I have been patronizing my dishwasher. I have been subsidizing its efforts. It is my little child, my idiot ward—an aging, arthritic servant I can’t honorably let go. Watch, as I slide a dinner plate into its lower basket, then—no, but it would be too cruel. My dishwasher will never peel that particle of gnocchi from that bed of chicken fat. Should my dishwasher rise to the occasion, should she in fact Wash a Dish, as her title suggests she might, still—said gnocchi risks clogging her innards. Back to the sink! Back to the hot water! Back to the yellow sponge with the abrasive moss on one side!
The labor of preparing a dish for its dishwasher is just two ticks shy of hand-washing the thing. Were I to add a metric-squish of soap; were I to give an additional pass of the sponge along the unsullied side of the dinner plate, why—I’d have the thing on the drying rack and that right quick. But then—how would my dishwasher feel?
Useless, irrelevant, and passed over by history, like a fifty-two-year-old chronically unemployed Appalachian man trained for a job in the steel mills—that’s how. I’ll not add to that neglect. Sure, she limps now, but once my dishwasher was heralded as “The Great Domestic Problem Solved!” She swept into the modern household on a tide of gigantic hope: “not just another appliance but a happy end to one of Mother’s dreariest tasks ... a gift of precious hours [!] of fun and relaxation.” The dishwasher was the very spirit of the labor-saving device, the hope of a billion housewives for liberation from drudgery: “Let it wash the dishes while I, having been saved by a slave, become fulfilled, learn the alto saxophone, take online classes in systematic theology, etc.”
Now we all have dishwashers. Where have those “hours of fun and relaxation” ended up? Mysterious, indeed. Is the antifeminist answer The Answer? Was the household appliance revolution a sordid plot by capitalist pigs to make women commodity-dependent in the home so that they (the womenfolk) could be wrung for value within the wage-labor market? Were women, liberated by technology, the scabs utilized to keep wages low for men? Chilling stuff.
The Dishwasher, says the U.S. Energy Information Administration, is chief among the least-used appliances in the American household. I presume this because they don’t work well. Or perhaps, having found out that there is nothing fulfilling about a life saved from labor, we might as well spend it hand-washing the dishes as doing anything else. “The reasons for handwashing when a dishwasher is available vary,” a study tells me, “but cultural differences, distrust in technology, and personal preference are often cited.” (I sense, without looking, that Mexicans are being targeted here.)
I am assured by such studies that the non-use of the dishwasher is a gross prejudice, that modern dishwashers require no pre-rinsing, that dishwashers are more efficient—though that is a slightly different question—and that “science has settled the score” when it comes to the question of which is better: hand-washing or machine washing. Well, let us pay Science its tribute: I have no doubt that, within laboratory conditions, the dishwasher beats hand-washing. But what to make of this life outside the lab, in which dishes pile, and crud congeals, in the household which nevertheless sports a KitchenAid, a Whirlpool, or a Samsung?
If the human being was just a more sophisticated version of the same machine that washes his dishes, then aiding him with the latter would be a reallocation of labor-time, simply—and “science” could prove it. But, if dish-washing is a personal act, if a man must freely decide to do the dishes, if he must take them upon himself in an act of decision and execution, then the effect of the machine on his spirit must be accounted for.
The presence of a machine called a “dishwasher”—which still signifies an occupation, something a man might be instead of have—is not neutral to the act of washing the dishes. And we still must wash the dishes! We still have to hand-wash the pots and pans, the bigger items, the deep-dish casserole trays with their crowns of burnt cheese, the kitchen knives—I am told that they dull inside the dishwasher—and so on. Even if we cook like wimps, and end our meals with nothing more than dulled water-glasses and plates that barely evidence the nuggets that recently warmed them, still—we have to load and unload the thing.
And doing whatever dishes we must requires courage, requires resignation, requires that spiritedness by which we fully acknowledge that we are in fact, doing the dishes, willing to get our hands dirty, willing to bust suds. Doing the dishes is not like other tasks—in a special way, they present themselves as needing to be overcome, conquered, slain. Why?
“The belly is an ungrateful wretch, it never remembers past favors, it always wants more tomorrow,” says Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Man labors because he is a body, a stomach that always gets hungry. He exists only by successfully obeying the wheel of hunger, consumption, and satiation that cycles inside him.
