........in which I talk about King Arthur's Court and welders.

A few months back, Marco Rubio made a comment about the country needing more welders than philosophers.  This made most every philosopher I know pretty upset, and social media seemed to explode (insofar as philosophers possess the demographic capital to make anything explode) with mass protest about how important philosophy is to society, how educational programs in philosophy are indeed conducive to an economically productive future, and how philosophers are disproportionately rich and good-looking with rapier wits.  O.K., I made that last part up, but it wasn't too much an exaggeration of the hullaballoo. 

 

Lost in all of this angst was the welders.  Perhaps because they were on the complimented side of Rubio's comment.  I think it more likely they lacked the luxury of time and means to fritter away their day hunting down links to statistics that validated their wages and existence and which they could post on Facebook with a "Ha-Ha, Marco Rubio."  Whatever the case, I want in today's post to give the welders -- and their ilk; what I think Rubio was intending to connote with the term was anybody who works in a manual labor profession and produces or services material goods as their vocation -- a little of the attention they didn't get in the Rubio flap.

 

Two things at the outset:  1) I'm not concerned at all here with the economics of profession, the usefulness of degrees, or any of the implied politics of Marco Rubio.  Those things concern me as a person, but not here.  2) I do not mean at all to denigrate philosophy.  The examined life is terribly important.  Anyone who knows me will tell you that I spend, if anything, too much time in examination of both my life and life in general.  Philosophy is probably more important to the human race than welding, as such.  We got along for a few thousand years without welding; rudimentary philosophy has been around since Adam first wondered what he was doing here.  So please, philosophers, withhold your ire.  I'm not against you.  In fact, what I would like to do in what remains is to philosophically consider the welder.

 

In a passage in Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, the title character Hank Morgan (The Boss) takes a moment off from his drilling King Arthur in how to act like a commoner to consider the difference between the life of the King and the life of the commoner.  The King, of course, is an intellectual (loosely speaking) and the commoner a member of the working class.  I'd like to quote the passage in its entirety.

 

"There are wise people who talk ever so knowingly and complacently about 'the working classes,' and satisfy themselves that a day's hard intellectual work is very much harder than a day's hard manual toil, and is righteously entitled to much bigger pay.  Why, they really think that, you know, because they know all about the one but haven't tried the other.  But I know all about both; and so far as I am concerned, there isn't money enough in the universe to hire me to swing a pick-axe thirty days, but I will do the hardest kind of intellectual work for just as near nothing as you can cipher it down -- and I will be satisfied too.

Intellectual 'work' is misnamed; it is a pleasure, a dissipation, and its own highest reward.  The poorest paid architect, engineer, general, author, sculptor, painter, lecturer, advocate, legislator, actor, preacher, singer, is constructively in heaven when he is at work; and as for the magician with the fiddle-bow in his hand, who sits in the midst of a great orchestra with the ebbing and flowing tides of divine sound washing over him -- why, certainly he is at work, if you wish to call it that, but lord, it's a sarcasm just the same.  The law of work does seem utterly unfair -- but there it is, and nothing can change it:  the higher the pay in enjoyment the worker gets out of it, the higher shall be his pay in cash, also."

There's a lot in that little passage:  the gulf of separation of the intellectual ruling class from the working class, the injustice that the most rewarding professions pay the most money too, and the line of B.S. that hard intellectual work more or less equates to hard physical work.  (Think about that last one for just a minute:  It doesn't take you too terribly long to realize that nobody has ever been or will ever be sentenced to 20 years in Siberia working out Sudoku puzzles.)  I'd like to briefly consider each of these three things in turn, and at the end of it all, hopefully we'll appreciate the welders -- and machinists, excavators, janitors, garbage men, dishwashers, road crew, landscapers, etc. -- a little bit more than we're used to.  You'll notice I left farmers out of that list.  I did that on purpose.  I'll come back to it.

First, Twain noted that the intelligentsia in his day pretty much didn't get the working classes.  He knows this because they say that hard intellectual work is as hard -- or harder - than hard manual labor.  And, as Hank points out, it's not.  Not in any way.  Like Hank, I've done both.  I've worked hard at both, insofar as working hard means putting in a great deal of earnest energy in order to accomplish a task.  But there's a difference, that can easily be illustrated by two different experiences with summer jobs.  During the summer between my freshman and sophomore years in college, I laid railroad track to earn money for school.  I spend 8+ hours a day manually hauling around heavy, creosote soaked ties and driving railroad spikes.  It was hot, miserable, and dirty.  What made it bearable was that I knew it was temporary.  Like Hank, I don't think there's money in the world that would have made it doable as a vocation....for me; obviously, it was a vocation for a number of the guys I worked with.  Fast forward not quite 15 summers, and I spend my "vacation" between academic years at Thiel College writing a detective novel.  I put just as much effort and probably nearly as much time into the novel as I put into laying track, but..... well, let me illustrate this with a story:  I wrote most of the novel on our front porch, because, like Twain, I like to smoke cigars when I write, and my wife won't let me smoke in the house.  Employing the "if you give a mouse a cookie" logic, when I smoke, I like to have a beverage.  So most afternoons found me at the bistro table on our porch with a laptop, a beer, and a cigar......working.  One day, a man from the window company came by to give us an estimate on replacing our front windows.  The short of it is that it was too high, and we were in the midst of declining when he indicated my beer, cigar, and laptop on the bistro table and said,  "Well, if your husband was spending his days working......" 

