One of the defining features of post-industrial economies in the early Twenty-First Century is specialization and an extensive division of labor. Unlike the farmer or the artisan who could immediately observe the impact of their labor on his fellow human beings, it is now difficult for us to know where the materials that support us in our work came from or how our work ultimately impacts anyone. Yet without this division of labor, there is no way we could experience the material abundance and the services we experience today.
Alain de Botton, a native of Switzerland who grew up in England, offers an engaging look into this dilemma in his recent book, The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work. The book is a travelogue through a variety of occupations and industries, including cargo ship spotting, warehouse logistics, biscuit (cookie) production, career counseling, rocket science in French Guiana, painting (as in painting art), transmission engineering, accountancy, entrepreneurship, and aviation. Almost every page of text is accompanied by black and white photo on the opposing page relating to the businesses he explored.
The book is an engaging combination of wit and wisdom. De Botton hones in on how people find meaning and purpose in their work, often in the face of banal … even absurd … realities they confront in their daily work. He frequently resorts to a delightfully dry sense of humor to make his point, but he offers incisive philosophical reflection throughout the book. For instance, in concluding the chapter on Biscuit Manufacturing, he writes:
… It was in the eighteenth century that economist and political theorists first became aware of the paradoxes and triumphs of commercial societies, which place trade, luxury and private fortunes at their centre whilst paying only lip service to the pursuit of higher goals. From the beginning, observers of these societies have been transfixed by two of their most prominent features: their wealth and their spiritual decadence. Venice in her heyday was one such society, Holland another, eighteen-century Britain a third. Most of the world now follows their example.
Their self-indulgence has consistently appalled a share of their most high-minded and morally ambitious members, who have railed against consumerism and instead honoured beauty and nature, art and fellowship. But the premises of a biscuit company are a fruitful place to recall that there has always been an insurmountable problem facing those countries that ignore the efficient production of chocolate biscuits and sternly dissuade their ablest citizens from spending their lives on the development of innovative marketing promotions: they have been poor, so poor as to be unable to guarantee political stability or take care of their most vulnerable citizens, whom they have lost to famines and epidemics. It is the high-minded countries that have let their members starve, whereas the self-centred and the childish ones have, off the back of their doughnuts and six thousand varieties of ice cream, had the resources to invest in maternity wards and cranial scanning machines. … (100-102)
In the final two paragraphs of the book, he writes:
… If we could witness the eventual fate of every one of our projects, we would have no choice but to succumb to immediate paralysis. Would anyone who watched the departure of Xerxes’ army on its way to conquer the Greeks, or Taj Chan Ahk giving orders for the construction of the golden temples of Cancuen, or the British colonial administrators inaugurating the Indian postal system, have had it in their hearts to fill their passionate actors in the eventual fate of their efforts?
Our work will at least have distracted us, it will have provided a perfect bubble in which to invest our hopes for perfection, it will have focused our immeasurable anxieties on a few relatively small-scale and achievable goals, it will have given us sense of mastery, it will have made us respectably tired, it will have put food on the table. It will have kept us out of greater trouble. (326)
In many ways, de Botton reads like a modern-day version of the teacher from Ecclesiastes with a British sense of humor. I sense that he has genuine sympathy and respect for his research subjects, but he does not pretend to have answers. Instead, he poignantly reflects to the reader the world his subjects live in … and the reader lives in!
What are the theological responses to de Botton's work? It astounds me how little the Church has to say about these issues central to our consciousness and our mission in the world.
I highly recommend this book!
Below is Alain de Botton's presentation at TED, A kinder, gentler philosophy of success. I don't endorse all his conclusions, but this would make a wonderful discussion starter.
Update: Here is a link to the photos by Richard Baker that weren't used in the book. Photos.
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