Andrew Sullivan’s weekly essay contains this observation:
Jobs are vital not simply because of money — but because they give lives meaning, a meaning that now seems so remote people medicate themselves with opiates. People are grieving for a lost way of life. This is not racist or retrograde or even backward. It is, rather, deeply human. For it is in these places that a deeper identity forms, that Americanness, Britishness, la France profonde, endures. And what we’re seeing right now, across the developed world, is a bid to retain the meaning of a culture and a way of life in the headwinds of faceless, placeless economics.
Nationalism is one response. The answer to it is not globalism, which is as cold as it is remote, but patriotism, that love of country that does not require the loathing of other places or the scapegoating of minorities or a phobia of change, that confident identity that doesn’t seek to run away from the wider world but to engage it, while somehow staying recognizable across the generations. If the Democrats hope to come back, that patriotism is going to have to define them once again. But can they get past their racial and sexual and gender obsessions and reach for it?
I must note that this only applies to those who belonged to those places. For those of us who never felt like they belonged, then it’s a little harder to place value on them as they go away. For example, black people in America, homosexuals darn near anywhere, transgendered ditto – because those places also rejected them, not for what they did, but for what they simply are. It’s difficult to mourn the loss of a village that hated you when it found out you were homosexual, I should think.
But sometimes the rejection comes for less well defined reasons. I never really felt like I was part of society in general, so when the community of bulletin boards sprang up, a whole lot of normally introverted, shy people, from kids as young as ten to judges to myself suddenly found a community which welcomed them, that they could help build and participate in. And when the Web came and ate it, there was some mourning, although the tech savvy of those folks made it a trifle easier, as well as the experience of the earlier rejection. You see it go to dust, and you move along and search for another community out in the greater world of the Web.
But, to return to Andrew’s point, that seeking for the past’s stability and value unfortunately includes those elements which have become, contentiously, judged to be socially undesirable. Just as we ultimately decided that beating up the Irish was not in the interests of justice, but merely an indulgence in xenophobic hatred, so it is with lynching blacks, whether as it was done previous to the Civil Rights period, or as it happens today through the agency of police rotten apples – as evidenced through various arrests and convictions of a few police officers. I will certainly grant that most such folks are not racists, but an unfortunately set of racists have certainly attached themselves, as useless parasites will, to the group, and use it to their own ends.
All that said, I’m glad Andrew has reiterated the point that jobs are more than money, they are meaning and satisfaction and self-worth. This recognition must impact the implicit assumption of capitalist society that it’s all about the profits, and everything else be damned. In truth, capitalism is simply one way to deal with the problems of the creation of things and services of value to each other. There are other methods: communism, mercantilism, out and out thievery for that matter. Each has been subjected to valid criticisms, and so should capitalism – and it has been. Capitalists need to remember that the precepts of capitalism may appear to lead to a stable, productive system – but it assumes that the people it is thrust upon are dedicated capitalists.
They’re not. It’s not their purpose in life.
A thousand purposes we share. From fulfilling the commands of The Church, to the self-expression of the compulsive artist, the explorer looking at far horizons, for the vast majority capitalism is merely one of the many means to their personal end that they need. Because capitalism is not their end point, it is a flawed instrument, and as such it needs some regulation. Trump may actually recognize this: witness his proposal to tax imports at a higher rate than exports. It’s a recognition of the damage job movement to other countries does to communities in the short-term. Whether this is true in the long term of centuries is another question, since wages grow in the developing countries as more and more jobs move, and eventually it’s no longer economical to move those jobs.
The Pull The Finger Joke doesn’t work when you’re a cog in the machine, John.
But how to impose effective regulations such that smaller communities are stabilized is not at all clear to me, or even if it makes sense; cities are more efficient, and in this age of over-population, this may be of overriding importance. Perhaps regulation smacks too much of taking a hammer to the flower bed approach; an indirect approach, such as UBI, might yield better, if harder to predict results.
But it’s worth remembering, as Charlie Chaplin once elegantly pointed out, we are not cogs in a capitalist machine.
