We are often told by apologists of modern civilization that we are now living in a wealthier and more educated society than\u00a0was the case at\u00a0the beginning of the 20th century. The material\u00a0condition of the contemporary average worker is indeed more enviable than that of the Industrial-era worker: his labor\u00a0is both physically easier and less tiring, while he is more educated (a college degreee is necessary to perform the very modern tasks of, say, accounting, managing human or material resources, or graphic design), without mentionning his greater material prosperity (home- and car-owning, hobbies, etc.). In fact, in all industrialized societies, the\u00a0working class as it has traditionnally been understood has significantly shrunk while the middle class has expanded in dramatic ways. This narrative of material progress is, however, only half the picture.<\/p>\n
If we now move on to consider the second half of the picture, what seems to have been a (material) progress in fact hides merely a change in\u00a0skills and activities\u00a0necessitated by a move from an industry-based economy to a service-based economy. While the blue collar worker, best illustrated by the automobile factory worker repeating over and over again the same gesture on a Ford assembly line, was the basic unit of the industrial economy, the white collar office worker is his contemporary counterpart,\u00a0lying at the very bottom of the service-based economy. In their function <\/em>in the wider economic system, as the basic units of production<\/em>, the blue collar of old and the white collar of today occupy\u00a0the same position. The blue collar worker produced individual pieces through an automated assembly line, which pieces were then assembled together to create another object (a car for example), the goal of which being the feeding of this gigantic economic machine through economic output, relayed by consumption. Today, the white collar sitting at his desk\u00a0has the duty to develop and create new ideas and products which will then be combined into a larger “finished” product (a phone, a travel plan, etc.), only to be\u00a0instantly thrown onto the market to be consumed and feed\u00a0the economic system.\u00a0\u00a0As this economic system has qualitatively transformed itself over the past 100 years, so have its constituent parts. The structure, however, remains unchanged. It is this gargantuan economic machine that needs our labor.\u00a0Only today,\u00a0it has become even more complex and “efficient” through its computerization. The only goal is to keep this gigantic machine running (its performance is measured by various indexes such as the GDP), and it is a necessity for the worker to adapt to the needs and pace of this machine. It is clear here that the general computerization of our century has only increased the speed, the interconnectivity,\u00a0and the complexity of this system, making it less and less fit to welcome human beings.<\/p>\n The mechanization and computerization of the economy entail various consequences. Individually, both the factory worker and the office worker are not only deprived of their labor, but also of what constituted the joy of labor, i.e. the possibility to create<\/em>, since their products are immediately\u00a0destroyed through consumption. They loose the sense of telos <\/em>of their work. Their own contribution is drowned under an unknown number of other contributions, all of which becoming the means to an unknown or vaguely known end (do we work for our products to be consummed, to generate profits which we will most likely never see, or for something else?). Modern labor is meaningless.<\/p>\n Second, there is a social consequence: the expansion of the middle class has been negatively proportional to its degradation into the\u00a0condition of the former working class. The borderline between these two classes\u00a0has become\u00a0more and more blurred. This degradation explains why we are now witnessing across Europe the obsolescence (and end?) of traditionnal socialist and communist parties, which have remained stuck\u00a0in an early-20th century conception\u00a0 of class struggle. As we have just seen, the main issue lies with the technically-driven nature of our economy, not with\u00a0who owns the means of production, and it is not affecting the lower classes only, but all.<\/p>\n Finally, and perhps more importantly than the second consequence, the phenomena described above have deeply affected education. The factory worker of old did not need much of an education to perform his task. Higher\u00a0learning (still understood as knowing Greek and Latin, reading Homer and Eschyles) remained the prerogative of the higher classes. As the contemporary technology-driven\u00a0economy requires higher and very specific skills to operate often technologically-advanced devices, the education that the contemporary white collar needs is more akin to skill acquisition than a true education in the classical sense of paideia. <\/em> It does not so much aim at teaching him beauty and right judgment as to make him able to master the tools necessary to perform his function–the computer\u00a0and its softwares are tools just as much as\u00a0a wrench is. We may praise ourselves for having the highest rate of graduates\u00a0in our history, this education is more of a necessity to survive in the\u00a0technically-organized society\u00a0than a love of knowledge (“I need to get an education” is a phrase too often heard around American campuses) and this education itself is not intellectually demanding. The expansion of the economic sphere to all strata of society has resulted in the bastardization of\u00a0education (and not its “democratization,” as we often hear). Hence the gradual but constant\u00a0recession and disappearance of the humanities, which are seeing their program and financing cut by too many universities in favor of sciences and vocational curricula (this is just as true in the United States as it is in Europe, as this example in Germany shows <\/a>(in French).<\/p>\n In the end, isn’t this economic system at the very heart of the meaninglessness we often encounter around us, a meaninglessness that is all too often\u00a0escaped by suicide? We may be more prosperous and “educated”, yet we are more isolated than ever and reduced to a simple labor force as perhaps never before.\u00a0It is just as true of the bank employee as it is of the CEO.\u00a0In this way liberal democracies have indeed managed to make all\u00a0their citizens equal. It is just not an equality in freedom, but an equality in the condition of the ancient slave.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We are often told by apologists of modern civilization that we are now living in a wealthier and more educated society than\u00a0was the case at\u00a0the beginning of the 20th century. The material\u00a0condition of the contemporary average worker is indeed more enviable than that of the Industrial-era worker: his labor\u00a0is both physically easier and less tiring, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_disable_autopaging":false},"categories":[6611,6616,6605,6613],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-philosophy-aeneas-quest","category-society-politics","category-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3128"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3128\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ellopos.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}