Breakfast with Socrates

INTRODUCTION

Given that Socrates was assassinated by poison, you might think twice before accepting his invitation to breakfast. Yet what got him killed is exactly what would make him an excellent breakfast companion: his curiosity. He was silenced for asking too many questions, getting up the nose of too many people. His mind was probing, dissatisfied, and inventive, and it led him to bring everything, from the purpose of the law to the origin of sex, into doubt. No wonder his most famous pupil, Plato, characterized him as an irritating insect. Were you actually to sit down with him for cappuccino and croissants, he might start by asking why you lead the life you lead, or what value you have as a person. It’s a style that might cause you, like the state that had him murdered, to take offense; on the other hand, were you to give him the benefit of the doubt, you’d be taken on an extraordinary mental journey. He might explain why genius and madness are so closely linked, or how the universe is made up of the soul; on a more personal level, he might set out the reasons why being good is more important than being happy. Famously, Socrates declared, “The unexamined life is not worth living,” and, preferring dialogue to giving speeches, he’d get you to reflect on your self and your actions in a way that would either lend them greater meaning or inspire you to make changes, and so create the meaning that your life lacked.

Pretty much the same would apply if you were to have a bagel with Hegel or eggs with Bacon. Although there have been excruciating debates in philosophy about how many angels can stand on a pinhead and the difference between being and Being, its spirit is not to make up conundrums for boffins, but to help us pursue wisdom. After all, the word philosophy means “the love of wisdom,” and being wise is not the same as being clever. Where cleverness satisfies itself with winning arguments in the abstract, wisdom is a practical art, aimed at making deft judgments in the midst of everyday complications. In this sense, philosophy is about recognizing the ambiguity of life as it is lived, and Socrates would be just as interested in how much to tip the waiter for serving you the toast and muffins as in whether God exists.

This book tries to follow suit: It shows how history’s greatest ideas — not just from philosophy, but from psychology, sociology, and politics — relate to how you live your life and how you can be more thoughtful about it. True, there are plenty of in‑depth works on this subject, on how to act ethically, what kind of political party you should vote for, and so on. The difference is that, apart from being written in technical language, they tend to keep the big ideas aloft rather than grounding them in everyday experience, which is the purpose of this book. The following pages, therefore, conjure up various geniuses to accompany you while you go about your business. You’re at the gym and the social historian Michel Foucault runs beside you to explain how your exercise routine is a form of state control. Jacques Lacan, a psychoanalyst, becomes your personal shopper and, as you gaze into the fitting-room mirror, lets you in on the perils of narcissism. While you’re at work Karl Marx whispers in your ear about how to stop being a wage slave. You’ll encounter Machiavelli giving advice on throwing a successful party, hear from Carl Schmitt on why fighting with your partner might be a good thing, and learn techniques from the Buddha for avoiding falling asleep in the bath. As they apply themselves to thinking about your morning ritual or what you watch on TV, you’ll find out something about them. Their ideas might be challenging or bizarre, but they will always be relevant to how you spend your day.

Of course, that day might not follow the pattern set out here. Not everyone has sex on a daily basis, and lunch with your parents might — thankfully, perhaps — be no more frequent than an annual event. If you work from home, then traveling to work is unlikely to involve the travails described in chapter three, where I refer to Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century political theorist, to explain why the morning commute brings out the savage in us. Equally, there’ll be things omitted you might have wished to see, and an alternative version of this book might include the chapters “Picking the Kids Up from School,” “Seeing Your Therapist,” “Going to Pray,” or “Working the Nightshift.” But most of the experiences described here should be ones you recognize, and you will be equipped with tools to think about them afresh.

Not that it’s all about big ideas from big thinkers. Along with some thoughts of my own, you’ll find references to music, painting, film, literature, and even a remarkable Japanese experiment on water crystals. In “Going to the Doctor” you’ll discover a serious study on pain, as well as the funniest joke in the world (allegedly). “Cooking and Eating Dinner” brings in French anthropology alongside Peter Greenaway’s film of culinary decadence, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. I have used whatever material — old, new, borrowed, or blue (the chapter on sex discusses pornography) — that might bring meaning to the mundane, humor to the humdrum, reason to the routine.

If it’s true that the unexamined life is not worth living, instead of waiting for a lecture on the subject, why not examine it in the moment? After all, the everyday is 99 percent of our lives; if we don’t think about it while we live it, there’s not going to be much time left over for reflection. And if we do, we might learn to appreciate the importance behind the apparently trivial things we do so automatically, such as getting dressed and falling asleep, and see them in a new light.

