Listen to Mark’s introduction to this topic via our Precognition mini-episode.
On Saturday, 9/21, we’re scheduled to interview Frithjof Bergmann, Professor Emeritus from the University of Michigan, about his book New Work, New Culture (published in German in 2004
Watch on YouTube.
This clip outlines the problem as he sees it and his proposed solution. In the 1980s he turned from the traditional academic’s life in favor of pursuing projects to make a real impact on people’s lives. You can read about those projects, and the entity (“New Work Enterprises”) more recently created to coordinate them, at the New Work website.
First, why is this philosophy, as opposed to public policy or economics or some other discipline? Well, Bergmann’s take on work is a direct result of his assessment of Hegel and Nietzsche on human nature: Far from being self-contained, self-interested balls of greed that need to be reigned in by society (as Hobbes thought), we are born as essentially herd animals: timid and easily controlled (the success of fascism and numerous other senseless political movements wherein people jumped in and destroyed themselves is ample evidence of this). We need to develop a sense of self, to figure out “who we really are,” in order to have authentic desires that are truly ours and not just inherited or drifted into or latched onto impulsively. Moreover, we are tremendously self-ignorant; we generally can much more objectively make judgments about other people whom we know well than we can about ourselves.
Bergmann describes many people’s experience of work as being as of “a mild disease.” Whether or not your job is actively horrible, its sheer mass in terms of time taken out of your life is debilitating. Contrast this with some people’s experience of creating art, of inventing something, of helping out in an emergency, or really of performing any task that they truly find meaningful. That kind of work can really energize people, giving them a sense of purpose. Far from this being a luxury that very few of us can afford in large quantities, Bergmann diagnoses this as a necessity for the good life (eudaimonia). This is an existential challenge: are you truly alive, or only half alive, just going through the motions? Merely having some entertaining side hobbies isn’t enough to mitigate the damage of selling off the majority of your life.
Add to this the facts cited in the video that 1) Jobs are disappearing due to automation at an alarming rate; 2) Globalization has made this much worse: politicians emphasize all these new markets of consumers, but in many of these countries you’ve got 70%+ unemployment and U.S. firms outsourcing to those places; 3) More than unemployment, the problem is poverty; job creation by businesses just isn’t doing what’s needed to get even the majority of the world to a subsistence level, and the gap between rich and poor ever widens; 4) The current job system has only been around since the industrial revolution; it’s not a natural phenomenon and not the only conceivable alternative.
Conclusion: Life-affirming work (work that we choose based on trying a lot of things out, on deep introspection and interaction with those others that can read us better than we can read ourselves) is something that we need. The job system is inadequate to give this to us, and the need to fill our lives with this such a job prevents us from seriously pursuing such a “calling.”
All this so far has been a matter of cultural observation and looking at human nature and our experience of work, and it sets up the problem that we as thinkers face: how do we cope with this clash between our current economic situation and our needs? As individuals, the best we can do is navigate this the best we can: try to learn about ourselves and don’t settle for a full-time, all-consuming job that we don’t really like. This may mean choosing a lower paying but more satisfying profession, locating our “selves” in our hobbies, tending to our personal relationships and not just work. If we want to work for the social good, we could throw ourselves behind political causes to reduce the length of the work week, decouple health care from full-time employment, maybe argue for a national “minimum income” or somesuch.
However, this is ultimately not Bergmann’s solution, and he sees those political maneuvers as hopeless in the current climate where we all rely on jobs and hence businesses will always have a political veto when they threaten to move those jobs elsewhere. Instead, Bergmann points to new technologies as leading us toward a “self-generating economy.” In short, just as computers now let us do just about anything with information without necessarily needing travel agents, librarians, file clerks, operators standing by, etc., in the near future, fabricators will let us create maybe 80% of the consumer goods we currently purchase ourselves. It should be noted that Bergmann thinks that is not an individual endeavor: we will need voluntary organizations (and there are 30 New Work Centers set up around the globe at present to kick this off) to facilitate economics and effort here. Most of his recent efforts have been in the third world, e.g. where a village installs and runs their own water filtration systems, power plants, builds a car, and/or implements cutting-edge farming technologies. Likewise, the goal would be for associations to lower the individual cost of health insurance and other fixed costs. When we maximally use our technology and resources to free ourselves up, Bergmann this will not be a matter of austerity, of “job sharing” and making do with less (although there is a matter of getting rid of the consumer excess that we don’t actually want when we think about it), but a matter of tailoring what we make to what we, again, really really want, what helps us to be whole people and live vibrantly and all that other eudaimonic stuff.
