Reviews: nonfiction
Priya Satia, Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of an Industrial Revolution: Satia argues that gun manufacturing was central to England’s rise to dominance, not just or even primarily from the use of the guns but from the development of technologies, administrative procedures, and economic relationships out of government gun procurement practices. The Industrial Revolution thus is not about doux-commerce or private enterprise so much as public-private partnership, with gun manufacture and export sustaining domestic industry through economic hard times. Satia centers her story on a Quaker gun manufacturer who defended his business against accusations of lack of peacefulness; he could see guns as compatible with peace by emphasizing the role of guns in trade with Africa and in protecting property. Satia argues that, for the first guns were unpredictable in performance/aim and that their social meaning was initially about war or defense of property against break-ins, rather than on non-property-based interpersonal violence.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: Graeber is a really entertaining writer even though I found that his theorizing of what makes a job bullshit to be too extended for my tastes. (Also I’m pretty sure he’d see most of my work as bullshit, and my belief to the contrary to be at least in part because I’m high enough in the hierarchy that people flatter me that my work is not bullshit.) His basic thesis: many modern jobs are bullshit, in the sense that they could disappear completely and the world would be unharmed or even better off, and also in the sense that most of the people doing them at some level understand this, which inflicts deep psychic harm on them given a human need for effectiveness. One result is increased resentment of the people who do have non-bullshit jobs-teachers, firefighters, nurses-cultivated deliberately by political forces that benefit from dividing and oppressing workers. For those elites, “a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. … And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”
People holding bullshit jobs (the upper/middle class) thus cooperate in immiserating people with non-bullshit jobs, on the idea that having a job that actually does something is rewarding enough; a living wage would just be too much. This group (my group) resents the fact that janitors, subway workers, line workers in auto assembly plants, and the like are actually important to the operation of ordinary life. These are often shit jobs, which are bad in their own way and deserve improvement, but not bullshit: “Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.” This is also gendered: women tend to end up in shit jobs, but are less likely to feel that their jobs are meaningless. In his engagement with service workers in pursuit of a definition of bullshit jobs, Graeber concludes that most think their work isn’t bullshit, with the exception of information technology (IT) providers, telemarketers, and sex workers-the first two groups tended to think that they were basically engaged in scams, while the third was getting paid far more for work that didn’t fully exercise their human capacities than for work that would engage them more. Graeber deems this to be a sign that we’re living in a bullshit society.
Graeber deems our resentment of teachers and line workers to be a result of moral envy: they seem to be upholding a higher moral standard than our own, by doing really useful work. Thus, Republican attacks on school administrators have died down, while attacks on teachers have skyrocketed. “Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying ‘thank you, thank you for all you did for me.’ For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.” [I hope recent events show that this is starting to change in the US.]
Graeber challenges the usual caveat that many bullshit jobs are in government; he argues that there are at least as many proportionally in private enterprise. The profit motive doesn’t control for this-it does lead to janitors and line workers being fired or outsourced, but not management-because people higher in the hierarchy demand to have a hierarchy: a manager who manages only robots is not a manager at all. Thus each executive must have a number of people “laboring” under them.
Graeber argues that this societal sickness explains a number of things, for example why students so often have to get meaningless jobs to support their education-learning to study in a self-motivated way is one thing, but it’s not learning to work under orders, which is what our current system requires of most of us. Meaningless jobs also teach students “how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done; that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys; that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important that one does not enjoy; and that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying.”
In our sick society, we assume that humans would prefer to be parasites, whereas Graeber argues that most people prefer to do something useful. But historically, most human work has been in spurts of intense work followed by rest-planting, then hanging out and gossiping, then harvesting. Even under intense inequality, close supervision wasn’t generally necessary for the day to day work; as long as the lord got his share of the harvest, he was uninterested in how it came about. Once supervision became a thing, supervisors couldn’t stand to watch their employees hanging out and gossiping, so they invented bullshit work to do. “The modern morality of ‘You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around’ is … the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it.”
Graeber uses the concept of nonconsensual BDSM to explain why bullshit jobs feel so toxic to so many. The job is bullshit, but you’re not allowed to say so; you have to pretend. It’s not clear whom to blame for the job’s meaninglessness. Because there is no obvious change your job makes in the world, there is no defined script for what you’re supposed to do. Unlike members of consensual BDSM communities, “people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic, with the (person on the) bottom struggling desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forthcoming, and the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie.” There’s no safe word in these circumstances; quitting is the only out, and that “might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game.”