CHAPTER FOUR

Being at Work

Have you ever fantasized about quitting your job? About striding into your boss’s office and telling him (it’s more likely to be a man) what you think of him and his stinking business? About strolling back after the deed, through the rows of desks, head held high, smugly accepting the looks of awed admiration on the faces of your colleagues? About walking out of the blasted building for the last time and into the sunshine of your new life?

If it’s a fantasy you recognize, it reveals a number of things about you. First, and most obviously, you’re in the wrong job. Second, if you haven’t yet converted the fantasy into reality, you’re a coward. Or, third, to be less harsh, you lack a safety net: You can’t resign because you’ve got financial commitments — mortgage, rent, kids, debts, bills — and not enough spare cash to meet them. Finally, it says you belong with 66 percent of the population.

According to a recent newspaper survey, 34 percent of lottery millionaires prefer to keep their job. Assuming that, before the day of the jackpot, such people are pretty average, we can deduce that about a third of all those working aren’t there just for the money. Even if you adjust for the fact that per capita spending on the lottery is higher among lower social bands and that some players are already retired, this still leaves, say, a quarter of the working population who, following a windfall, would continue in the same employment. Far from biding their time at work until the big payout, when they can pack it all in, these people can’t even be paid to go away. They keep working despite the fact they don’t need to. And that raises the question of what, exactly, work is all about.

In its most classic definition — the one that Marx was so radically to revise, as we’ll see — work is the exchange of labor for money. And where money is involved, some force is at hand, some agency countering the drift of nature. For having to be paid implies you’d have preferred to stay in bed or go fishing, and so, for tolerating this unwelcome interruption to your leisure, you expect to be compensated. A word not lacking in peculiar overtones — being compensated for injury, say — compensation nevertheless goes to the concept at the heart of work, which is that of balance: Whenever that exchange of labor for money takes place, they ought to be equivalent. In this view, the purchase of labor is no different from buying sugar or envelopes, where the swapping of commodities for currency must be fair and the balance struck.

But for a quarter of the working population, those who in theory would work regardless of compensation, that balance could be said to be off, and it’s a significant enough proportion to warrant some comment, both cruel and kind. The kinder interpretation says that those people who make up this demographic have nobly elevated work above pecuniary concerns. In work they see the opportunity for job satisfaction or personal fulfillment; lest that sound selfish, in the best cases they perceive the work they do as “giving something back” to society, “doing their bit,” or “making a difference.” Although they continue to draw a salary, their labor counts almost as it would for a charity, a kind of free good, donated out of a sense of moral duty. As such, these people only bear out what other surveys consistently report: that employees look for not just financial reward but intangible benefits, such as the chance to be stretched or a sense of purpose.

And if all that sounds a bit goody-two-shoes, there is the crueler perspective. These are the people, after all, who whistle at their desks while the rest of you have your head down, whose faces pop up over your cubicle with a shiny corporate smile. But let’s set aside the feelings that this category of person must from time to time elicit from the majority, who simply trade their labor for the money it equates to and who don’t enjoy the same serene relationship to working life as the magic quarter. There’s a more rational basis for disliking them. Because this annoying minority permit themselves to be compensated for something they would have done anyway, their vocation becomes a vacation, and they are getting a double yield on the effort invested, taking out twice what they put in once and distorting the market. By hiking up the emotional value of the labor done in their organization, they lower its monetary worth, such that their presence in the workplace will have a counterinflationary impact, albeit subtle, on wages, and thus spoil it for the rest of us.

But whether you feel kindly or cruelly disposed toward them, this group deserves no more attention, obviously, than those at the other end of the bell curve, for whom the balance is off because they get paid less than what is fair. Though senior executives may claim “Our people are our greatest assets,” being at work can for many feel that the give-and-take is out of kilter, and in compensation for all the hours plucking chickens, entering data, or loading bags onto aircraft, there’s little sense of being valued by the powers that be. Ironically the word asset gives it away: As in that other peculiar phrase from the modern workplace, human resources, it’s clear that those who do the legwork are considered primarily as units of economic value, not as people.