You can download the first chapter of the book here; PEL Citizens can listen to a discussion that I led last month on that portion of the book here.
For a shorter yet more comprehensive overview of the main points of Bergmann’s proposal, try this 2008 essay, “A 2020 That We Could Attain.“
Mmm, tasty contemporary philosophy. This is a guy I hadn’t even heard of (outside of your previous passing references to him) and now find highly interesting. +1 for PEL.
I do find this topic interesting… I’m not sure I have enough information yet to decide how I feel about Bergmann’s notions. I shall delve further into his thoughts tonight as I read the 2008 essay linked above. Hopefully a robust discussion of Thoreau will be coming soon!!
Began to read his essay then skimmed to the conclusion and watched the video clip. To borrow a line from Gertrude Stein there seems to be no there there. I don’t know exactly what to think when his remarks are, prima facie, so naive. I think his aims are noble and I do believe we do not exist in the best of all possible worlds with respect to ‘work,’ but I believe Bergmann’s attempt to tackle the issue is pure folly… I don’t want to come off as an ass. I need time to put down a more comprehensive response and, since I am busy with work, I will have to address the issue when I can!
It is disconcerting to hear something that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. Nietzsche, according to Bergmann (when he introduced me to Nietzsche back in ’91 or thereabouts) was too wary of the social/political to wade into it… it’s too big, too complicated, with too much intransigence and idiocy. The best we can do is live an authentic individual life.
That, of course, was my approach to New Work ideas as they’ve been buzzing around in my head for these many years since then: all about me, and how tragic it is that I should be expected to earn a living when clearly I should be free to just sing and write and read all the time :).
So I approached Bergmann some time near or after graduation to do some volunteer work related to his New Work projects, but basically I was fishing around for how I could myself put the ideas into practice. He slammed me down… he told me something to the effect that I (i.e. people in my position) was not the priority (as opposed to helping the homeless, recently fired, those actually working), and he told me just now as I expressed how people I were talking to were skeptical about their ability to apply any of New Work to their lives, that from the very beginning he had in mind that this is not something that one could do by oneself. It has to be a social movement.
Now, here’s a 2003 essay (http://newworknewculture.com/sites/default/files/New%20Work%20Life.pdf) addressing some Silicon Valley tech company leaders (after the Dot Com crash) about how they could, right then, establish a community that would allow them to live according to this new arrangement, with lots of cooperative self-providing and reduced living costs through other shared resources that would allow them to work fewer hours and give more time to their pet projects. I was frankly pretty turned off by the idea he puts forward there of people living in private spaces that would then be attached to a communal, New Work space (and believe me, I hate capitalizing that term and think that it really needs to be un-branded like “telecommuting” or “flex-time” or “career counseling” or “psychotherapy” to become an option that people en masse would take seriously), but was then somewhat relieved when I got to the section (p. 32) “Not a Commune.” I became somewhat more convinced at that point that the kind of self-providing he was talking about could be realized in a number of organizational ways, from an experience kind of like Kinko’s to one that’s more like the YMCA or Sam’s Club or a food coop that you sign up for.
What seems unbelievable is that technology really could enable us to do things quickly enough so that self-providing in the way he describes would not be a full-time endeavor. I think Bergmann understands that, which is why his whole approach is to actually bring such things to reality so he can point to them, as he’s now pointing to Detroit as as now being nearly self-sufficient as far as food production is concerned. (I’ve not gotten the details on this project yet; it’s the one he’s most deeply involved in right now, though his efforts there go back to the 80s.)
