A reflection inspired by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s recent book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope
There is a variety of business that is essential to mental health and well-being. In the USA today we are so close to it, and so, so far away. The phrase “doing business” has become useless to indicate the values of work I am talking about. It is colored grey with a one dimensionality, an indifference of self-seeking, as when we say, “don’t take it personally, it’s just business.” This is a crude simplification of the social significance of work in human life, and those who feel they have somehow captured the spirit of economics with these phrases are wrong.
Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s recent book Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope[1] is full of heartrending and moving stories that are explored and shared with a sensitivity to the deeper dimensions of economic life. These stories remind me of experiences I have had in Tennessee, where I am from, and of the beautiful Hudson Valley, where I have lived for the last twelve years. I am sorry to say that I am sure it will not be strange for people no matter where they are from in our country.
The book presents the stories of Americans, and American families, many from Yamhill, Oregon, where Kristof grew up. In the 1970s Yamhill had a general store, a hardware shop, a farm supply store, a phone booth, a barber, and a bar. It was home to about 500 souls. Work in Yamhill was mostly in logging, light manufacturing, and the production of gloves at a nearby factory in the town of Carlton. Life was improving for many at that time. Just decades before it was not unusual to have no plumbing, electricity or telephone, not to speak of savings. Tom Green, for instance, was a veteran of the Korean war who was skilled at working with stone and finishing cement. He was a hard worker and by the 1970s he had a union job that paid what today would be $43 per hour, despite only having a fifth grade education. His wife recalled that “His work meant a lot to him, and he was proud he had a good job.” Tom was well respected by his neighbors and workmates. He handled himself with dignity and self-confidence. His children were raised with a solid work ethic on a family farm with hogs, geese, chickens, and milk cows.
One of Tom’s children, Kevin, grew up in awe of his father, working summer jobs baling hay and picking strawberries. While he was not successful in typical classroom learning, Kevin could take a car apart and put it back together again. He was passionate about fishing, once diving into a river after a fish and catching it with only his hands. Although he entertained the idea of going to college, he could not see a way to pay for it and eventually dropped out of high school and earned his GED.
At this time the prospect of finding good work was shrinking in Yamhill. The glove factory closed, and the efficiency of machine harvesting displaced people. Kevin worked at a company that made storage racks until it went under. He then picked up a job as a welder that paid poorly at a trailer factory. Kevin had a girlfriend who had two children, and they went on to have twins together. He was waiting to get married until he was more financially stable. Then the trailer factory closed. Kevin was out of work. His mother reflects that Kevin did not think well of himself. At this point, he did not think he was worth much. Kevin was unable to earn enough money for rent and his partner left him. A friend recalls that this “destroyed his self-esteem.” Kevin started drinking too much and gaining weight. He grew a long beard and did not shower enough. He developed diabetes and a back injury. He eventually received disability, which his friend notes did not make him inclined to look for work. According to those who knew him, this could not be attributed to his basic character. Before this, he would spend hours biking up and down highways collecting bottles for deposit money, or tramp for hours to find the best fishing spots. He was hard to keep up with as a hiker. He was a “workaholic” and did not tolerate being idle long.
Now, Kevin’s health issues became serious. He ballooned to 350 pounds while living with urinary tract issues and diabetes. His only access to health care was the emergency room.[2] He eventually developed heart problems and liver issues from drinking too much. As one might imagine, his physical condition made it hard for him to walk and to do basic chores, not to speak of getting a job. A flu shot led to health complications and his organs began to fail. During the winter of 2014-15, he died in the same farmhouse in which he had grown up.