Enter Karl Marx. Another name for the undercompensation for labor contributed is, not to beat about the bush, slave wages — meaning crudely what’s paid to those people who put in double what they get out, for whom being at work feels like being exploited. Marx had two key insights about this state of affairs. Most critically, he said it wasn’t the result of economic accident, innate ability, or natural process, but of specific social forces. If sections of the workforce are woefully underpaid for their labor, and this keeps them poor, it’s not because that’s just how it is, or because they’re stupid, jinxed, racially inferior, or lazy; it has to do with a chain of causes that can be traced back to their masters, who prosper at their expense. And — surprise, surprise — their masters are none other than those who get paid more than their labor is worth. Indeed the fact that they get paid over the odds is what allows them to acquire their masterful power in the first place. The extra that they pocket — the handsome salary, the princely bonus — translates as capital, and with capital comes a panoply of mutually reinforcing benefits that others may well resent. Not that you have to be at the bottom of the pile to feel the injustice in what Marx is describing. Plenty of middle managers will look wanly across to the boss’s corner office and wonder if the work being done in it truly justifies being paid so much more.

Although discussions of capital can be intricate and contentious, it’s this being paid more than what’s fair that lies at the bottom of things. Even if it’s tied up in shares or land, capital is spare money, and this is precisely why for the poor, who have nothing to spare, capital remains an elusive prize: Only once you’ve satisfied your immediate needs can you turn to building up your asset base. But should you be fortunate enough to scale this golden first rung of the ladder, the preeminent benefit that capital brings is the chance to secure your own position, not least by investing that same capital in order to multiply it, and in so doing putting more distance between you and those you’ve left behind. You can even look forward to the compound interest that Baron Rothschild declared the eighth wonder of the world. For this is the other key aspect of capital: It’s about growth, about making more of itself from itself, like yeast, the magic ingredient that the capitalist hungrily pursues. As for the workers, well, let them eat bread.

At that point, it only gets worse, for this vertical stretch that capital creates between rich and poor then gets played out in society as class difference, as if there were indeed some natural order of things rather than the brute fact of capital driving society apart into separate classes. What we call class, in other words, is an excuse for the economic disparities that prevail, an excuse that makes those disparities falsely appear to be inevitable. But if all that sounds rather desperate, it brings Marx to his second key insight, which holds the possibility of redemption or revenge: that the rich can’t do without the poor, so the poor have hidden strength.

Inspired by Hegel’s investigations into the relationship between masters and slaves, which found that masters are masters only to the extent they are recognized as such by those they dominate, Marx isolated a more basic truth: One man’s wealth is another man’s poverty, meaning that the rich depend on the poor, and the poor, in a reversal of roles, take on a certain power. Rather than letting this power be squandered, Marx encouraged the poor to exploit it, and to do so by presenting their labor not as cheap but as indispensable. It is the workers, after all, who “own the means of production.” The most direct method of highlighting the value of your labor is to withhold it by striking; we all know how valuable a garbageman becomes when he’s not collecting our rubbish. But there are profounder energies in train. The other lesson Marx learned from Hegel was that history, like a comet, was on an unalterable course, and its destination is truth, where truth is a state in which masters and slaves see themselves in each other’s eyes and realize no difference: None are more equal than others. Society having climbed up to this plateau, the ladder of inequality would be thrown away and a commune would prevail. Going on strike might give a spur to the process and a coup d’état might act as catalyst, but in either case the communist state is a foregone conclusion to which the sophomore practices of capital must irresistibly yield. Slaves — the bulk of the workforce — have nothing to lose but their chains.

In the face of so trenchant a formulation, how could one possibly see capital as anything but evil, or work as anything other than the feral sizing up between haves and have-nots? Are you not justified in loathing your over paid, overfed directors? Shouldn’t you be joining a union and marching for fairer pay?

The answer is that not only might capital not be evil, but it might be the very flower of virtue. At least this is the answer put forward by Max Weber, who himself grew up in an affluent family and helped launch the discipline of sociology. If capital is the money left over from your paycheck after you’ve paid your bills, it’s just the consequence, according to Weber, of hard work. Far from being indicted for your wealth, you may deserve to be venerated for it as testimony to your work ethic. Those directors got to where they are not by luck but by graft. As Jack Welch, former boss of General Electric, once said, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” What’s more, if you don’t then blow it on Friday night, this hard-earned wedge speaks to your abstemiousness — an abstemiousness that led Weber, whose mother was a strict Calvinist, to point out its affinity with Protestantism, which stresses the conjoint virtues of labor and self-denial. That these virtues combine so effectively to produce cash is a rich irony, of course, especially as cash per se continues to be considered filthy. Cash is flash, which is one of the reasons it needs to be buried, hidden, deposited in a vault where its value can grow in the dark. The protest that gave Protestantism its name was against display, against the staginess of the Catholic Church, and its aversion to theatrics applies equally to money: better to appear less wealthy than you are and keep putting in the hours. It’s the quiet types in the office who will have the last laugh.

