Things Written Randomly in Doubt Page 20

  Enough. I cannot write a constitution for a distant future, and I’m not very qualified to do so. The central point of this essay is that class is at the heart everything and concerns our relationship with property. Every class can be subdivided into a myriad different professions and trades, often very different from each other. Each trade is quite distinct, unlike the classes, which don’t have clearly defined borders. Butcher, baker, candlestick-maker. Is that a candlestick you’re making? Yes. Then clearly that’s what you are.

  The London tube, that wonderful institution for mixing and squeezing together people who are in a rush to be elsewhere, provided me with an instructive encounter. I sat opposite a very elderly Indian man whose wiry body was only now beginning to lose its strength. His face was intelligent and his expression intense. His clothes were old, threadbare and fading. He had an old briefcase of the kind used by electricians, and brown, packing-case tape held it together. He was writing copious notes on a piece of paper that had some kind of diagram at the top of the page. My curiosity, by now, was fighting with my timid desire not to reveal it. I took the opportunity of a particularly intense spurt of note-scribbling to lean over and read the letter-head. I only caught the word “Associates”, but it was enough. This was work. This was work either for or on behalf of **** Associates. I had no idea what kind of company it was. He stopped writing and opened his case, from which he withdrew a video-box he had recycled as a crayon box. He then opened the box and a quantity of crayons spilt out over the chair beside him. He then spent a couple of minutes methodically returning them to their container with the exception of a few select ones. These he used to colour parts of his diagram slowly and painstakingly, perhaps almost lovingly – as someone would if they care about every aspect of their work. When he came to his station, he gathered his things together and then surveyed the seats carefully to check for forgotten items in the manner of a man only too aware of his ability to forget things. And then he was gone. He left me with a happily unsatisfied curiosity. Why was a man clearly the master of some unknown technical know-how and an obvious passion for his work so badly dressed? I like to think that it was because he cared little for material possessions and was driven solely by his love of knowledge. He spent his money on his grandchildren whom he indulged beyond belief because it cost him nothing in his unworldliness. On the other hand, he may have been half mad and designed complex, brilliant but ultimately impractical projects and inventions for **** Associates, who wearily and politely filed them away and paid him a meagre sum in order not to offend a man whose eccentric brilliance evoked fondness, respect and a degree of friendly laughter once he had left the office. Equally, he might have been entirely mad. **** Associates might have been his own imagined company and his technical drawings merely daft and meaningless lines on paper; his only life an inner life of fantasy and invented dialogue (like the equally mad novelist).

  Everyone else’s profession is a wonderful and absurd mystery. The Indian inventor, although an entirely truthful memory, is an excellent metaphor for the way in which we perceive professions we have never practised and can therefore never fully understand. The predictable behaviour of doctors, teacher, judges, electricians, builders and all the others we cannot avoid are often equally incomprehensible. We all rely on a wide variety of professions in our private lives but also in our own professional ones. A writer requires a publisher, and a publisher requires printers, editors, typesetters, cover designers, marketing experts, salespeople, bookshops and so on. A publisher does not have to know how to do these things, but must have some idea of their possibilities and limitations. The writer only needs to know how to write. “Only” in its singularity and not to underestimate the difficulties and varieties encompassed by that one activity. Most people take other professions for granted. They consider them to be simple and, of course, inferior to their own. If a builder fails to do a proper job, his customers are incensed, even though they may do much simpler and less responsible tasks in their own profession and work less conscientiously. We are trained in this society to believe in the sanctity of the financial transaction. “The customer is always right” and therefore can scream and shout. Failure to deliver the goods is a serious matter. But the price is decided by the market or a nomenklatura, and not the complexity of work involved. Many practised consumers take for granted and, unlike me, don’t seem to be impressed by this enormous array of professions and skills that are sealed off from us, but are so useful and often essential.

  There was a highly respected mathematician, who worked in a very specialist field. He was an elderly man and kept himself fit by going each morning to his university on a bicycle, whose saddle had become loose. This made the journey uncomfortable, and my neighbour offered to assist. He produced a spanner and within a few seconds had tightened the nut and entirely resolved the difficult problem. The old man was bowled over by the wonder of it, and shook his head at the cleverness of the man with the spanner. I would not be amazed by a spanner tightening a nut, but then I do not have the intelligence or knowledge to deal with the complex mathematics that stole this man’s enviable brain and energies. But I am enough of an obsessive to understand how someone even more obsessive might end up with this mindset. I am amazed by the number of professions and specialitisations within professions, and that each one has a unique culture, a unique vocabulary and a unique way of thinking or perceiving the world.

