By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, April 14, 2019
I would like you to entertain, for a moment, an idea that
might sound a little eccentric, or maybe as plain and obvious as a thing can
be. It is this:
The division of
labor is the meaning of life.
I do not mean this metaphorically or analogically, but
literally.
Life begins with the cell, and the cell is defined by a
minimum of specialization: membrane, cytoplasm, and (usually) nucleus.
What makes a cell a living cell is a matter of some
slight imprecision: Most living cells reproduce, but some (such as neurons) do
not; most cells have nuclei and DNA, but mature red blood cells do not; etc.
But the generally shared characteristics of living cells all depend upon the
division of labor within the cell: order, sensitivity to stimuli, growth and
reproduction, maintenance of homeostasis, and metabolism.
The cell is defined by the division of labor among the
organelles and other cellular constituents. That gets us to the single-celled
organism. Next comes division of labor among cells rather than within them.
When cells begin to divide labor among themselves, they form tissues and
organs, which in turn divide labor to produce organ systems and, ultimately,
complex organisms.
Or maybe not ultimately.
In certain cases, the individual members of a species
divide labor in such a way as to function as a superorganism, or a colonial
organism. The famous cases of this include the Portuguese man o’ war, ants, and
bees.
Human beings are not colonial organisms in this formal
sense; unlike bees or ant species in which only the queen reproduces, every
normal and healthy human being possesses the features and ability of every
other normal and healthy member of the species—although even here we must
account for the division of reproductive labor by sex. From the point of view
of sexual reproduction, the clonal
ant might have a better claim to being a biologically autonomous individual
than does the human being, though both species have a sophisticated division of
labor.
We are not colonial organisms. But human beings isolated
from other human beings do not thrive. Even in situations in which the material
needs of the human animal are satisfied, the human being in isolation
degenerates quickly, both mentally and physically. There are many examples of
this, but you can get a good indication of the phenomenon reading through the
American Civil Liberties Union’s report on prison isolation, “A Death Before
Dying: Solitary Confinement on Death Row.”
The division of labor among human beings is not a purely
economic phenomenon—it is also a social and emotional one. The human need for
other human beings is so deep as to be fundamental. This should, properly
understood, complicate our understanding of individualism
and our rhetoric about it.
In 21st-century human society, the mode of social life is
so closely identified with the particularities of the division of labor that
the two are practically identical. Even many of the so-called social issues are
ultimately questions of the division of labor, for instance within marriage and
family life, where changing attitudes toward sex (gender is a grammatical term) in relation to marriage,
child-rearing, homosexuality, and other questions challenge ancient divisions
of labor between men and women.
Which is to say, changes in the division of labor are by
necessity changes in the mode of social life; radical, far-reaching, and sudden
changes in the division of labor are, in the favorite term of Silicon Valley,
“disruptive.”
They are disruptive economically in the familiar
Schumpeterian sense of “creative destruction,” but they are socially disruptive
as well, eroding or upending relationships between individuals, communities,
and institutions, introducing new insecurity and uncertainty into status
hierarchies and social relations that had seemed to be fixed, at least from the
point of view of those whose lives are defined by those disrupted status
hierarchies and distressed social relations.
We have seen this kind of disruptive capitalism before.
Historians call it “the Renaissance,” though the writers of history have
reached no consensus about what that term means, when the period it describes
began or ended, or what its principal qualities are.
***
Historians date the fall of the Roman Empire to September
4, 476 anno Domini, when Odoacer
deposed the last Roman emperor, the teen-aged Romulus Augustulus. But if you
had asked a Roman citizen about the fall of the empire a day or a week or a
year later, he’d have been perplexed.
He wouldn’t know the empire had fallen.
Life went on, very much as it had. Julius Nepos called
himself the emperor in the West, and the Roman senate continued to meet for at
least another century. Roman law and Roman institutions continued to prevail in
many parts of the Western empire, at least to the diminished extent that they
had prevailed in the declining power up to 476 A.D. The fall of Rome was not a
definitive event.
Similarly, no one in the Renaissance seemed to know that
he was living in a Renaissance. In fact, the Renaissance as we know it is in no
small part the invention of one 19th-century historian, Jakob Burckhardt, whose
classic work, The Civilization of the
Renaissance in Italy, pulled together the main strands of what we think of
as the Renaissance into a coherent historical narrative: the rediscovery of the
art, literature, and philosophy of antiquity; the emergence of secular culture;
the turn away from monastic otherworldliness toward worldly affairs and
pleasures; the turn to logic and reason that would lead to the Enlightenment.
That did not come out of nowhere. In fact, the cultures
of the medieval period and of what we call the Renaissance were in many ways
continuous. But not in all ways. There was a renaissance of many things, most
important among them being cities.
The Roman way of life was an urban way of life. The pope
today delivers addresses to “urbi et orbi,”
to the city—Rome—and the world. But in a certain sense, to the Roman mind the
city was the world, and everything else was subordinate to it. And it was the urban
mode of life that declined after the fall of the Roman Empire—that is what made
the Dark Ages dark.