He was being funny, of course, but he was also dispensing some true homespun wisdom, which is that to those who actually work, intellectual work isn't work at all.*  Sure, those of us in the philosophic fields of academia might whine all the time about how much we aren't paid, but that's exactly to the point; we do what we do anyway, because we like it.  I didn't see a penny from the novel, which still languishes in unpublished obscurity, but I can't wait for this summer to start so I can do it again, even if for the same pay.  Conversely, I wouldn't drive spikes again all summer for half again as much pay.

Of course, academics are sort of the exception to the rule.  As Hank Morgan noted in his day -- and it's worse now -- usually one is paid more the less his job requires him to actually work.  Don't get me wrong, he may put in the time.  Lawyers, for instance, famously never see their families, but they never break a sweat either, unless the building's air conditioning goes out, and I'd bet any one of them their savings account that they wouldn't trade positions and work an assembly line if the respective salaries were switched.  And there's something of an injustice in that.  For much manual labor, the pay is the only reward, so it seems to me it should be larger proportionately.  It'll never happen, the market being what it is, but I'd kind of like to see a bus driver paid more than a hedge fund manager.

We do have a sector of the ruling class in our country who purportedly are dedicated to helping rectify some of that injustice.  Predominantly, that's the Democrats.  Of course, there are other planks in their platform, but, traditionally, in my lifetime at least, the Democrats have been a party dedicated to adjusting things so that the economic situation of the working class is more equitable with that of the white collared "worker."  And don't get me wrong, I think that many of them actually mean well.  Some of them, of course, are simply Machiavellian villains pandering to folks they consider their intellectual inferiors in the interest of swindling their votes so that they can remain in power.  But many are also probably well meaning.  But even the well meaning ones have a problem, which is that many of them have never really worked, themselves.  I offer exhibit "A" above and to the right.  I get that he's not dressed for the job, but that man is clearly not used to swinging a pickaxe.  He looks more likely to fall down than make any real progress on getting a sizeable hole.  This, by the way, is one of the guys that I think genuinely feels like helping a worker, but I don't think he gets their lives at all.  It is, of course, not just Democrats who have become experientially separated from the working classes.  A lot of us have.  Many upscale urbanites in our country probably go cradle to grave anymore without ever having a good healthy backache brought on by spending all day working.

And there's something problematic about that.  A lot of somethings, probably.  Doubtless, we can't fix them all today, but one thing we can do is learn to appreciate the welder in our midst.  In Twain's novel, the bogey was the aristocracy, a bloated, lazy class that, though they added nothing to society in actuality, received all the respect.  I wouldn't at all equate present day philosophers with the medieval aristocracy -- nor any of the intellectual professions as such.  I would equate celebrities.**  And professional athletes.  These folks have earned neither their bloated*** salaries nor the respect that we lavish on them as a culture.  Rivet drivers have, conversely, earned much more than we pay them, and certainly more respect than we give them.

A follow up on farmers.  I excluded them from the manual professions as such because, as Twain describes the working classes, they are people who work only for their pay, i.e. non-intellectual, not rewarding in their own right.  That doesn't describe the farmer.  Farming is an intellectual trade, and an autonomous one.  Farmers don't punch a clock.  They're their own bosses (when the bank doesn't own them), and their trade requires intellect.  In some senses, they are every bit as artistic as the fiddler or the painter, working the canvas of flora and fauna and producing something beautiful (and often times tasty).  Which isn't to say that they don't work hard.  One might say that, from a perspective, farming is the perfect vocation.  A farmer understands more of the fusion of hard work and wit and even homespun philosophy than pretty much anybody.  When you throw in the fact that they keep you fed, you can't help but come to the conclusion that they're more important and deserving of respect than even welders, to say nothing of the Kardashians.


*A similar anecdote also illustrates this.  Once at a Foo Fighters concert I attended, Dave Grohl came out for the encore with a guitar and a can of Miller High Life.  The folks in the front started chanting, "Chug it!"  Grohl fixed them with a stare and said, "Chug it?  I'm working right now."  'Nuf said. 

**It really is a social evil that the Kardashians are a thing. 

***Bloated like a tick gets bloated when it's been on a horse for three days, all puffy and grey and nasty.