The most tiresome part of living in a faux revolutionary age, in which the only bona fide success story is of the one who rebels against some tradition or “disrupts” some existing industry; the most tiresome part—I say—is that we all have to choke down and deny our basic hope that the world will continue.
The continuity of the world—whether it takes the form of baseball, church-going, hewing wood, or dentistry—requires the imitation of fathers by sons, mothers by daughters, and the old by the young. “A man will be known by his children,” the Bible says, and this much is true, that whatever life you live and good you do will evaporate with you—unless it is taken up by children who do it again, however differently.
Imitation of this kind is most obviously inspired by admiration. A man can threaten and spit at his children to get them to go church, but no such coercion will match the peaceful efficiency of simply being an admirable churchgoer. You can pay your kids to garden or to read, but money can’t buy what human nature provides for free: that children are born mushy while adults are relatively definite, and that the indefinite look to the definite and long to know their secret.
When a child looks and wonders, in so many words, how to become his father, this unrepeatable specificity of an adult, the answer is invariably: “do as I do.” By doing a certain thing, by perfecting a certain skill, by learning a certain trade, a man becomes specific, becomes particular. The mason’s hands feel strong, his muscles bulge; he looks and talks a certain way; he is capable of a particular range of motions and decisions; he contains a particular wisdom, and exudes a particular culture. His work characterizes him, stamps itself into his person, and it is this second, habitual nature that provides a basis for childhood imitation.
It is no secret that children love types. If Old MacDonald had a farm and yet did not have the typical characteristics of a farmer, the child would lose interest in him. Where stories are concerned, a banker without a large bag of money is like a burglar without a mask—a flop. Types serve as landmarks to the child who, in the thrill of his developing powers, loves to see evidence that he can, in fact, become someone particular—sharpened to a point and recognizable at a glance. This is why children generally begin their waking life desiring to be people in uniform—nurses, police officers, firemen, mailmen, altar servers, soldiers, princesses, ninjas, and so on. The idea of a child desiring to be a civil servant or an app-designer or the manager of a health-care start-up is simply laughable, and if we were to ruin the joke by entertaining it seriously we would have to imagine some stereotypical looks and behaviors by which these occupations could be believably taken as types.
The child grows up but he does not grow out of this longing. Even after he readily distinguishes between the uniform and the man, between the tool and the one who wields it, between the role and the person who performs it, he continues to love the type. There is no creature striving for its own perfection that does not spontaneously love an image of achieved perfection; no creature being shaped who does not love the fact of a definite shape; no American man who does not secretly want to be a fireman.
The trouble with a technological age is that people are increasingly shapeless. We produce less types. Physical obesity is simply a fruit of this crisis of character, this spiritual flabbiness in which fewer and fewer people act or work in such a manner as to produce, out of their lives, someone admirable, some definite character, the lines of which can be imitated and redrawn by the child. The production and use of technological devices involves people in activating pre-arranged systems—with relative dexterity, to be sure—but in such a way that the habits they produce in people are without specificity, without stamp.
The specificity of work is “stored up” in the machine. It contains definiteness and character in a fixed and literal way. A mason is “for stone” by his second nature, but a backhoe fitted with a pneumatic jackhammer is “for stone” by its first and only nature—much in the way an animal comes pre-fitted and permanently fixed for its particular life in and through its tooth, claw, or wing. Men who activate these immensely character-ful machines no longer do something, but rather set machines in motion with some minimal motion of their own—indeed, it is precisely this bare minimum of motion which is the object of eventual replacement by another machine.
This is a twofold alienation, as Marx would put it, because the worker no longer sees himself in the product of his work, and the work no longer comes to presence in him, but exists only as a “job,” that is, as an exchangeable and fungible means of “making money” which would be done equally well if one could get the stuff without laboring at all—by winning the lottery, say.
The Industrial Revolution’s destruction of the craftsman and the artisan could not entirely destroy the natural propensity for admiration and imitation by which the world repeats itself in the next generation. Especially where the machinery was dangerous and the work difficult, the very suffering of the human became a source of admiration. Bodies still became specified. Laborers were represented in unions, where their paradoxical specificity as non-specific laborers (as opposed to the capitalist class) became a passionate source of pride. If the child could not precisely admire his father as a type, honed to a particular point by the development of a skill, still, he could admire and imitate his father as a hard worker, as someone strong and tough, as someone who suffered nobly and honorably.
But these vestigial remains of admiration were all but obliterated in the more common work of mass-production—one could be admirable for making steel, but for making pre-packaged cupcakes? The rate at which the next generation clamored for white-collar jobs, for college education, for managerial status, for a way “out,” reduced to the point of nonentity whatever admiration and imitation remained in labor. If anything could be passed from father to son, mother to daughter, it was simply the wisdom that one must make money, that one must get a job, and the cleverness by which to find a job that pays well. Now, the large corporation takes on the same characteristics as the large machine. The company is branded, recognizable, iconic, character-ful, specified, flourishing—and its workers are unrecognizable in their work. They cannot explain to their children exactly what it is that they do. Their labor is not itself a source of admiration, and they do not pretend that it is, but maintain an ironic distance from it. It’s just a job.
All of this means that one of the normal helps by which the human world repeats itself in the next generation—skilled labor, which makes men and women admirable—is denigrated by mechanization and technologization. Technology wars against fruitfulness, contracepting it by making men into flabby, un-imitable, and unadmirable figures. We need not wonder why modern nations are characterized by the language of revolution and a rote antipathy between the young and the old: we have lost the help of skilled labor which quite naturally makes the former want to be like the latter.
And so our world is characterized by an extrinsic addition of character as style, as fashion, as something which does not arise from what we do, but from what we buy. Our technological work leaves no mark—but we do wear t-shirts that “say” things about us. It is an age whose work produces no particular character that is obsessed with identity, with being someone specific, labeled. Labor no longer helps us become who we are, and so trivial things, like taste in music, rush in to fill the gap—the love of types so obviously finding fulfillment in punk, emo, metal, or some other media-produced “character” maintained into an adulthood that provides no other source of characterization. In darker hours, I think of this as some sort of plot to deny humanity of its natural mode of reproduction in order to open up new markets for selling stuff—the commodification of character-building.