Alain de Botton is not short of detractors. With his self-help approach to
philosophy and his television fame, he is frequently accused of being
lightweight, populist, smugly platitudinous. This much is perhaps to be
expected of a media intellectual; but de Botton is more media friendly than
most. Last year, he helped to set up the School of Life in London, which –
as well as promoting his books – offers courses, seminars, events on
metaphysical questions from relationship ethics to holidaymaking. He is the
subject of sitcom gags. “What would de Botton do?”, asks the neurotic Mark
Corrigan during a moment of crisis in the television comedy Peep Show. In
these pages, de Botton has been slated for, among other things, not merely
“dumbing down” but “dumbing out”.
What de Botton’s critics tend to ignore is his literary brilliance. Label him
a “social commentator” rather than a “philosopher” and the arguments against
him start to fall away; relabel him a “writer” and they disintegrate
entirely. With his stress on better living, he has been compared to
Montaigne, but his elegant, tortuous sentences owe more to Marcel Proust,
about whom de Botton wrote an early book. Philosophically, he is perhaps
closer to Samuel Beckett, who also wrote a youthful monograph on Proust. De
Botton is a connoisseur of bathos. Few contemporary cultural critics have
such a keen eye for hubris, such a witty grasp of juxtaposition. His every
observation is framed by an acute awareness of absurdity, offset by a
tenderness for human folly. “The impulse to exaggerate the significance of
what we are doing, far from being an intellectual error, is really life
itself coursing through us”, he concludes at the end of The Pleasures and
Sorrows of Work, before triumphantly proclaiming: “Let death find us as we
are building up our matchstick protests against its waves”.
The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work shows de Botton at his wry, inquisitive
best. In ten short chapters he explores ten diverse industries from
accountancy to rocket science, taking a series of Iain Sinclairish journeys
under electricity pylons and through dockyards. As in de Botton’s previous
books, the text is accompanied by various photographs (taken by Richard
Baker), including a photoessay documenting the complex logistical operation
behind getting a tuna out of the Indian Ocean and on to a small boy’s plate
in Bristol. The boy, we are finally told, “hates tuna”.
De Botton delights in unpicking the vast structures geared towards our every
whim. Pausing to marvel at our “prosaic appetites” rendered ridiculous in
grand scale – the crates of “Tango fizzy orange” and boxes of
toothpaste-moistening polyols – he finds amid the depots at Woolwich and
Gravesend “an area as noteworthy as any of the museums of the city”.
Noteworthiness is in itself an aesthetic for de Botton, who wishes to show
us the utilitarian beauty within the mechanics of consumerism. Marx’s
critique works both ways: we are not just divorced from the products of our
labour but also from the labour behind our products. The Dickensian
industrial nightmare is made all the more poignant in the light of its
bourgeois banality. We have ravaged the world for fripperies: “A river-side
factory, with tubes like a hydra’s tentacles snaking around its midriff and
crowned by a chimney wheezing orange smoke, is responsible for nothing more
sinister or esoteric than the manufacture of cheddar biscuits”. We are now
deep in the “era of the technological sublime” where New Romantics have
“learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards
glaciers”. Observing a group of anoraked ship-spotters, de Botton is
reminded of “premodern travellers, who, upon arriving in a new country, were
apt to express particular curiosity about its granaries, aqueducts, harbours
and workshops”. Compared to these devotees, museum-goers seem “fickle”.
Later, at an entrepreneur’s convention, de Botton suggests an alternative
holiday company based around visits to industrial locations. He quotes
Diderot: “The liberal arts must free the mechanical arts from the
degradation in which these have so long been held by prejudice”.
“What makes the prospect of death so distinctive in the modern age”, writes de
Botton, “is the background of permanent technological and sociological
revolution against which it is set, and which serves to strip us of any
possible faith in the permanence of our labours.” In Status Anxiety (2004),
de Botton considered how the comforts of one era become the necessities of
the next; here, our bludgeoning, Schumpeterian adventures in capitalism are
nothing less than mortality in relief. De Botton counsels against amnesia,
suggesting the intriguing idea that “histories of technology should usefully
identify not only when a particular invention was introduced, but also, and
more interestingly, when it was forgotten”. Casting aside the old is what
drives our economy, but the capitalist tragedy is its lack of patience with
imperfection. This goes for people as well as objects. Contemporary “have it
all” ideology has it that we are denied “longing and error” and thus, de
Botton argues, “collective consolation”. Our seduction by bourgeois ideals
is made all the more tragic by their very possibility. It isn’t that work
and love are “incapable of delivering fulfilment, only that they almost
never do”.
