstances also increase the likelihood that the residents will rely on illegitimate sources of income, thereby further weakening their attachment to the legitimate labor market."  It is perhaps a mark of our clandestine racism that writers like Murry, in Coming Apart, when the blight associated with inner-city, black ghettos seems to be spreading into white neighborhoods and the increasingly meth-infested small town America.  When the blight is confined to the inner-city ghetto, it is easier to focus current policy discussions of the welfare state on "the shortcomings of individuals and families and not on the structural and social changes in the society at large that have made life so miserable for many inner-city ghetto residents,"  changes in society that have produced "certain unique responses and behavior patterns over time" of the sort reflected in hardcore hip hop.   When the blight is no longer the problem of third world America and is bleeding into the larger population, the conservatives it seems are doubling down on the "shortcomings of individuals," with Rick Santorum talking about "the narcotic of dependency" and Mitt Romney suggesting that government programs "foster passivity and sloth."  This may well be true, but the path to redemption is narrower of late, and there is little to suggest that dismantling the various safety net programs will do much to foster engagement and industry without improving opportunity.

To be Continued

Basic Human Dignity Continued

Labor is redemptive on any number of levels, but there are at least two that concern me.  First and foremost, of course, work is wholly pragmatic.  I have suggested elsewhere, mostly in accord with common sense, that there are basic human drives, basic human imperatives that must be brought to resolution.  If one wants to take a Darwinian tack on it, they are those biological drives that must be satisfied for survival, and for the present purposes, it is enough to think in those basic terms, in part because it is difficult, if not wholly impossible, to imagine something like basic human dignity where one is deprived of the instrumental means of fulfilling those basic driving imperatives -- food, clothing, shelter.  One works, at the most fundamental level, to earn a living, and work redeems one from the life of penury and want that is most destructive of basic human dignity.  Second, it is not difficult to imagine how work might be socially organizing.   Imagine the on-going life of a hunting and gathering tribe.  The link between one's innate ability and character, one's ability and willingness to hunt or to gather, had an immediate impact, not only on one's own survival, but on the survival of the tribe.  Imagine too the on-going life of early agrarian societies.  In any hard scrabble existence, one imagines no lack of opportunity for work.  One imagines rather an almost universal approbation of work, an almost universal disapprobation of sloth, and if differentiating roles emerged in the nature of work, they were the differentiated roles of gender, for women the labor of child bearing and child rearing, and for men the labor of provision.  Although more a mythology than anthropology, it is nevertheless a mythology of some standing, an understanding of man's lot in life as least as old as Genesis -- "in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to your husband and he shall rule over thee" -- "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread."  Labor is redemptive, not only in the immediate and pragmatic sense, but it is the curse levied by God for disobedience, and as such, submission to the conditions of life imposed by God provided the path to recognition and redemption not only in God's eyes, but in man's eyes.  The hard working man, in short, is recognized as the good man, and here again, it is difficult, if not wholly impossible to imagine something like basic human dignity where one is wholly deprived of the means to achieve approbation and recognition.

To be continued

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.