Modern capitalism actually resembles feudalism: big institutions extract big pots of money because they have the political power to do so, and their incentives are to distribute them in ways that preserve the institutions and the pots. This is why management swells even as line workers are fired and tenure for professors disappears in favor of immiserated adjuncts. Graeber contends that “production” is essentially a theological, patriarchal concept-it assumes that goods jump into being, fully formed. Most human labor, “which cannot in any sense be considered ‘production,’ is thus made to disappear,” and this is largely done through gender (but also through class). Men “like to conceive of themselves as doing socially, or culturally, what they like to think of women as doing naturally.” The factory actually depends on lots of service work-not production-including cleaning, moving parts around, moving finished goods around, selling the goods, keeping track of the money, and so on. “[M]ost working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking.” By making the factory laborer or miner the prototypical worker-shades of the media focus on the white laborer in the Trump era-we ignore all that other work.
And the structure is very hard to change on one’s own. Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam paved the way for the “Northern European notion that paid labor under a master’s discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.” Because of all this work, consumerist pleasures are often the only ones we can afford-the only solace for our terrible days. And so the cycle continues.
Graeber even argues that the rise of open source software has been sucked into this pathological dynamic: now, all the really interesting and fun tasks are done for free, and programmers are paid to do the hard, unpleasant work of duct taping the fun parts together and smoothing out the rough, buggy, undocumented parts.
I was struck by the justice of Graeber’s point that white middle/working-class resentment of liberal “elites,” when those supposed elites often lack many indicia of real power, makes sense from this viewpoint: The liberal elites are nearly monopolizing many of the jobs that allow one to do something useful, altruistic, or glamorous. Conservative voters are madder at liberal elites than at the rich because they “can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. … [I]f you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; if on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value-whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth-and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.”
The only possibility for unselfish work if you’re not already well-off is the military, and Graeber points out that many people do enlist because they want to do something bigger with their lives-they want to help others, which is how the military now sells itself. Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties are two or three times more likely to reenlist. Graeber’s take on this is touchingly optimistic: “societies based on greed, even that say that human beings are inherently selfish and greedy and that attempt to valorize this sort of behavior, don’t really believe it, and secretly dangle out the right to behave altruistically as a reward for playing along.” However, Graeber also suggests that this dynamic explains why the right’s valorization of the military doesn’t translate into material support for soldiers once they’ve returned to civilian society-the whole point was to sacrifice, to be noble, to get the chance to do something good in return for all the pain.
Graeber, an anarchist, mostly offers diagnosis rather than solutions, though he’s willing to give Universal Basic Income a go. I was reminded of Joanna Russ on fan fiction: Russ asks what love and sex would be like if we were free; Graeber wants to ask what work would be like if we were free.
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling: Bushman is a respected historian and a devout Mormon. The blend didn’t work for me when Bushman got into commentary on Smith’s revelations. The rest of the history is interesting, and you definitely get a sense almost despite Bushman of how frustrating it was to deal with Smith, but Bushman repeatedly insists that, given Smith’s limited education and poor upbringing, it’s hard to imagine how he could have come up with such elaborate stories, especially ones that have some correspondences with other Biblical apocrypha, absent divine inspiration. I have a couple of things to say about that. (1) Humans are really inventive and creative, even ones from bad circumstances! It’s kind of our thing. Bushman sounds like a Shakespeare truther when he insists that such a lowly creature couldn’t have created an elaborate cosmology. (2) Bushman acknowledges that prophets of Smith’s type were thick on the ground in the US and England in this period, as part of the Christian revival that was ongoing, but he neglects the resulting base-rate problem: even if we accept that producing an elaborate, successful set of revelations was unlikely for any given prophet, people do win lotteries! Bushman is of course free to believe, but I wish he hadn’t neglected the idea of survivor bias if he was going to opine on the unlikelihood of non-divine revelations. (3) As for correspondences, the corollary of human inventiveness is our tendency towards tropes. I’m actually not shocked that both Smith and earlier apocrypha independently produced a story of Abraham’s father worshiping idols in Abraham’s pre-Yahweh youth-are you?
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: Graeber is a really entertaining writer even though I found that his theorizing of what makes a job bullshit to be too extended for my tastes. (Also I’m pretty sure he’d see most of my work as bullshit, and my belief to the contrary to be at least in part because I’m high enough in the hierarchy that people flatter me that my work is not bullshit.) His basic thesis: many modern jobs are bullshit, in the sense that they could disappear completely and the world would be unharmed or even better off, and also in the sense that most of the people doing them at some level understand this, which inflicts deep psychic harm on them given a human need for effectiveness. One result is increased resentment of the people who do have non-bullshit jobs-teachers, firefighters, nurses-cultivated deliberately by political forces that benefit from dividing and oppressing workers. For those elites, “a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger. … And, on the other hand, the feeling that work is a moral value in itself, and that anyone not willing to submit themselves to some kind of intense work discipline for most of their waking hours deserves nothing, is extraordinarily convenient for them.”
