Unreal City: Economic Pressures in the Modern World

T.S.Eliot 1888-1965

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought that death had undone so many.

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.

Flowed up hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

(The Waste Land, lines 60-68)

Work is everything in an industrial society. If you don't have a job you lack not just money but also an assured future for yourself and your family. You do not have a place in society and therefore no status and no entitlement to self-respect. That at least is how most people feel today. It is hard to maintain your own high estimation of yourself if the rest of the world around you regards you as less than a fully self-supporting citizen. The pressure is very considerable: you have to find employment to have any claim to self-respect and the self-respect that you feel you are entitled to will probably be proportionate to your salary, security and assets. We live in the unvoiced estimation of others.

This modern situation draws attention to our need to find a place and function in society. Our imagined graduate who has been offered a job in a prestigious weapons research establishment will find it difficult to refuse the offer in a world where appropriate jobs are in short supply. Why then should he or she feel any embarrassment at all about accepting what is a very good offer? Clearly our graduate feels unhappy about working for an organisation that produces chemical or biological weapons that might have immense destructive power. Like Jim in South America, he or she feels that his or her own interests and happiness must be weighed against those of people in general. This person feels that other people - including people unmet and unknown, possibly people in hostile foreign countries - have a claim to influence her decisions. 

How could this person resolve this conflict within herself? There are a number of outcomes. We might look first at how things might actually work out in practice in what we call 'the real world'. If it was you or I that had to make this decision to take or not to take the job we might just decide that my responsibility is to provide for ourselves and our families and that it was absurd to take into account distant and unforeseeable consequences of our work in the weapons establishment. That's the job of others and relies in part on the decisions and attitudes of foreign powers. We start to distance ourselves from responsibility for the manufacture and use of these weapons. We start in other words to deceive ourselves by editing and suppressing what we think and feel.

But imagine that we are not like that. Imagine that we take these distant possibilities seriously and feel that we would be responsible in some measure for what might happen in the future. Such a person might turn to the intellectual or religious tradition and look for support for her disquiet. She might turn to the British utilitarian tradition which urges us to pursue only those actions that would maximize the happiness (or minimize the unhappiness) of all those who might be affected by the consequences of our actions. If more happiness or less unhappiness would be produced by our not taking up this kind of work then, according to people like Mill and Bentham, we should not do it. It is, says these thinkers, a kind of calculation. This numerical calculation of happiness-consequences - even if it is a calculation of imaginary events - gives us a clear answer about what we should do. The fear that many people might die as a result of weapons I had helped to develop would be enough to make us feel a great aversion to being associated with the research that had produced those weapons. I would hate to think that I had been part of their death just because I needed money for myself and my family. I would have to walk away from the job. 

That is how a modern British liberal might be tempted to think about these things. It is certainly the way people in this country are encouraged to think about such events. But the result would be much the same if instead our graduate had looked to Kantianism or Christianity. Christianity still makes us think in terms of the absolute commands of the Decalogue. Of the ten commandments none carries greater resonance than 'Thou shalt not kill' (Exodus 20: 1-17 & Deuteronomy 5: 4-21) For people brought up in or close to these traditions - and perhaps our graduate is one of them -this command still carries great force. Or our graduate might be drawn to Kant's categorical imperatives. These are secular versions of the Christian commandments supposedly arrived at by reason alone without the influence of religious teachings. A categorical imperative

Odysseus didn't worry about commandments or maximizing happiness!

Let us try to summarize. We are imagining that our graduate already has some serious doubts about taking up the post she has been offered. She wants the job and she needs the money for very good purposes, but something in her is unhappy with this way of life. This is the basic given in the situation. From this base-camp as it were we have imagined her reaching out to religious and philosophical traditions that give some intellectual substance to her doubts. Surely this is how we respond. We do not think through things for ourselves or rather we do so but with enormous debts to others around us who have thought more deeply about these things. Few of us are able to give fully thought-out expression to the passions that obscurely drive our lives. We borrow our thoughts from others. We feel that we have to just get on with our lives.

“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.” So wrote John Maynard Keynes. His remarks apply to all of us and not just as regards practical matters. We are all to some degree bricoleurs - that's to say, odd-job men - of the spirit, borrowing magpie-fashion from here and there, without the leisure or inclination to examine our intellectual assumptions very carefully. The pressures of economics if nothing else stop us from going too far down that path, much as they might stop our graduate from thinking too hard about the job she has been offered.

People have often imagined an ideal world, one that does not constrain us in the way this world so obviously does. 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems — the problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion', said Keynes, rather optimistically. It is now almost a hundred years since Keynes imagined that day of freedom and more than a hundred-and-fifty years since Karl Marx tried to scare the middle classes into an egalitarian paradise with his claim that 'the spectre of communism is haunting Europe'. We seem as far as ever from the day when people would be free to devote themselves to the problems of human relations. Our graduate's wish not to have to be involved in weapons production does her much credit, but she is likely to end up telling herself that someone has to do this job and that it might as well be her.

Arguably we are likely to end up muddling through, thinking with remnants of other people's thoughts, and thinking that these moral imperatives have some kind of life of their own when they are nothing but the odds and ends of other people's passions.

Some days at the office are worse than others

  

Final Thoughts

(1) Our graduate seems to have generous thoughts but is caught in a material dilemma that is likely to skew her thoughts about what she is doing if she does go ahead and take the job at the Weapons Establishment. If she does take the job she will probably tell herself that she had no choice, that it is a necessary job given the world we live in, etc.

(2) We will imagine that our graduate has generous instincts. We would probably think less highly of her if she had devoted herself to her work in the Research Establishment either because of a passion for technological innovation  or because she had some ideological commitment to the Nation or Communism or Capitalism or Islam. We admire rather those people whose lives reflect that fundamental concern for problems Keynes described as basic, 'the problems of life and human relations.' There are no reasons for her choice, or, if there are, they come second, and she choose them as afterthoughts. It is that fact that she is the generous person she is that comes first. Her thoughts reflect her character and that is the way it is for most of us, most of the time.

(3) She and we regard the products of other people's thinking - categorical imperatives, biblical commandments, liberal notions of universal well-being - as floating in the intellectual air as if they had an independent existence. We do not manage to make these ideas completely or genuinely our own. It is as if they bully us into accepting them rather than what we are ourselves. We need an intellectual currency in order to be able to talk to each other, but we should ideally put our own stamp on our coins.

(4) In Albert Camus' novel The Fall, the narrator says, 'Do you know that in my little village, in the course of some reprisals, a German officer politely asked an old woman to choose which of her two sons was to be shot as a hostage? Can you imagine choosing like that? This one? That one? No, the other. And seeing him leave.' Mercifully, nothing like this happens in most of our lives, but there is a sense in which something like this happens in everybody's life. We all have to choose between having all of our life or surrendering some part of it in order to survive. We do not succeed in becoming the people we might have been if the world had been kinder or we ourselves more courageous. 

If you don't agree with this - and that may well be the case - try thinking through your own answer. That is really what is needed. Go and write down what you think.