Unalienating Excellence

We began our dehumanization when money started changing hands. Matthew Crawford gets at something of the sort in his book Shop Class as Soulcraft when he suggests that we’re more motivated by excellence than we are by money. This is to say that we’d rather do something we’re good at and do it well than do something we take no joy in and perhaps don’t find compelling just for the paycheck. Crawford puts this in Aristotelian terms and claims it’s an aristocratic idea, which he later rejiggers as communitarian.

That’s a piece of unnecessary intellectual jujitsu: it’s no affront to democracy to say that we want certain people to be better at certain things than we are. I have no taste for carpentry and little ability. I hire it done because I want my doors to hang straight and my cabinets to close. Political equality and universal suffrage has little to do with ability; it’s what we use to even out the power differentials that inevitably arise. The only excellent work it is set out against (ideally) is excellent tyranny.

In fact, and Crawford to his credit points this out, the bigger threat is that distortions of the marketplace will prevent people from doing what they do at the highest level they can. After all, excellent poets would love to make money writing poetry, but even the best have to teach for a living, sapping away precious energy and time from their art.

But, of course, current market theory says that taking a job you love that pays less than another position open to you is “irrational.” Common sense says otherwise. That discrepancy exists because current market theory was created and is championed by people whose primary motivation is the acquisition of cash. They project their own avarice on everyone, going so far as to define it as rationality itself. Since the people doing the hiring and creating the corporations and running the financial markets are schooled in current market theory and are, themselves, greedy, they force us all to live in a world in which the primary motivating factor must always be the acquisition of money. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.

This mistake goes back to Adam Smith who contended that most everyone was governed by self-interest. Smith also formulated the idea that if the market moved away from a certain kind of work, the “invisible hand” would move workers to retrain for more sought-after jobs. It’s telling that the “invisible hand” term appears in Smith’s Wealth of Nations only in passing and only to describe this phenomenon, not all market forces. But it’s also based on a false premise. Smith supposed that a laborer could learn the “rudiments” of a trade in a few weeks, and that prudent tradespeople would save their money for these inevitable times of career-switching. This seems absurd now, with “high-tech” jobs sometimes requiring years of schooling, but it wasn’t even the case in the 1770s when Smith had the idea: apprenticeships lasted for years not just because the guilds wanted to control labor, but because it takes years to develop marketable skills. Nobody is going to hire a rudimentary carpenter no matter how cheaply he’ll work; if you want the frame of your house to stand up you’ll spring for a journeyman, and if you’re rich for the master’s work. By so grossly underestimating the time it takes to develop marketable skills, Smith displays his bourgeois ignorance and undercuts pretty much everything he has to say about labor and what it’s all about.

Arguably, the mechanization and regimentation of work has made skills themselves nearly moot for the majority of what were once considered “labor” positions. McDonald’s is a case-in-point. Its “Spee-dee” delivery system is not a series of devices but a series of routines, all standardized, all able to be translated to any McDonald’s restaurant in the world. As Eric Schlosser makes clear in Fast Food Nation, this system exists in order to make the McDonald’s worker easily replaceable. The system itself requires little or no skill: follow the routine behind the counter and you’ll end up with the same Big Macs and Chicken McNuggets on the customer end. This has the ancillary effect of de-skilling the labor force in the fast-food industry. As Matthew Crawford might put it, the Spee-dee delivery system makes individual agency on the part of McDonald’s workers unnecessary. There is no need for the skills or intuitions possessed by a skilled cook. When the meat is done, when the fries are the perfect golden-brown, knowing just how much “special sauce” will make a Big Mac sing are all predetermined. There is no need for the worker to even want to be excellent, no incentive to be anything other than menial. When agency is gone, so goes pride in one’s work. This, in turn, helps keep fast-food wages down. Taking pride in your work, feeling it is a part of your being, makes someone think that perhaps it makes sense to make a living at it, and a living wage is not part of the fast-food industry’s business model. Because the work is valueless, as the worker adds little value to it, so too the worker is written off as valueless, both by her employer and by her culture.

The irony of this is that paying people a living wage, encouraging excellence, and developing individual agency may in fact lead to even more efficient systems, and certainly to better products. But then, better products are also not part of the fast-food industry’s business model; consistency is. After years of this sort of mediocrity, we’ve come to expect nothing better. Now all they have to do is keep us from being utterly let down. This has long been the bugaboo of industrial production: do you make it well or do you make it with consistency? An actual craftsperson can do you one better. She can make it exactly to your specifications. After 200 years of industrial production, that idea seems utterly foreign but for the most exotic of products: expensive suits, mansions, yachts.