People holding bullshit jobs (the upper/middle class) thus cooperate in immiserating people with non-bullshit jobs, on the idea that having a job that actually does something is rewarding enough; a living wage would just be too much. This group (my group) resents the fact that janitors, subway workers, line workers in auto assembly plants, and the like are actually important to the operation of ordinary life. These are often shit jobs, which are bad in their own way and deserve improvement, but not bullshit: “Bullshit jobs often pay quite well and tend to offer excellent working conditions. They’re just pointless. Shit jobs are usually not at all bullshit; they typically involve work that needs to be done and is clearly of benefit to society; it’s just that the workers who do them are paid and treated badly.” This is also gendered: women tend to end up in shit jobs, but are less likely to feel that their jobs are meaningless. In his engagement with service workers in pursuit of a definition of bullshit jobs, Graeber concludes that most think their work isn’t bullshit, with the exception of information technology (IT) providers, telemarketers, and sex workers-the first two groups tended to think that they were basically engaged in scams, while the third was getting paid far more for work that didn’t fully exercise their human capacities than for work that would engage them more. Graeber deems this to be a sign that we’re living in a bullshit society.
Graeber deems our resentment of teachers and line workers to be a result of moral envy: they seem to be upholding a higher moral standard than our own, by doing really useful work. Thus, Republican attacks on school administrators have died down, while attacks on teachers have skyrocketed. “Teachers are seen as people who have ostentatiously put themselves forward as self-sacrificing and public-spirited, as wanting to be the sort of person who gets a call twenty years later saying ‘thank you, thank you for all you did for me.’ For people like that to form unions, threaten strikes, and demand better working conditions is considered almost hypocritical.” [I hope recent events show that this is starting to change in the US.]
Graeber challenges the usual caveat that many bullshit jobs are in government; he argues that there are at least as many proportionally in private enterprise. The profit motive doesn’t control for this-it does lead to janitors and line workers being fired or outsourced, but not management-because people higher in the hierarchy demand to have a hierarchy: a manager who manages only robots is not a manager at all. Thus each executive must have a number of people “laboring” under them.
Graeber argues that this societal sickness explains a number of things, for example why students so often have to get meaningless jobs to support their education-learning to study in a self-motivated way is one thing, but it’s not learning to work under orders, which is what our current system requires of most of us. Meaningless jobs also teach students “how to pretend to work even when nothing needs to done; that one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys; that one is paid money to do things that are in no way useful or important that one does not enjoy; and that at least in jobs requiring interaction with the public, even when one is being paid to carry out tasks one does not enjoy, one also has to pretend to be enjoying.”
In our sick society, we assume that humans would prefer to be parasites, whereas Graeber argues that most people prefer to do something useful. But historically, most human work has been in spurts of intense work followed by rest-planting, then hanging out and gossiping, then harvesting. Even under intense inequality, close supervision wasn’t generally necessary for the day to day work; as long as the lord got his share of the harvest, he was uninterested in how it came about. Once supervision became a thing, supervisors couldn’t stand to watch their employees hanging out and gossiping, so they invented bullshit work to do. “The modern morality of ‘You’re on my time; I’m not paying you to lounge around’ is … the indignity of a man who feels he’s being robbed. A worker’s time is not his own; it belongs to the person who bought it.”
Graeber uses the concept of nonconsensual BDSM to explain why bullshit jobs feel so toxic to so many. The job is bullshit, but you’re not allowed to say so; you have to pretend. It’s not clear whom to blame for the job’s meaninglessness. Because there is no obvious change your job makes in the world, there is no defined script for what you’re supposed to do. Unlike members of consensual BDSM communities, “people in hierarchical environments typically ended up locked in a kind of pathological variation of the same sadomasochistic dynamic, with the (person on the) bottom struggling desperately for approval that can never, by definition, be forthcoming, and the (person on the) top going to greater and greater lengths to assert a dominance that both know is ultimately a lie.” There’s no safe word in these circumstances; quitting is the only out, and that “might well lead to one’s ending up playing a very different game.”