Kristof and WuDunn are convinced that a central challenge today is the creation of jobs. This is not only because it is more sustainable to provide work than benefit checks, but because we experience a meaningful facet of our own self-worth and identity through economic activity. Being jobless is clearly connected to depression, divorce, opioid use, and suicide. Kevin was not looking for compassion, just a way he could contribute to the economy, and also be supported by it. Not finding this, his harvest was isolation—another instance of the epidemic of loneliness across America. As Americans are less and less able to find their place in society through work, our voluntary civil associations are also shrinking.[3] These include churches, bowling leagues, poker evenings, dinner parties, and clubs. This is not only about financial poverty, but social poverty. The shrinking of civil society and the thinning of meaningful employment options are working to undermine certain experiences of individual dignity and self-respect across the country. Kristof and WuDunn point out that the breaking down of self-worth and dignity during Kevin’s life occurred during a time when the U.S. economy quintupled in size. Yet, as we are all aware by now, the wealth growth went disproportionately to a tiny fraction of the population, the 1%. Those in the upper 10% may have been able to maintain. Everyone in the lower 90% lost ground during this time period.[4]
In "America Regained," the concluding chapter of the book, the authors offer a number of initiatives to address the American decline they outline in the book. I would like to dwell on the idea of a right to work, an idea that Franklin Roosevelt proposed as part of a second Bill of Rights for Americans. This would involve creating programs that help with education, training, and hiring of citizens as a matter of right. The authors prefer this over the idea of a universal basic income not just due to politics, but because of the complex interconnection of dignity, identity, and employment. The universal basic income provides material income but does not adequately address the social question. Working in large, associative collaboration with other people to meet a need in the community is about much more than money.
Thinkers as different as Marx and Arendt have seen the overcoming of labor, and work, as an ideal. It is hard for us to take seriously the notion of a work related right, as it goes against our liberty and our individualistically oriented culture and society. But what if excluding someone from opportunities to provide services to others, and be provided for in return, is just as important, from the perspective of human health and dignity, as freedom of expression? It is this question which is everywhere between the lines of Tightrope.
In a chapter called "American Aristocracy," the well-known growth of income inequality in the USA is presented in brief and stark form and the feudal order that is emerging between the cracks comes into view:
“When we traveled to modern feudalist countries, like Pakistan, we were discomforted by the gaps between the high life inside the barbed-wire compounds and the struggle for survival in slums outside. It seemed ridiculous for tycoons to ride around in Mercedes-Benzes over deeply rutted roads. Yet that’s the direction we’re moving toward, with public goods like parks and libraries squeezed for resources. As a result, wealthy Americans have developed their own workarounds.”[5]
Reading this, I was transported to a memory of Egypt, at the Social Initiative Forum at Heliopolis University in Cairo. I had many opportunities there to leave gated communities and drive through derelict streets of poverty in expensive cars. It was there that I met James Sleigh, the director of a Camphill Village in Capetown, South Africa. He presented on his work with those who live in the village with disabilities. One of his main goals was to turn therapeutic workshops into professional quality sites of production. For example, some workshops prepare dairy products for sale. Instead of marketing the goods as a charity buy on the consumer end, he focused on the capacity of his disabled co-workers to create truly excellent products that stood on their own merits in the market. His presentation was on the positive therapeutic effects this change had on the workers with disabilities. Their meaningful collaboration to meet the needs of others had an ennobling and healing effect on them.
Culturally speaking, our notion of work and employment is extremely superficial. Almost fifty years ago E.F. Schumacher pointed out that this is connected to the common notion that work is something we need to get rid of. He writes that “The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilize and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence.”[6] Thus the focus on efficiency that makes work boring and stultifying, often disconnecting us from the social, human purpose of our activity, is counter-productive. It also indicates more concern for goods than people, products over workers. This more comprehensive notion of work is sometimes referred to as right livelihood.
SIF Egypt 2019: Unfolding Individual Potential for the Future, where I met James, was hosted by the Social Initiative Forum, Sekem, and Heliopolis University. Heliopolis is one branch of a large associative undertaking called SEKEM, which includes many businesses, schools, and clinics. Its founder, Ibrahim Abouleish, was the recipient of a Right Livelihood award in 2003. The success of SEKEM is truly miraculous.[7] And as the shadow of feudalism threatens to darken the future of the USA, the significance of places like SEKEM intensifies.