  Work is one of the most powerful identities, and as an identity it is the least destructive. It is not based on any mythology, but the day-to-day business of living. It concerns the very essence that we have created for ourselves, particularly now that we are less likely to follow in our fathers’ professional footsteps. It is where we spend most of our waking life and, if we are lucky, it is the object of our passions and even creativity. A person who if they belonged to a profession other than your own would be boring can become the most fascinating individual simply because they are in the same line of work. You can understand what they’re talking about, because of your shared expertise. That shared expertise can also be a source of rivalry or genuine disagreement. This can rankle, so we’re drawn to our fellow practitioners and we’re repulsed. We admire their methods or reject them. We consider them to be under or overvalued. But we do things in a completely different way to the non-practitioners, which is not to say that the non-practitioners’ views are less valid: is an actor’s acting to be judged better by another actor, who might, it’s true, see all those little professional tricks and know which are easy and which are difficult? It is an actor’s task to convince the public, not his or her peers. In other professions, it is the peers who matter. Would we want doctors and mechanics to be judged by those who aren’t? Most of us have no idea whether a doctor has given us the right pill or a mechanic has fitted the right carburettor on our car. If we have a doubt, we go to someone who does know. But always we perceive professions differently according to whether we practise them or not. These are very clearly defined identities. They are cultures.

  Professions and trades unite beyond all borders and boundaries. I knew an inshore fisherman. Wherever he went, he was drawn to the coast and the ports. He would wander and look at how the boats were made and how they were powered. Nets seem to have been a particular point of interest. Sometimes he would meet another fisherman and, although they had no common language, they would communicate, sometimes by actually doing something. He would point out a tear in a net, and the other fisherman would show him how he mended it. My friend would grab the net and start to show him how he mended it. The fisherman might nod with a bemused and unconvinced smile to show his indulgence for less skilled methods, or become alert as though he were about to learn something. And yet this real identity is not that strong. People of different languages, races, nations, religions, classes, ideologies and empires go to war with each other, but you don’t get the butchers going to war with the bakers. Professions and trades are important to human relationships, in a way that the larger ab
stractions of class, religion and nation are not. Professions and trades can lead to corruption, just as family and kinship can lead to nepotism, but they are down at the most essential human level.

  When Napoleon’s army descended into Italy in 1797, they opened the ghettos and made all subjects citizens, which meant that they could all join the armed forces. In 1799, the Ave Maria rebellions temporarily wrested power back for the Anciens Régimes and this led to a series of pogroms. A band of soldiers in Orvieto, in the Papal States set out for Pitigliano in southern Tuscany to loot the Jewish community. They were not used to meeting resistance. Unknown to them, the little town perched on a natural fortress of tufo rock was well used to the Napoleonic reforms. Grand Duke Leopold I of Tuscany was possibly the only real enlightened despot of the Enlightenment period, although it was easier to introduce reforms in a small state, as he would discover when he briefly became Emperor Leopold II of Austria at the end of his life. During his long rule, he steadily introduced a series of significant reforms. On 30 November 1786, Tuscany became the first modern state to abolish the death penalty, although it had been de facto abolished there since 1769. He also opened the ghettos and introduced citizenship, and this drew in refugees from other states. The Jewish community was built up in this period, and there was intermarriage across the religious divide, often within the same trade. The band of bravos from Orvieto encountered resistance from a united population, and one of the soldiers was cut down as he entered the first house. The rest took their horses and rode back to Orvieto. The skirmish was given grandiose titles: “La notte degli Orvietani” or even “La notte della rivoluzione”. The historical account I read suggested that removal of the interdiction on trades and the ensuing intermarriage explains the event. In other words the personal identities of family and trade are intermingled and are what you might call positive identities that can override the more abstract and dangerous ones.

  Professions and trades go on strike, but that is class activity. Sometimes it is a very specific group on strike, like signalmen or train drivers, but more generally it’s a sector, like railway workers. It is strife between employee and employer. It is not about the essence of being a signalman; it is about the essence of the relationship between the person who sells their labour and the person who buys it.

  Perhaps class identification with work is greatest amongst those who are most alienated from their work – those for whom work is primarily a means for earning a salary and their working days are governed by the clock that ticks too slowly. Perhaps only those who enjoy their work identify with it personally and are defined by it, although work always defines everyone to some extent. Primo Levi was surprised that when he became famous in America he was introduced as a Jew and Holocaust-survivor. “He was puzzled that Americans had made such a song and dance of his Jewishness. He was a chemist as well as a writer; Judaism was just one of the many things that interested him.”6 This was not primarily a cultural difference between Italy and America; it was an expression of how much he enjoyed and identified with both of his professions. For a person who enjoys their work, work is not a burden; it is their life. When they’re cutting their nails or having a shower, they’re still thinking about it. It is their constant companion, and perhaps isn’t even work as it is often perceived.