De Botton has written about love elsewhere, and here he concentrates on
employment. “All societies have had work at their centre; ours is the first
to suggest that it could be something much more than a punishment or a
penance.” Chatting to deluded inventors and earnest biscuit plant managers
(“Pottier’s disquisitions on topics such as . . . the ideal viscosity of
chocolate did not always accurately gauge the levels of interest of his
interlocutor”), de Botton looks back to a “franker, and therefore kinder”
age in which our expectations were so much lower. Granted we had less time
to “master calculus and worry about the authenticity of our relationships”,
but were we any more miserable? The answer, probably, is yes, and sometimes
there is wanton cruelty to de Botton’s glibness. Glancing at an accountant’s
business card, he notes that its function is to tell others “that she is a
Business Unit Senior Manager, rather than a vaporous transient consciousness
in an incidental universe”. This is an easy game to play, and it is
fortunate that de Botton does not seek to exaggerate his own importance.
Work, he reminds us, whatever your profession, “does not by its nature
permit us to do anything other than take it too seriously”.
Nevertheless, claims Andrew Ross in Nice Work If You Can Get It, we are all
entitled to “meaningful experiential outcomes”. In fact, “we need to see
creative work as a basic human right”. Like de Botton, Ross can see beauty
in the mundane. Contending, perhaps a little disingenuously, that even
burger flippers and checkout operators are able to perform their roles with
“flair and individual panache”, he argues for a culture of “dignity and
respect” in the informal sector. Today’s workplace, he shows us, is becoming
increasingly reliant on the “precariat”: an uncontracted, footloose labour
pool, prevalent in both the high-end creative sphere and among undocumented,
migrant, low-wage workers (“the strategic lynchpin of the global economy”),
all subject to the hazards of “flexploitation”. Economic liberalization, he
demonstrates, has opened up a frenetic global traffic in jobs and migrants,
uprooting people in a manner both useful and troubling to the managers of
capital. In short, more people are available to exploit, but they are also
harder to control. All that freedom, de Botton would add, has only further
increased our foolish expectations. (Since these books went to press, one
might also add, the global traffic has become something more akin to a
pile-up.) Ross’s “new geography of livelihoods” is unlikely to win acclaim
for its coruscating prose, despite its author’s modish use of terms such as
“de-skilling”, “hipsterization” and “grabby”. The collection is, however, a
thorough and thoughtful study of global professional insecurity. Ross
considers the industrialization of creativity in Blairite Britain, noting
the former Culture Secretary Chris Smith’s pooh-poohing of “grants for
grants’ sake” or “something for nothing”, and writes intelligently about the
internet’s fostering of “amateurism as a serious source of public
expression”. The “creative industries” in Britain are estimated to have
generated £112 billion in 2000; but top of the global creative economy is
China, with export revenues of $445 billion in 2005. Ross looks at how
domestic cultural consumption in China remains deliberately stunted, and
analyses the growth (and regulation) of various creative hubs from SoHo, New
York, to Dashanzi, Beijing.
A chapter on the Olympics shows how public money so often ends up in private
hands, and another on eco-housing laments its continued association with
luxury developments. Having discussed alienation in the workplace as an
effect of the “overproduction of dubious items”, Ross examines some
pioneering housing projects in the United States, which have seen workers
participate in the building of their own low-cost, energy-efficient homes.
Here the benefits of the Marxist fruit are palpable, though work, like life,
remains as much about the process as the result. After all, de Botton
reminds us, “generating money is really an excuse to do other things”. Ross
cites a nifty Haitian proverb to show that gainful employment in itself need
not be imbued with dignity: “If work really were such a good thing, then the
rich would surely have found a way to keep it for themselves”. But nor have
the rich been able to get a patent for the “meaningful experiental outcome”.
If nothing else, de Botton reminds us, a good dig in the dirt provides a
momentary distraction from the abyss: “Long before we ever earned money, we
were aware of the necessity of keeping busy: we knew the satisfactions of
stacking bricks, pouring water into and out of containers and moving sand
from one pit to another, untroubled by the greater purpose of our actions”.
Alain de Botton
THE PLEASURES AND SORROWS OF WORK
329pp. Hamish Hamilton. £18.99.
978 0 241 14353 7
Andrew Ross
NICE WORK IF YOU CAN GET IT
Life and labor in precarious times
264pp. New York University Press. $27.95.
978 0 8147 7629 2
Toby Lichtig is a freelance writer and editor living in Lisbon.
