What about the undeniable fact that what makes humankind is its ability to labor much beyond survival, which ineluctably leads to an interdependent civilization? The myth, however, is that individuated labor is somehow ruggedly independent of the order of society. The office worker on the eightieth floor of the Empire State Building doesn’t think about the window washer’s harrowing ballet dance a thousand feet in the air; or how each morning the emptied wastebasket, dust-free keyboard and monitor are kept that way. Ironically the office worker, him/herself is in the service industry relying on interaction, perhaps keeping records or sending email to customers, somehow yields an air of superiority to the white collar workplace, particularly as the job description is imbedded on a higher plane of the corporate hierarchy of unreasonable worship — a Donald Trump syndrome whereupon one never drove a red hot rivet into, or welded a skyscrapers’ steel skeleton — dirt or grease under the fingernails or calloused hands are to be avoided. The elevator operator, sometimes personable and perhaps too personal, has been replaced by automation to purify the hierarchic air of cost analysis and alienation. Lest the men or ladies of the office staff /distaff be distracted by an attractive UPS or Fed-Ex person, his or her deliveries are relegated to sub-basement of large corporate buildings where the office mail department takes it from there to the purified air.
The most pressing issue is the apartheid of labor: hands v. brains. Despite the magnificent hands that are responsible for the marvels of infrastructures, without which modern society could not function, the accolades are to the planners and designers, along with the dignitaries of the investment class as though the entire network of facilities were not accomplished by the blood and sweat of billions of dirty, scuffed hands. Parents begin early in planning the future of their offspring to obviate its future of hard, debasing labor of tradesman or worse, common laborer. Education implants in the minds of the student: if you don’t study, you will become the next campus janitor. Advertisers as a rule glamorize the clean-cut and beautiful people who apparently with finely tuned minds have made it in the world; nonetheless, it is prevalent when catering to the unwashed through truck, fast foods or beer commercials Madison Avenue tosses in the uncouth Jack or Jill.
This is the great moral issue of the day: while the laborers dine at the sub-basement kitchen, the gods of the hierarchy dine at the five-star observatory restaurant. Antoinette today would say: “let them eat fattening burgers.” Dewey would say:
They may be captains of finance and industry, but until there is some serious consensus of belief as to the meaning of finance and industry in civilization as a whole, they cannot be captains of their own souls.
Copyright © 2004 Richard R. Kennedy All rights reserved. Revised: January 11, 2005.
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