  You may think that I’m writing about the creative industries. Not at all. Such people can be found in many walks of life. Business people, mechanics, technicians, scientists, academics, you name it – where there’s a skill, then there are those who live off those skills, as though they were as important as the blood in their veins. Equally there are people in those professions who are just coasting along, and have either lost their passion for it or never had it. There may be good reason for having lost it. The world is not as amenable as we would like it, by which I mean not that everything should be easy – that would take the pleasure away – but that hierarchies and bureaucracies kill off autonomy. The work should be difficult, but the working environment should be on your side. So often it isn’t, and in the end the individual gives up trying, because their ideas are going to be rejected anyway, or the management demands that work is done so quickly that it cannot be done well, or for a host of other reasons why work becomes a place in which the employee is just an object that is programmed and set going. Surely this is a greater political problem than the ones of productivity and GDP that are constantly reiterated in every news bulletin here, like the Soviet five-year plan that was satirised in the West. The waste of human talent is now mainly caused by the insane drive for productivity.

  The only way this problem can be overcome is by involving people in the decisions that affect their work. It is important to give people control over what they do and to trust them to do a good job; then they can start to enjoy their work. Not everyone has an obsessive nature. Some people enjoy their work, but at the end of the day they want to leave it behind and perhaps even forget about it. This probably means that they’re well-balanced people. They too will enjoy their work more if they are given more autonomy.

  Capitalism has spent the last thirty or so years introducing legislation to protect the consumer; this is also a way of pushing small businesses out of the way because they cannot sustain the extra costs, while the very large companies pass on the percentage to be paid by those of us who don’t spend our lives walking in and out of shops demanding our statutory rights. I was at the cash desk in a shoe shop when a man walked in with a pair of shoes he wished to return. He had a loud voice – received pronunciation – and he claimed without any evidence that he had bought the shoes there and they were letting water in. This was not surprising because it looked as though he had walked across several mountain ranges in them, and they weren’t walking boots. Of course, the shopkeepers sent him packing and perhaps he wandered off to another shoe shop, but the interesting thing is that he thought he was in with a chance. Where is the legislation to protect the producer? What little there is is being torn up. Now we have zero-hours contracts, a return to some of the worst forms of wage slavery. The producer gets the rod, and the consumer is constantly offered the carrot – all kinds of weird carrots, such as loyalty points and special promotions. Buy a newspaper and they offer you a bottle of water or a bar of chocolate. Leave me alone, you want to say, the newspaper is expensive enough. They seem very motivated to persuade you, and you wonder at the oppressiveness of it all. Where are the human relationships? Shopping isn’t the problem; it’s that every tuppence-ha’penny transaction becomes a complex speculation. Buying a train ticket is like entering the commodity market; their prices go up and down on the internet like stocks and shares. People don’t even talk about the weather and football so much. “Did you enjoy your meal?” “Is everything as you would wish it, Sir?” There was a time when you went to the shop for the crack as well as the pint of milk, which is still possible at the corner shop, but forget it in the retail chains: now we’re talking earnestly about chocolate bars and bottles of mineral water. Am I alone in objecting to having my mind invaded by this rubbish? Am I alone in rejecting the Have-a-good-day culture? Am I alone in longing for the garrulous shopkeeper and the cantankerous waitress – a world populated by real people with problems they don’t have to hide? But most of all I count myself lucky that I don’t have to do these things. Those who cannot beam on demand and ask insincere standard questions must be very stressed by these new demands on the workforce. Industrialisation started with the standardisation of products, and that brought some undoubted benefits. Now it has passed on to the standardisation of us – and of our relationships. We should not exaggerate: human beings are very wilful when it comes to being human and resisting those who want to turn them into machines. But then again, the more sophisticated methods of modern advertising and propaganda programme people and persuade them at the same time that they are free. Consider the yearly migration of young consumers to Ibiza for the expensive misery of a week’s sun-kissed, hard-work hedonism. If we lose variety, we lose the
ability to enjoy the external world. We should consume less, and when we do, we should draw on the uniqueness of its little pleasures. At work, we should regain the essentiality of important human relationships by being ourselves and doing things differently. I think of those wonderful teachers and university lecturers who taught me and would now be considered eccentric at best. They would be sacked within a month. One glance from the inspectors and they’d be off. Each generation has its own reason for self-medicating with alcohol.