Feudalism arose in Europe as a response to the decline of
commerce. It did not arise in response to the decline of the Roman Empire but
to the later decline of the Carolingian Empire, whose leaders, having lost
touch with earlier Roman financial and administrative practices, proved unable
to protect their people and their trade routes from the Magyar raiders and
Vikings who were pillaging practically all of Western Europe. Later, Muslim
powers in the East would largely cut Europe off from Mediterranean trade.
Venice was practically alone in maintaining trade with the East through the
Adriatic.
The lack of trade and of the cultural exchange associated
with economic exchange can have terrible consequences for a culture.
Archaeologists have found evidence of isolated island peoples discovering and
then losing the same piece of technology (a barbed fish hook, in one case)
several times over the course of many generations, whereas those people who
were in contact with other neighboring peoples did not forget their
technological innovations. In the same way, the indigenous British people
declined in their standard of material life and technological sophistication to
a level well below where they had
been prior to their first contact with the Romans. Trade, as it turns out, is
not just about widgets.
As Wallace K. Ferguson puts it in The Renaissance, the decline of commerce left central governments
and subjects alike with little recourse. “As a result,” he writes
Men sought protection from private
lords on whatever terms were offered, while the lords seized the political and
judicial powers that fell from the hands of helpless rulers. The political and
social structures of feudalism thus became almost identical, both composed of
the same personal relations. Both rested, moreover, on the same economic base,
the tenure of land.
… From the ninth to the eleventh
century, there was little exchange of goods save on a local scale, and hence
little need for money. A natural economy of barter and exchange of services
largely replaced the money economy inherited from the ancient world. Meanwhile,
the rural isolation of society was further intensified by the lack of adequate
means of communication and by the appalling dangers and difficulties of travel.
Natural economy and poor
communications do not necessarily lead to political disintegration, but they do
put almost insuperable obstacles in the way of central government. When the
wealth of a country can neither be exchanged for money nor shipped without
great difficulty, the income of the central government must be exceedingly
limited, and what income there is cannot be effectively mobilized to meet
governmental expenses.
Feudalism, properly understood, then, was a stopgap
emergency measure developed ad hoc in
response to the crisis of central government. But in a largely illiterate world
composed of largely isolated communities, conditions of two or three
generations’ standing may come to be understood as ancient tradition, and
perhaps unalterable tradition. The Christian Church supplied a moral theory in
support of feudalism, based on Saint Paul’s metaphorical treatment of the
specialized members of the body and their ultimate harmony in the division of
labor. Feudal society had three classes—peasant, nobility, and clergy—and each
class performed its own specialized labor: working, fighting, and thinking.
Social arrangements, status relations, and economic
relations were, under feudalism, almost entirely unified, and the relevant
relationships were intensely personal. There was no nationalism, and there were
no real nation-states. There were lords and vassals, lieges and feudatories,
barons and serfs. And though the kings, nobility, and Church might have their
differences in this or that political matter, they all made their living the
same way: from the land.
What they had was a stable division of labor, meaning a
largely stable mode of life.
Until it was disrupted.
***
With the decline of the Muslim powers in the
Mediterranean, the cities of Italy, where urban life had not been eradicated as
entirely as it had been in much of the rest of Europe, began to bring back
commerce, which meant a revival of urban life and the creation of a new class
of Europeans: the burghers, men of the cities who made their livings from
commerce and trade, who alone were liberated from the life of the land, a boast
that the kings, barons, and clergy could not make. A century or two later as
the Scandinavians began their long slow transformation into the peaceful and
neighborly people we know today, a similar process began in the Netherlands,
with important centers of trade eventually developing in Amsterdam and in Flemish
cities such as Antwerp and Bruges. The Netherlands developed what some
economists regard as the first truly modern economy.
Capitalism began to radically improve the material
standard of life for all those it touched, beginning with the burghers in the
cities and the merchant princes, but also the peasants who benefited from new
and more stable sources of food and other goods.
This great blessing was, of course, hated and resented,
and such blessings often are.
Capitalism upset the feudal social order. People like to
be well housed and well fed, but they also like predictability and certainty,
particularly in the delicate matter of social-status hierarchies. The merchants
and traders were liberated from the land and were therefore outside the feudal social
order. They engaged in corporate self-regulation but were difficult and wily
subjects often operating beyond the reach of princes and popes alike. (The
Jewish traders were, as we know, hated with a special intensity for having the
audacity to flourish at the social margins into which they were pushed.) The
Church and the nobility had much to lose as the reintroduction of a money
economy disrupted and threatened to supplant political and economic relations
based on land tenure. But the commoners did not think too very much of
capitalism, either. As Ferguson writes:
Even the peasants, who had less to
lose, were suspicious of any alteration in the immemorial custom that formed
the framework of their lives. And this conservatism was not limited solely to
the sphere of practical affairs. It extended into the world of ideas, or at
least into so much of that terra
incognita as the feudal classes ever cared to explore. The seed of new
ideas found scant nourishment in feudal soil. The way of life of noble and peasant,
originally formed in an age of half-barbarous isolation, was never calculated
to inspire intellectual curiosity.