The quality vs. consistency problem is almost always solved in industry by siding with consistency. Consistency is both more measurable and more likely to lead to mass appeal, which, when one is working the supply-side, is the most sensible thing to do. Pop music is given the widest promotion if it isn’t too good: quality can be difficult to listen to, and it can also create polarizing reactions in focus-groups. Pop music does not just seem to be made to appeal to the lowest common denominator; it actually is. So is McDonald’s food.

By creating a baseline, a corporation is able to more easily measure deviation, and it is easier therefore to build those systems of routines around that standard. Work is routinized and training time decreases. If the system is really good, the company no longer has to even worry about managing the process: it can be—has been—outsourced to people who have no knowledge of or interest in the product’s actual use. We’ve seen the dangers of this from melamine-laced dog food to cadmium jewelry, but the list could go on. It’s Marxian alienation as way of life.

Quality, on the other hand, is a good deal less measurable. It can come in a variety of forms and is dependent on a product and the situation of the product’s use. What makes a sod house perfect for the plains makes it disastrous for an earthquake zone. On the prairie, a sod house is easily and quickly made, it insulates in the winter and stays cool in the summer, and it requires little maintenance. In Japan, building a sod house would mean literally digging your own grave. These aren’t considerations you can stamp out in a factory; they’re qualities dependent upon situations.

Quality also leads to excellence; in fact the terms are often used interchangeably. An awareness of this relationship defeats alienation. If you get good at building sod houses—we call them earth-sheltered houses now—you end up with a dwelling that literally becomes part of the landscape. It isn’t just a hole in the ground; it’s a hyper-efficient, cutting-edge, “green” technology.

Quality, therefore, requires someone with a vested interest in the product itself, not one who is merely interested in the money. The big money is in tract houses, and the nation is full of them. Most of them are ill-suited to their environs: fire-prone in California, hurricane-bait on the Gulf coast, vastly under-insulated in the Northeast. As consumers we’re trained to love them and want them and pay huge amounts for them when they’re placed stupidly on the edge of town, but a conscientious builder, one who cares about quality, would educate his buyers and build for them something that he could be proud of. Even our fast-food worker, now only able to suggest a certain cheaper combination of value-meal, would be going off-script if he steered us toward a better, or even a customized, choice.

It’s this consistency vs. quality problem that has percolated through industry and begun to pollute the streams of knowledge. It has already rendered much K-12 education toxic through the No Child Left Behind act. The idea that we can somehow standardize the educational experience is absurd enough on the face of it, but what NCLB contends is that we can, and should, standardize teaching as well. By following a routinized pattern of “best practices” we can, of course, get fairly consistent results, but this approach rarely fosters excellence. Operant conditioning can also produce consistent results, and if that’s really what we want, we ought to just turn educational institutions into giant Skinner boxes and be done with it. We’ll also end up with a nation of extraordinarily well trained pigeons. I think a democracy requires something else.
My point here is not that industry should suddenly focus on quality and excellence: they tried that in the ‘90s and ended up turning those words into empty slogans. Rather, I am saying that there is no such thing as menial labor; all work, if it is truly worth doing, in some sense requires skill. I agree with Matthew Crawford that individual agency is important, and that this is what unravels alienation and makes things worth doing. But I’d like to go beyond that and say that “worth” is the important word here, that our pursuit of excellence in what we do ought to be more important than our GDP. Markets are present-tense stories we write about who is in charge and what is important to those people. It’s not anymore manipulative of a market to direct it toward excellence as it is to plot it toward making Microsoft’s products ubiquitous, in fact considerably less so. The genius of the guilds, for all their abuses and depredations, was that they put a worker and his tools at the center of the market equation.

In the end, what we do is a reflection on what we value. Human values creep in regardless of the avaricious set’s compulsion to keep them out. Even Donald Trump claims that he’s not in it for the money, but the pursuit of the “art of the deal.” It should not surprise us lesser folks that more highfalutin’ business deals get done on the golf course than in the boardroom: even CEOs are victims of the soulless workplaces they create. On the links they can be people and pursue quality instead of mere consistency.

Isn’t it about time they gave the rest of us the same right?