Now, doing the dishes obviously belongs to this cycle of need and satisfaction—but the dishes are not enjoyable in the same way that eating is enjoyable. The dishes share the never-ending quality of all labor—which “never frees the laboring animal from repeating it all over again” [Hannah Arendt]—but they satiate no longing. The dishes are not the solution to the problem of being bound to the hungering body—they are the eternally recurring consequence of it.
In all hunger and eating we can see a lovely continuity between man and the other animals: “The ‘blessing or joy of labor’ [Marx] is the human way to experience the sheer bliss of being alive which we share with all living creatures.... [It is] the only way men, too, can remain and swing contentedly in nature’s prescribed cycle, toiling and resting, laboring and consuming, with the same happy and purposeless regularity with which day and night and life and death follow each other,” says Hannah Arendt. In the dishes, however, we see man in his distinction from the simplicity of the sea otter. No other animal uses dishes. The daily consumption that occupies the meerkat produces no problem—no Thing Which Must Be Dealt With now that the grubbing is done. The animal is fit for his world. Like the ultimate Boy Scout, it leaves no trace. Only man frowns and fusses to find the world as it is. Only man will not put the world into his mouth unless he can first transform it, and in transforming it leave behind many traces—chief among them a tupperware oranged with pasta sauce. Only man cooks—and so only man must do the washing up.
The dishes, then, are a sign of man’s transcendence of the world, or, to be less pompous about it, they are a rebuke of that desire (you’ve felt it, I’m sure) to be natural, fit, and absorbed without remainder into the world. The herd of cows, says Nietzsche, “springs around, eats, rests, digests, jumps up again, and so from morning to night and from day to day, with its likes and dislikes closely tied to the peg of the moment.... To witness this is hard for man, because he boasts to himself that his human race is better than the beast and yet looks with jealousy at its happiness.”
It is as if the world was not fit for such a creature as man, who always alters it in order to eat it. Correspondingly, it is as if man were not fit for the world. Every other animal comes prepared, by tooth and claw and instinct, by all we mean by “nature,” for its daily bread. This sense of being bound to an animal existence for which one is ill-fit comes to a head in doing the dishes. These greasy trays contain neither the worldly pleasures of animal life, nor the transcendent pleasure of our rational life—but they gotta get done.
Because of this, they require a certain attitude. It is a courageous attitude, in that it manfully accepts a consequence and a symbol of mortality. It is an attitude that bears a great similarity to that of penance, or at least to payment, in that—unlike every animal—a human being pays for the pleasure of consumption by way of the dishes. It is an attitude opposed to all daintiness—one cannot pick at the dishes, or do a few here and there, or scrub in a way that fears getting wet, but must be willing to plunge oneself into them. As such, it is an attitude of willful self-humiliation and self-resignation, by which one does not decry or complain about one’s lowly lot, does not imagine a higher form of dishless being, does not fuss over one’s predicament as a slave to cycles of hunger and satiation but says, “well then, I am a slave” and “let’s get slaving.”
And this perhaps gets to the heart of it, though if we had begun by saying it, I think it would have been a cliche: that in order to do the dishes well—and indeed, to enjoy doing them—one must be happy to be a slave, to be willingly bound to the necessity which binds us in any case. Only the man who can successfully adopt such a low opinion of himself can plunge into the grease and the grime and renew his embarrassing, eternally-needy, human nature for yet another round of eating, another stab at continuing-to-be—and not hate it! The dishes are a trial as to whether we will affirm the goodness of human life as a subjection to necessity—or whether we will curse God for making us so very like and yet unlike the beasts.
To curse God is to begin casting about for a slave. The hope of slavery, in the ancient world, was that some men might be saved from the dishes. “Slavery,” says Arendt, “became the social condition of the laboring classes because it was felt that it was the natural condition of life itself. Omnias vita servitium est [quipped Seneca]. The burden of biological life, weighing down and consuming the specifically human life-span between birth and death, can be eliminated only by the use of servants, and the chief function of ancient slaves was rather to carry the burden of consumption in the household than to produce for society at large.”
