I thought my Blog needed an intellectual boost, so I invited my friend Glynn Young to do a book review as a guest post. Glynn is a public affairs director for a Fortune 500 company in St. Louis. He also writes about books, poetry and business at his Blog, Faith, Fiction, Friends.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work
By Alain de Botton
Pantheon, 2009, $26, 327 pages
My introduction to Alain de Botton occurred a month ago. I followed a link in a tweet on Twitter, and ending up at a YouTube video from the TED Conference in Oxford earlier this year. In the video, de Botton was speaking about our notions of what constitutes success and failure, and how we usually allow our success to be defined by others who have generally enshrined meritocracy as the guiding principle of people management. In short, meritocracy means we succeed or we fail, and if we fail, we deserve to fail. If we doubt that, he says, just go to the bookstore and look at the hundreds of self-help books available, which can be neatly summarized in two roughly equivalent piles – the books that say you can do anything, and the books that tell you how to deal with poor self-esteem. Those two piles could stand for work life in the 21st century.
But there was another statement in that video that grabbed my attention. A self-described secularist, de Botton pointed out that “we live in a society where we worship ourselves, and we’ve lost the habit of worshipping something transcendent.” (In another video, he also points out the importance of the idea of the Sabbath – to help us understand that we “didn’t create the world so lay down your tools and give it a rest.”) Without that transcendence, and with that self-worship, our work and our life becomes all about us.
This is the idea that suffuses “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work,” published in April in the U.K. and recently released here in the U.S. De Botton, an accomplished author who’s taken on subjects ranging from architecture and love to Proust, status and travel, here looks at 10 examples of work in contemporary society, to explain both the work itself and how it fits into the larger context of how we live. It’s a fascinating journey. The occupations or work he examines include cargo ship spotting, logistics (warehousing and distribution), biscuit or cookie manufacturing, career counseling, rocket science, painting, transmission engineering (monitoring electric power lines), accountancy, entrepreneurship and aviation. Illustrating the text are numerous black—and-white photographs, almost all by the documentary photographer Richard Baker.
Along the way, he discusses a number of questions and (cherished) beliefs. When does a job feel meaningful? (Whenever it allows us to generate delight or reduce suffering in others.) Isn’t our work supposed to make us happy? (We’re the first society to think that; the idea started vaguely in the Renaissance and by the 18th century was firmly taking root, but not until fairly recently did happiness become its own work objective, even though work rarely delivers happiness.) What is art for? (The sensuous presentation of ideas, according to Hegel.) And the explanation for our concern with the environment may have less to do with global warming or carbon footprints than our fascination with “the technological sublime,” a manifestation of self-worship.
For most of human history, he says, the main way to get people to work was some form of the whip. But once work became more specialized, more focused, more technological, more “brain-based,” the whip was no longer effective. Instead, management had to focus on “the mental well-being of employees.” Employees now have to be handled with patience and costly respect. (In another context, a talk on why we have departments of human resources, he has a term for all of the various theories of people management – “pseudo-science.” In the book, he challenges another sacred notion of the workplace by referring to the business plan as a “subgenre of contemporary fiction.”)
De Botton’s idea that we have lost our sense of the transcendent (i.e., God) is never as overtly stated as it is in that YouTube video, but it is present nonetheless. It’s there in how the people he meets and writes about use work to search for meaning, to seek happiness, to look for fulfillment. Our ideas of success and failure, how we compare and differentiate the value of the accounting firm executive and the waiter who serves him in the corporate dining room, the understanding that there is an almost preordained need for people to stay busy at something (if not happy) – all of these suggest that the transcendent is largely missing in today’s workplace and the culture at large. We define the value of people by what they do or how successful they are, not understanding that each of us are created with the same inherent value because we are each made in the image of God.
The people who populate the essays of the book – from the artist who spends two years painting the same oak tree over and over again to the Iranian entrepreneur who’s invented a way to walk on water – display a kind of anxiety, a determination to find something that smacks of meaning, fulfillment, success, happiness – or all of the above. The people who live in de Botton’s writing, and the writing is indeed good enough to say they live, are the same people we work with in our own companies and organizations, or the people we serve as clients and customers. Or ourselves.
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