Interrogations

By Ophelia Benson

An eclectic, literary challenge to everyday thinking.

Number Sixteen: Work

We all know that enjoyable parlor game of reducing, summing up life as some one thing. 'Life is all' whatever it may be - struggle, sex, competition, survival, a quest, a pilgrimage, shopping, an illusion, a game, a joke, warfare. One good candidate for this slot - for the word that comes after 'all' - is work. Labour. Effort. We all have to do it, or have it done for us, there's no other way. Food doesn't walk into our mouths, we have to get it from somewhere or starve and die. Survival requires work. When conditions are bad enough, survival can require so much work that the worker dies anyway - calories expended exceed calories taken in, and off you go. Hummingbirds have such high metabolisms that they have to keep eating constantly to stay alive - something of a zero sum game, really. It could be seen as one of the great fringe benefits of being human that at least some of us are able to spend some of our time on activities other than eating and acquiring things to eat.

Richard Dawkins says in The Extended Phenotype that communication is a way one creature makes use of the muscle power of another, which is quite an interesting and suggestive idea. Of course in the case of the human creature we can immediately think of a mass of exceptions, of communications that lead to no twitches of muscles from anyone, unless the small facial moves caused by interest or boredom, listening or not listening, qualify. But all the same the idea is interesting. We know our life does depend at the most basic level on work, or calories; it is interesting to wonder how often we think we're talking about something else when we're actually trying to enlist someone's muscle power to our use. How often what might look to a Martian like mere factual statements are actually something quite different. I'm exhausted. This place is a pig sty. The tomatoes are ripe. We're out of milk. The shipment is ready. Dishes don't wash themselves. There's a customer waiting. My back hurts. I'm hungry.

It was easier in earlier periods. It was taken for granted that the top people didn't want to do the tedious boring repetitive grubby tiring work and that the bottom people were there to do it for them - that in fact was the definition of top and bottom people. Aristotle notoriously thought that some people were inherently slaves, and what a comfortable thought that must have been. It's different now. Economists (of the 'classical' variety), political theorists, right-wing think tanks stay up all night manufacturing rationalizations to show that a helot class that will do all the nastiest work for the longest hours in the most dangerous conditions for the lowest wages is absolutely necessary for The Economy, or else we'll all instantly find ourselves in an economy comparable to that of Angola or Bangladesh. 'Some people are born slaves' in modern dress.

Of course these rationalisations are necessary, to conceal from us that what we are doing is treating people as means rather than ends. As tools, instruments, equipment, machinery; appliances that happen to be alive and conscious. We have a bad conscience about it, and at the same time, oddly (or perhaps not oddly at all), literature is full of touchingly affectionate, intimate relationships between masters and servants (though hardly any between factory owners or mine owners and their workers, or plantation owners and their field hands). Odysseus and Eurykleia, Don Quixote and Sancho, Hermione and Paulina, Tom Jones and Partridge, David Copperfield and Peggotty, Pickwick and Sam - and then the sickly, nostalgic, reactionary wish-fulfillment version in Frodo and Sam.

In one of the inscriptions on the beams of his library Montaigne referred to the slavery of court life and public duties, a phrase he borrowed from Epicurus. It's a thought familiar to the Romans. It was fashionable, indeed almost obligatory, for Senators to say the whole thing was really a terrible burden and they'd much rather be back on the dear old farm tending the vines and lunching on a handful of olives, writing the odd hexameter and re-reading Homer. It was pretty obviously a pack of lies, they wanted to be exactly where they were, in Rome, scheming and jockeying and lining their pockets, but the pretense of gentlemanly love of leisure was apparently the elegant thing. It was different in Greece - everyone knows that 'idiot' is Greek for 'apolitical' - in Greece leisure meant leisure to work at what matters: politics, whereas in Rome and the Western Europe it influenced for twenty centuries it meant retreat from public affairs. In neither case, of course, did it mean digging in silver mines or scrubbing floors. 'As for living, our servants will do that for us,' said Villiers de l'Isle Adam. Quite a sensible idea, in a way. Living does take a lot of hard slog - all that getting up and sitting down, all that walking to and fro, eating and excreting, talking and listening, sweating and washing. But we'd rather do it ourselves, on the whole, even if it does mean we're not quite as elegant as Roman Senators or French poets.

Ophelia Benson is editor of Butterflies and Wheels - http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com.

She can be emailed here.

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Interrogations will next be updated mid September 2003

Previous Interrogations

1. Self and Internet
2. Perfection Isn't
3. Homo Quaerens
4. Showtime
5. Thinking Makes It So
6. Who's In There?
7. Gustave and Dawn
8. Sense and Sentimentality
9. Mind the gap
10. Weave a Net to Catch the Wind
11. Done and Not Done
12. Mere
13. Influence
14. Other Minds
15. Mystery, Drama, Surprise

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