Both SEKEM and the Camphill in Capetown have done well by focusing on the qualitative, human facet of economic life that Schumacher noted was abandoned by many European economists. They both draw inspiration from the associative economics of Rudolf Steiner. Steiner also articulated a fundamental social law that states the health of a group of people who are working together is greater, the less an individual lays claim to the products of their own work, and the more these products support their coworkers, and the more their own needs are not supported by their own efforts, but by the productivity of others.[8]
Steiner, who lived a century ago in Central Europe, described the direction of the modern economy, and the division of labor, as proceeding more and more in this direction, namely, toward mutual interdependence and cooperation. He suggested the social potential of economic life could be intensified if this tendency was recognized and worked with. He encouraged the founding of innovative corporations that strove to separate work from income, to foster regular communications of concrete conditions of production consumption and production, and to treat capital as a social asset, not solely as private property. I should be very careful here to note that in separating work from income he was not advocating for a universal basic income, but an end of wagery. He has this in common with Kristof and WuDunn. Steiner showed how wages create the illusion that one is working for money, not in a great cooperative endeavor to meet real needs of other people. Also, when he suggested that capital should be a social asset, he was not suggesting it be collected as taxes and distributed by the state.[9] Needless to say, he lived in a radically different situation than ours. Still, in general, Steiner believed that removing these three obstacles would go a long way. One would feel the meaningfulness of one’s daily work and the cooperative community solidarity in daily life. The virtue that would be activated, fostered, and developed, that rests on economic activity, on business, he called fraternity. Today, the types of thoughts and notions we see in the benefit corporations are in line with the direction Steiner was moving. And, indeed, on a basic level so is this passage from the appendix of Tightrope: “Reward companies that have a moral compass, and punish those that don’t. If more Americans supported companies that gave their workers healthcare and reasonable wages and benefits, we could leverage American industry to provide traction for more workers.”
I was thinking all of this as I read from Tightrope, which contains an intuition of the social virtue that we need from our work life. Work is not only about income, it is about identity, dignity, service, pride, about community spirit. It is a question how realistic it is to expect these to be delivered through liberty, through being left on our own with a basic income check, or any government check, and no job. The three ideals of the French Revolution were Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. It is a great contradiction today that many of our social justice values are not social, but individual, having to do with individual rights. Whether it is Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, or Milton Friedman, the freedom of the individual is the greatest value. In Tightrope, and in the USA, where the genius of the corporation and the voluntary association are most at home, it can seem we are losing our literacy of fraternity. The imagination of the rights needed to protect the individual from the majority, from the government, are articulated in our current Bill of Rights. The question remains of what a social bill of rights, that protects the individual from social isolation and economic exclusion, would look like.
Could it be that the denial of an integrated economy based on collaboration and the fulfilling of one another’s need through industry and cooperation is as much a social sin as the outlawing of religious freedom or the freedom of the press?
Wilhelm von Humboldt, who inspired John Stuart Mill to write on Liberty, captured the hollowing out that happens when the rights of freedom, as creative activity and expression, are denied:
“Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness...we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.”
He points here to the powers of character and integrity that are connected with individuation and creative autonomy. These are processes already protected by the Bill of Rights.
Is there a correlate depredation of human dignity when social rights are denied? Is an intrinsic social virtue, a social dignity, intrinsic to our nature, being corrupted, turning us into a shadow of our healthy potential? What light does this shed on the lives of Kevin Green, and so many others, whose selves are being stunted and rubbed out by isolation and exclusion, and through the resulting egotism and diseases of despair? Is what we seek not only liberty and equality, but also fraternity?
[1] Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn. Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020.
[2] Jacob S. Hacker. The Great Risk Shift: The New Economic Insecurity and the Decline of the American Dream. Oxford University Press, 2008.
[3] Robert D. Putnam. Bowling Alone. Simon and Schuster, 2001.
[4] Timothy Noah. The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do about It. Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012.
[5] Kristof and WuDunn. Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope, 48.
[6] Ernst Friedrich Schumacher. Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered. London: Abacus, 1978, 54.
[7] Ibrahim Abouleish. Sekem: A Sustainable Community in the Egyptian Desert. Rudolf Steiner Press, 2005.
[8] See Rudolf Steiner. Economics: The World as One Economy. New Economy
Publications, 1993 and Steinerian Economics: A Compendium. Adonis Press, 2015.
[9] See also an address from last year on these suggestions here.