Suddenly the definition of work as the plain exchange of labor for money seems simplistic. Either that exchange is unfair, which creates a two-tier system run by self-interested masters (Marx), or it is fair, but still dominated by masters, those who have learned self-denial (Weber). In this respect, both thinkers were suspicious of what mastery consisted in, and Weber went on to consider what mastery in the workplace, or “leadership,” might mean.

He broke it down into three categories, of which charismatic leadership has become best known. Today we tend to think of charisma as positive, a special quality that certain people enviably possess. You may have worked for a boss, say, who had a natural charm and persuasiveness that you just couldn’t help going along with; you might even have wanted to earn the boss’s respect and gone the extra mile. But for Weber and those he influenced, charisma has a dark side. Like a secret ingredient, it is as elusive as it is desirable, not a skill that can be learned, and when the top jobs are appointed, it’s often the indefinable qualities rather than anything on the CV that make the difference. Which is dangerous, because it implies that people with oodles of charisma can get away with a gap in basic competence, even using that charisma as a veil from behind which they manipulate others. Worse still, it’s a manipulation we collude with: The charisma of the leader, says Weber, has as much to do with the superstitious yearnings of those whom the leader leads as with any innate merits. Standing by the water cooler, we gossip about the boss because he’s the boss, and the gossip only reinforces the sense of his being special; even if secretly we know he’s dull as dishwater, we can’t help attributing a mysteriousness to him, which says more about our own need for someone on whom to fixate.

Thankfully, leadership comes in less ominous varieties, and it is Weber’s rational-legal type that applies more broadly to modern-day work. True, some businesses still revolve around Weber’s third type of leadership, the traditional, which takes the form of a patriarch in charge of his family or the feudal lord overseeing his demesne. But the nature and scale of modern commerce are such that the most efficient way of its being organized is as a bureaucracy, which is where rational-legal leadership comes in, and where the leader gets redefined not as a charismatic presence but as a competent official whose authority is underpinned by rules rather than by personality. Today it’s rare, of course, to hear the word bureaucracy spoken without disdain, but if only because it attenuates the abuse of power implicit in the other two types it’s not so dreadful. You might experience it as stifling, but, like democracy, bureaucracy might offer the “least bad” solution to the problem of processing the concerns of a large number of people.

Bureaucracy in turn has several features, and the one you’ll recognize instantly from being at work is hierarchy. If organizations have hierarchies (and which organization doesn’t have at least an unofficial one?), it is more for rational-legal than charismatic reasons; that is, it’s not to list certain workers higher up the office pool than others (although that is the by‑product), it’s because volumes of work are best handled by a pyramid structure. The most transactional tasks can be done by the least skilled workers, but their relative lack of skill means they need directing by the next layer above, and so on. And in case you’re thinking, like Marx, that this is a covert means of reasserting class difference, a hierarchy, as in the command-and-control structure of the armed forces, simply facilitates the fastest transmission of instructions with the smallest amount of the “friction” (as they call it in the army) that comes with consultation or debate. If it excludes the opinions of juniors, that’s only to expedite the work itself, whose needs are straightforward, implacable, and relentless. In other words, if you find yourself some way from the top when it comes to hierarchies, you shouldn’t take it personally.

That likening of the commercial organization to an army has dwindled, of course; “human resources” was once known as “personnel.” Today we reach for more organic terms: the “living system,” for example, or “organizational DNA.” But the change in language has hardly managed to put an end to hierarchies at work, and a modern apologia for them is made by Elliott Jaques, the management guru (a phrase that for some will be an oxymoron). Before praising hierarchy, however, Jaques blames teams. Writing at the end of the twentieth century, he was in a position to reflect back coolly on postwar evolutions in the workplace that promoted the notion of teamwork — this being the very notion to which hierarchy finds itself least reconciled — as a panacea.

At first sight, the team seems like a good idea, and if you’ve ever worked in one you might have experienced a pleasing sense of belonging — so much so, perhaps, that you felt more loyalty to it than to the organization of which it was a part. Because the team recognizes and harnesses diverse talents, it reflects advances in wider society: the expansion of liberal democracy, the formalizing of human rights, the extension to minorities of suffrage, and the broadening of welfare — all good things, no doubt. It even parallels the rise of the focus group and the emergence of group therapy as vehicles for its members to express themselves. So saturated has team become with these Western values of inclusion, in fact, that to laud the relative merits of hierarchy is seen almost as a vote for fascism. And while team is the single word that captures most neatly the postwar abhorrence of authoritarian practice, its most obvious reference, of course, is to sport. When it comes to business-speak, sporting metaphors are surely the most ubiquitous of all (“pulling together,” “getting onside,” etc.). No doubt sports lingo serves in part to glamorize what is essentially unglamorous office work, but its general verve contributes to an esprit de corps that is more conducive to getting work done. If a team at work can mobilize itself like a high-performing sports team, deep resources of discretionary energy may be released. Taken together, all those factors make the team a sacred cow in the workplace. Try telling your boss you’re not a “team player” and see how long you last.