I am a huge fan of the podcast, but I must say that as PhD candidate in economics, I am approaching this upcoming show with trepidation.
Encouraging people to find fulfilling work and making it easier for people to do so is super-laudable. To speak in Alisdair MacIntyre’s words, too many people are focused on the exterior rewards of practices (money, fame) at the cost of internal rewards (meaning, virtue development).
However, I worry that much of the economics you bring up will be misleading or incomplete. Take your list of ‘facts’ about the economy:
1) Jobs are disappearing due to automation at an alarming rate;
-I suppose it depends exactly what you mean by this, but more people are working now on earth than in any point in history. If the point is simply that certain kinds of jobs are disappearing, well that’s happened since the guy who invented the wheel reduced the number of sled manufacturers. Simply put, contemporary economists do not believe that technological growth has much impact on a nation’s stock of jobs.
2) Globalization has made this much worse: politicians emphasize all these new markets of consumers, but in many of these countries you’ve got 70%+ unemployment and U.S. firms outsourcing to those places;
-What do you mean by ‘this much worse’? If you mean job loss, most models of trade would say that it shouldn’t have a big effect on unemployment rates in the long run (the exact effect would have to do with elasticity’s of supply for labor, it may very well be positive for both nations). I am also completely unaware of any countries with 70% unemployment rates.
3) More than unemployment, the problem is poverty; job creation by businesses just isn’t doing what’s needed to get even the majority of the world to a subsistence level, and the gap between rich and poor ever widens;
-You seem to be making two separate points here, one about poverty and one about inequality. With regards to poverty this line of thinking blatantly false. The amount of world population living on less than a dollar a day has dropped precipitously both in absolute terms and as a share of the world population. You say we have failed to get the ‘majority of the world to a subsistence level’, but median world income has been increasing as well. With regards to inequality, you have to sit down and work out what meta-ethical system you want to work with before you can decide what types of inequality matter morally. As emphasized in ‘After Virtue’, utilitarian/Rawlsean, rights-based, and dessert-based approaches will give very different answers as to which types of inequality are bad.
4) The current job system has only been around since the industrial revolution; it’s not a natural phenomenon and not the only conceivable alternative.
-Certainly we can imagine different systems, this goes without saying.
Now let me finish be conceding that there are several cultural norms (such as the 40 hour work week and the understanding of work as something inherently unpleasant) that may be preventing individuals from having much more healthy work lives. However, these are not a problem with jobs as such, but rather elements gunking up the works and preventing people from choosing the path that is optimal for themselves.
I just read Mark’s comments concerning the Not School discussion of Bergmann’s work that is posted in the PEL Citizen section… Mark is seemingly a better messenger of these ideas than Bergmann is himself. I’ll listen to the Precog as I drift off to sleep. Wish I would have read this sooner!
Hi, Seth,
Your concerns are MORE than welcome. I’m well aware that I’m not in a great position to confirm or deny the world-economic facts that Bergmann cites (and the purpose of my post is just to summarize his argument), and there’s a whole field of the philosophy of the foundations of economics that’s being glossed over here. So please, keep posting, now that the precog is up, and when the episode goes up, and in fact the more other points of view I have to bring in during our interview with him the better.
A couple of questions/comments:
You say: “More people are working now on earth than in any point in history.”
Well, of course the population is higher, but I assume you mean percentage-wise. According to Bergmann, before the industrial revolution, the vast majority of people worked on farms, i.e. they did not have “jobs” in the sense of working for someone else. Until very recently, that was the case for most of the Third World, but now farming there has become unprofitable: food has been made cheap enough by agri-business that small farmers can’t support themselves, so now all those farmers are by necessity moving to the cities, where there is just plain not near enough work for them. Now, I’m just taking Bergmann’s word on this for the moment, but given that he’s traveled in Africa and Asia and talked to leaders of countries about these problems, I’m inclined to believe this is accurate. Please let me know if you have better info.
