Dignity

The Mop and the Microphone

Posted on September 11, 2012 by John Churchill

At the Democratic National Convention the mayor of San Antonio, Julian Castro, credited his mother’s efforts for civil rights with his success. Her work, he said, meant that “instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.” At the Republican National Convention, Florida Senator Marco Rubio noted that his father had tended bar at conventions. “He stood behind a bar in the back of the room all those years, so one day I could stand behind a podium in the front of the room.” So there it is from both sides of the aisle: The real American dream. Work hard at menial tasks and your children may rise to a nobler, and more remunerative, line of work.
Not ─ as the saying goes ─ that there’s anything wrong with that. Both my grandfathers started out farming cotton, observing a mule from its least attractive angle. This version of the American dream gives voice to a vision we can all understand and endorse. It must be a part of the promise of any sane society that the route to success is through hard work. The other options are cynically to premise success on learning to take advantage of gaming the system, or defending inherited advantage. Or both.
And yet, for all its golden promise, something is left out of the view that the American dream is to move from the mop to the microphone. Won’t we always need people with mops? Won’t there always be someone at the back of the room tending bar? Of course we will, and of course there will be. What are we to say of their work?
Are we to say that it has value only in so far as it transcends itself, in a generation or two? Is there no intrinsic value ─ no good in itself ─ in the work of a life that does not rise, in its own span, above the level of the mop and the apron?
This is where I balk. Call me a Calvinist. I believe in the redemptive power of work. I believe that well-directed work, work well done, has about it an intrinsic dignity and intrinsic nobility, that stands no matter what happens further in the life of the worker, or his or her progeny. We are, I think, so chastened by the truths in Marx’s concept of the alienation of labor, and so rightly horrified by the exploitation of labor in our own national history ─ enslaved and wage-earning ─ that we are apt to think of the condition of work itself as an evil to be overcome.
But ─ barring a complete inversion of the human condition ─ that is not going to happen. Adam and Eve worked in Eden. If Genesis is vague on this point, Milton could not be clearer. Admittedly, as the story goes, in Eden the conditions were better than afterward. But work is our lot, and without it we are not human. If work is not of intrinsic dignity, then neither is any of us. But if we are and it is, then work with the mop and work in the apron of the bartender are to be valued and respected in their own right.
From this follows much about the standing of those among us who will never rise, or whose children may never rise, to the microphone and the podium. It is part of the American dream that we cannot identify these people. But surely it is a part of a better American dream that these, too, labor in dignity, in decent conditions, and with just rewards. It is a part of that dream that we have a responsibility to see to it that they may. This is a point, not just about the metaphysics of prestige, but about justice in the distribution of the goods made possible by the common work of all. I’d like to hear that from both sides of the aisle, too.