But it was not only the merchant princes who were
empowered by the return of the money economy. Gold is stored and transported
more easily than bushels of wheat or potatoes, and it is more easily exchanged
for services, too, including the services of professional soldiers and
administrators. With the return of the money economy came the return of central
government, albeit in a new form as kings who were in essence regional warlords
transformed themselves into something more like the executives of
nation-states. As the monarchs began to discover something like nationalism, so
did the people, who previously had felt their strongest allegiances toward a
transnational organization—the Church—and their feudal relationships, and did
not understand themselves to be citizens of any nation in the modern sense.
They had patrias, not polities. But that began to change.
As capitalism began to overturn the social relationships
of feudalism, the newly deracinated citizens of the emerging capitalist world
began to look for new sources of status and meaning. It is worth noting that
radical anticlericalism first took root in the new burgher urban cultures, and
that in the end Protestantism would make of itself a nationalist project—the
Church of England, etc.—that found its greatest purchase in the new capitalist
heartland: England and the Netherlands. Reactionary fanaticism, such as the
ministry of Savonarola, grew from the same cultural ferment. Ultimately, such
modern ideologies as socialism and fascism would be founded on the same causes,
with Marx’s complaints about the “alienation” of labor harkening back to the
first stirrings of capitalism at the end of the Medieval period.
***
The parallels with our own time are obvious enough. Money
is essentially a record-keeping system, and the displacement of barter and
personal services by a money economy represented a kind of information economy
radically different from what had come before.
What we call “globalization” is a sudden radical
expansion in the worldwide division of labor—a miracle of human cooperation
that, as such miracles so often are, goes mostly unappreciated and unloved, and
often hated. Our globalization is hated for the same reason that Renaissance
globalization was hated: It disrupts existing status arrangements and
introduces new elements of insecurity and anxiety into communities whose
members had believed their situations to be fixed, if not ordained—and who believe that they have a natural right to the
fixity of those situations, and that the duty of the state is to secure them.
Our Silicon Valley billionaires are denounced as “rootless cosmopolitans” (the
phrase itself derives from the anti-Semitic socialist purges of the 1940s and
1950s) and are resented for their transnational lives and transnational
interests, as well as for their preference for self-regulation and their
slipperiness in the face of merely national
mandates. Like the merchant princes of Florence, they lead lives that seem
impossibly indulgent and patronize cultural and political forces that perplex,
irritate, and offend the partisans of peasant conservatism.
At the other end of the economic spectrum, special
vitriol is reserved for a new kind of division of labor: the casual “gig” work
associated with firms such as Uber. This opportunistic work provides important
income to many people who could not otherwise get it as conveniently, and it
performs the important function of allowing people of more modest means to
convert their property into capital. But this comes with none of the
old assurances: health insurance, pensions, the gold watch at the end of a long
tenure of service, etc. It is easy to be sentimental about those old
assurances, and to forget that almost nobody in 2019 really wants a 1950
standard of living (you can have it—cheap!), but we should keep in mind that
the economy has evolved the way it has because people have made certain choices
that comport with their preferences in the face of the unalterable reality that
is scarcity.
That makes some of us uneasy, if not enraged.
And just as the alienated Europeans of the Renaissance
turned to new sources of identity and meaning, so do we, in everything from the
slightly comical turn to neo-Paganism in the quest for a unified “European”
identity (which is not entirely distinct from the white-nationalist tendency,
even if not quite subsumed by it) to more serious forms of political and
cultural radicalism. Of course the feudal way of life was not as ancient as its
practitioners imagined, and if God had a stronger preference for it, He has not
made Himself heard on the issue. But neither was the immediate postwar economic
and social order of the United States divinely ordained, or even normal, being,
as it was, based on extraordinary economic and political conditions related to
the destruction of Europe and its productive capital by the war.
By any meaningful standard of measurement, these are,
materially speaking, the best years the human race has ever experienced—and the
best years the American people have ever experienced, too. Health, wealth,
safety, freedom, opportunity—never better. When Calvin Coolidge was president
of the United States of America and hence the most powerful man in the world,
his son died because of a blister on his toe acquired during a game of tennis.
It’s a different and better world.
The division of labor giveth, but it also taketh away.
The pains we are feeling in the developed world are growing pains, but they are
painful nonetheless. We may like the fruits of disruption—forget that “may,” we
like and love the fruits of
disruption—but the process itself is uncomfortable and bewildering, and it
imposes real losses on some people, too, mainly those who are not
well-positioned to adapt themselves to a new mode of work and hence a new mode
of life.
Globalization is building a bigger beehive. It is
recruiting new cells into the organism, with new and very fine modes of
specialization. In that sense, it is growth, literally: smaller political
economies growing into a larger one.
There is no alternative to the division of labor, because
there is no alternative to life.
Except the obvious one.
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