Modern capitalism actually resembles feudalism: big institutions extract big pots of money because they have the political power to do so, and their incentives are to distribute them in ways that preserve the institutions and the pots. This is why management swells even as line workers are fired and tenure for professors disappears in favor of immiserated adjuncts. Graeber contends that “production” is essentially a theological, patriarchal concept-it assumes that goods jump into being, fully formed. Most human labor, “which cannot in any sense be considered ‘production,’ is thus made to disappear,” and this is largely done through gender (but also through class). Men “like to conceive of themselves as doing socially, or culturally, what they like to think of women as doing naturally.” The factory actually depends on lots of service work-not production-including cleaning, moving parts around, moving finished goods around, selling the goods, keeping track of the money, and so on. “[M]ost working-class labor, whether carried out by men or women, actually more resembles what we archetypically think of as women’s work, looking after people, seeing to their wants and needs, explaining, reassuring, anticipating what the boss wants or is thinking.” By making the factory laborer or miner the prototypical worker-shades of the media focus on the white laborer in the Trump era-we ignore all that other work.
And the structure is very hard to change on one’s own. Christian doctrine of the curse of Adam paved the way for the “Northern European notion that paid labor under a master’s discipline is the only way to become a genuine adult. This history made it very easy to encourage workers to see their work not so much as wealth-creation, or helping others, or at least not primarily so, but as self-abnegation, a kind of secular hair-shirt, a sacrifice of joy and pleasure that allows us to become an adult worthy of our consumerist toys.” Because of all this work, consumerist pleasures are often the only ones we can afford-the only solace for our terrible days. And so the cycle continues.
Graeber even argues that the rise of open source software has been sucked into this pathological dynamic: now, all the really interesting and fun tasks are done for free, and programmers are paid to do the hard, unpleasant work of duct taping the fun parts together and smoothing out the rough, buggy, undocumented parts.
I was struck by the justice of Graeber’s point that white middle/working-class resentment of liberal “elites,” when those supposed elites often lack many indicia of real power, makes sense from this viewpoint: The liberal elites are nearly monopolizing many of the jobs that allow one to do something useful, altruistic, or glamorous. Conservative voters are madder at liberal elites than at the rich because they “can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. … [I]f you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; if on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value-whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth-and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there’s simply no way in.”
The only possibility for unselfish work if you’re not already well-off is the military, and Graeber points out that many people do enlist because they want to do something bigger with their lives-they want to help others, which is how the military now sells itself. Soldiers allowed to perform public service duties are two or three times more likely to reenlist. Graeber’s take on this is touchingly optimistic: “societies based on greed, even that say that human beings are inherently selfish and greedy and that attempt to valorize this sort of behavior, don’t really believe it, and secretly dangle out the right to behave altruistically as a reward for playing along.” However, Graeber also suggests that this dynamic explains why the right’s valorization of the military doesn’t translate into material support for soldiers once they’ve returned to civilian society-the whole point was to sacrifice, to be noble, to get the chance to do something good in return for all the pain.
Graeber, an anarchist, mostly offers diagnosis rather than solutions, though he’s willing to give Universal Basic Income a go. I was reminded of Joanna Russ on fan fiction: Russ asks what love and sex would be like if we were free; Graeber wants to ask what work would be like if we were free.
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling: Bushman is a respected historian and a devout Mormon. The blend didn’t work for me when Bushman got into commentary on Smith’s revelations. The rest of the history is interesting, and you definitely get a sense almost despite Bushman of how frustrating it was to deal with Smith, but Bushman repeatedly insists that, given Smith’s limited education and poor upbringing, it’s hard to imagine how he could have come up with such elaborate stories, especially ones that have some correspondences with other Biblical apocrypha, absent divine inspiration. I have a couple of things to say about that. (1) Humans are really inventive and creative, even ones from bad circumstances! It’s kind of our thing. Bushman sounds like a Shakespeare truther when he insists that such a lowly creature couldn’t have created an elaborate cosmology. (2) Bushman acknowledges that prophets of Smith’s type were thick on the ground in the US and England in this period, as part of the Christian revival that was ongoing, but he neglects the resulting base-rate problem: even if we accept that producing an elaborate, successful set of revelations was unlikely for any given prophet, people do win lotteries! Bushman is of course free to believe, but I wish he hadn’t neglected the idea of survivor bias if he was going to opine on the unlikelihood of non-divine revelations. (3) As for correspondences, the corollary of human inventiveness is our tendency towards tropes. I’m actually not shocked that both Smith and earlier apocrypha independently produced a story of Abraham’s father worshiping idols in Abraham’s pre-Yahweh youth-are you?
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.