Some men would violently subdue other men and force them to do their dishes so that the former would be to that extent freed from attending to the cyclical maintenance of life on its way to death; free to spend that much time being rational. Slavery is an effort to restore an affronted human nature which finds itself with rational desires for contemplation, political society, and—a belly, the service of which takes up most of the day. Slaves free men from slavery to the body.
The bright hope of the dishwasher is the same, that, through cleverness, we will be saved from the necessity of the body, from its odd and unnatural production of gross plates and crusty spoons. It will do the dishes—we will not have to daily contemplate the futility of human life, bound as it is to the cycle of consumption and satiation.
Because of this, the dishwasher fails as it succeeds. For it takes over just enough of the dishes to fulfill in me the hope of having a slave rather than having to be a slave—but it leaves the pans. And these pans are not met with the spirit of man, simply, but with the spirit of man who has been saved from some servitude by a machine. He—by which I mean I—is that much more unwilling to take up that spirit of servitude by which the dishes are done well: the dishes left over are made proportionally more difficult by the dishes automatically washed.
As anyone who has labored knows, labor has an all-in or all-out quality to it. It feels good to not have to do it at all and it feels good to be utterly absorbed and resigned to the doing of it. All the misery lies in the lukewarm. All the angst is in the in-between. By insinuating that I am saved from labor, the dishwasher increases the degree to which I am revolted to find myself with labor left to do. Over time, I am more likely to leave a dish for some other time. I have been liberated by a household slave just enough to feel that such drudgery is beneath me—but not enough to eradicate the necessity of being a drudge. The result is: a pile-up. A helpless sense of injustice. A great putting-off of a responsibility that seems like someone else’s job—for how could dishwashing be incumbent upon a man who has purchased a dishwasher?
Now obviously this relationship to technology is not limited to the man crying over his dishwasher. The position most Americans occupy vis-à-vis their labor-saving devices is that of an anxious and stressed-out slaveowning class. We are saved from enough labor to develop the inability to resign ourselves to what labor remains. We are liberated enough to detest the slavery to which we remain bound. This is why we will always be suckers for devices that save us from that last bit of labor, that excrescence which still—always—remains: for new and improved Tide Pods, for those scrubbers with the soap in the handle. Carried out logically, the technological age would produce a minimum necessity of labor which inspires a maximum of revulsion in the people who must accomplish it, destroying its technological gains with a proportional sapping of human virtue.
This technologically-encouraged reticence explains why an age of the household appliance is, at one and the same time, the age of the disposable commodity. The ability to give over some cooking and cleaning to machines creates a longing for an ideal that these machines stir up in us but never fulfill: a life in which consumption is entirely taken care of, in which man can eat like a beast and avoid clean-up like a god. Ready-to-eat and ready-to-throw-away food items are a consequence not of the difficulty of the dishes but of the arduous labor leftover by the semi-automated kitchen. Trash achieves what machines can achieve only in part: no dishes. The consequence is a greater similarity of man to the animals—who likewise eat and throw away whatever husks remain. But “takeout” is merely the dishes deferred; plastic bags and TV dinners obscure slavery by moving it to a higher, more socialized scale: those cities and countrysides who suffer the landfills and litter of a trash-producing economy are simply the ones who “do the dishes” for others—they are, this far, slaves.
And none of this has recognizably made us happier. The studies tell us we are more free—but we do not feel ourselves as such. Hannah says, “Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.” She advocates getting our hands dirty:
On its most elementary level, the “toil and trouble” of obtaining and the pleasures of incorporating the necessities of life are so closely bound together in the biological life cycle ... that the perfect elimination of the pain and effort of labor would not only rob biological life of its most natural pleasures but deprive the specifically human life of its very liveliness and vitality. The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are rather the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.
Man, it seems, is either a willing slave or a disappointed slaveholder. Tools utilized by willing slaves will be perceived and felt as help; tools utilized by would-be slaveholders will never help enough. The dishwasher, like all things, is a matter of the spirit, and its efficacy is tied, not to energy-efficient design, but to our fundamental attitude toward the dishes, which are symbols of the human condition itself—will we bless it or curse it? When Our Lord came to us, taught us, and made us into a new kind of people, he gave us the grace and the commandment and the example to be willing slaves: “Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many.” Just so should we do the dishes. Just so should we accomplish all things.