Despite all those general advantages, to Elliott Jaques the team fails to deliver on its promise. When they come together, the individuals in it add up to less than the sum of their parts, and that’s mainly because the spreading of effort across several people leads both to a diffusion of accountability and to a confusion of role. In a team, you can hide. Everyone and no one is responsible, and when the meeting ends it’s not clear who’s supposed to be doing what. Even if mutual understanding has been gained, the work — the very thing the team was set up to process more ably — gets lost. What’s worse, the team remains assembled when there’s no match being played, which means it’s not even a team so much as a convenient grouping that ends up making work for itself.

It is in the face of this tendency that Jaques recommends the use of hierarchy. If the raison d’être of an organization is to do work — rather than provide an environment for socializing — then work is best served by that line running through that organization down which the boss can see the stopping of the buck on its staged ascent to, or descent from, himself. At every level, the work is properly “owned” and, where owned, more likely to be finished. Teams are okay so long as the work within them is clearly apportioned and the team has an identifiable leader. (In this sense, the dichotomy between teams and hierarchy is false.) Devoid of political, social, or psychological features, hierarchy is but the form that such ownership needs to take; the boss removes his mask as bogeyman, becoming merely the prudent guarantor of the work’s passage through the management layers. The organization stands more for the way the work, rather than the workforce, needs to be organized, and once the work is restored to this rightful place, everything can proceed.

Sadly, few organizations run so smoothly. It’s not that they don’t have the skeleton that a hierarchy provides, but that they are also made of flesh. Because they are composed of humans, history, and habit, they can’t be reduced to either the hierarchy or the work shuttling up and down it. It is this excess in organizations of other factors, over and above those they might be stripped down to, that we know as office politics. The result is that being at work requires us to negotiate a weird combination of formal rule and informal reality, what is preached and what is practiced, business acumen and blind emotion. I spoke earlier about compensation, and for this aspect of work alone the word, otherwise unnatural, is spot on: For putting up with all the nonsense that comes with office politics, some compensation seems precisely what is due. Which brings us back full circle to what work is and the appropriate recompense for it.

In response to the creeping growth of the service economy, Margaret Thatcher famously said that not everybody can take in everybody’s washing — somebody has to make the clothes. But the service, or “knowledge” economy can’t have been listening, because in the next generation it only self-seeded. In professional services, the analogue of doing the laundry might be “consultancy”; in the public sector, “partnership working”; and even the manufacturing industry hasn’t been sheltered from the duty of “client relationship management,” whereby a car producer, for example, must “engage” its “stakeholders” about its plans and their impact on them. In all cases, it’s hard to pin down exactly what the work is, or why anyone should therefore be paid for it. Its chief mode, after all, is talking, and for anyone who believes that employment should employ the hands — in plowing, sowing, reaping, milking, making, fixing, cutting, stitching, shaping, lifting, shifting — the concept of being paid to talk must appear bizarre and even unjust. And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that a significant amount of the actual activity in offices isn’t even talking but doing emails (not just writing them, but deleting them, resending them, recalling them, and so on). Add on the reality that workers will also chat to one another, call home, make tea, and visit the bathroom and you begin to wonder how much work work they do. A further survey, conducted by a management magazine, found that American workers spend thirty minutes a day just looking for things in order to be able to do their job. It’s clear that working and being at work overlap, but only up to a point.

And yet perhaps that spaceship-like gliding further into the intangible is not as irreversible as we’ve come to believe. Perhaps we are on the verge of what Michel Foucault, the French social historian, called an epistemic break. Not dissimilar to a paradigm shift, an epistemic break marks a watershed in history when a new frame for looking at the world interposes itself: Marx’s reframing of history as the history of class struggle was one such break. Perhaps the current crisis in resources of the staple kind — fuel, water, food — will lead to a correction of this drift toward ever more abstract forms of working. As the cost of such basics rises, so our spending on services declines and we focus once more on what’s real. That could have an effect on being at work, where we’ll be asked to demonstrate not “added value” so much as the basic worth of what we’re producing. Who knows, but perhaps work will swing back to a more fundamental form, one that involves less talking and more honest labor, such as collecting hay into bundles, driving rivets into the hull of a ship, or darning socks.