I understand that it sounds weird to blame “poverty,” i.e. people in depressed areas that don’t have much in the way of businesses going on, on “the job system.” It’s not that the existence of jobs caused this massive poverty in areas where jobs are scarce (or standing around waiting all day to try to carry some tourist’s bag counts as a job), but that if we have a system where the only way people get (or deserve!) money is by a job, i.e. by working for someone else, then that clearly doesn’t serve the function to get goods to all the people. Not only are the opportunities not there, but many people (e.g. the chronically homeless) just aren’t going to be in any state to work in a structured job environment. Bergmann has found that this doesn’t mean that those people can’t work, and can’t get a lot of vigor out of work… but light farming (e.g. getting the homeless to plant rooftop gardens; Bergmann tells me that Detroit is at this point nearly self-sufficient as far as food production is concerned) and other self-providing activities is very different from a “job.”
Re. the unemployment rates, I see here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_unemployment_rate) that Zimbabwe is 70%, and there are some other high ones there too. I’m not sure where he got that figure from, and if he still uses it (the book was written in 2003); I’m surprised to see that South Africa is “only” 25% given his emphasis in the book on work he was doing there. So I’ll ask him about that.
I would like to hear more about your positive picture here: so you’re of the mind that global capitalism is well prepared to pull the world out of poverty in the same way that industry transformed the US from a bunch of farmers to the wealthy society we are today? Or are you claiming that the Third World really is just humming along in its pre-industrial economic way? My only experience of this is walking around Tiajuana and Nuevo Laredo, and if that’s even slightly representative of the Third World, then I find it very strange that one would suggest that such evident economic dysfunction is not a major challenge to humanity.
I’ll admit to a certain impatience with the specifics: despite Bergmann’s emphasis on the “job apocalypse,” to me it’s beside the philosophical point, which is that jobs and human nature are not on the whole a good fit, and that we can either claim that that’s just a bitter irony of life and the best we can do given inevitable Heraclitean conflict in social existence, or we can try to actually do something about it. If one were to do something about it, then actually trying things with real people in diverse areas of the world to address the issue and test your ideas about human nature seems a good idea.
I have been listening to a bunch of EconTalk episodes and have gotten enough information to provisionally conclude that econ is no more scientific than philosophy, and that economists themselves can’t agree about much of anything. If that’s true, then Bergmann would be justified in not bothering to engage anything that looks like an economic theory in the book (apart from “the labor theory of value” which he treats briefly). I think we’ll have a bunch of episodes in this area, however; I’m certainly not willing to leave it at that, and I hope we can hear more from you as we go forward.
Best,
-Mark
I, for one, believe this is an immensely important topic and one well suited to philosophical investigation. Many forget that the modern field of economics essentially evolved from being a wholly philosophical enterprise (Adam Smith and Marx for example are considered as philosophers) to what it is today…which is still mostly philosophical. Basically, I am all for more philosophical exploration on the foundations of economics, work, value, etc. since these topics “hit home” (i.e. influence all of us tremendously). You guys have a great deal of content on metaphysics and epistemology, but have only touched on economics with the Marx episode, so this will be awesome in laying the groundwork for more content on the philosophy of economics in PEL. The relationship between ethics and economics can also be explored. Looking forward to this!
A UK-based organisation called the new economics foundation have just published a related work on this issue – ‘Time on Our Side‘
I think this is what you are talking about.
http://www.neweconomics.org/publications/entry/time-on-our-side
I notice that some of the authors are ones that we were planning to cover in a ‘part 2’ of this episode (Skidelsky). Thanks for the comment!
To clarify so people don’t groan or cheer at our potentially taking two episodes on this: we’re seeing how Saturday goes and whether we need to have a 2nd discussion (without a guest) to say all we want to say as with Owen Flanagan. There are a couple more books I had picked out for us to read prior to our securing Frithjof as a guest, so those may or may not get discussed or blogged about.
I am all for two episodes since this topic touches just about touches every aspect of what it means to be human. Oh, and don’t forget about Thoreau!!!
http://www.againstthegrain.org/program/753/wed-71713-emerson-and-common
I would love to hear 2 episodes on the topic, especially if the 2nd one covered some other writers