Shop Class as Soulcraft_ An Inquiry Into the Value of Work - Matthew B. Crawford [74]
Now consider the reality of the mortgage broker circa 2005, whose work takes on a very different character under absentee capitalism. Knowing the mortgage he secures will be sold by the originating bank (a branch of a nationwide bank) to some other entity, he needn’t concern himself with the creditworthiness of the applicant. The bank has no interest in the ongoing viability of the loan; its interest is limited to the fees it gets from originating the loan. The mortgages will be bundled on Wall Street, then these bundles will themselves be transformed through se curitization into quantized particles of something more general, “housing debt,” and sold to the Chinese government and other investors. The original encounter between mortgage broker and borrower as they sit across from one another is fraught with moral content—questions of trust—and both of the original parties no doubt experience it this way, in 2005 as ever. The mortgage broker gets a feeling in his gut. But this information is discarded through a process of depersonalization. The discarding is purposeful.5 Indeed, the originating banks get frequent phone calls from Wall Street investment houses, urging them to invent new kinds of loans in which the borrower doesn’t even need to claim income or assets, much less prove their existence.6 This makes a certain kind of psychic demand on the mortgage broker who actually writes the loans: he must silence the voice of prudence, and suspend the action of his own judgment and perception.
Why would a system demand the stupidification of the mortgage professional? Again, imagine it is 2005. Unprecedented concentrations of capital have arisen, and these pools of money are competing with one another to find a home, and get a return. As a result there is an insatiable worldwide appetite for mortgage-backed securities among investors. Further, the fees to be made from all the transactions between originator and investor are fueling a Wall Street boom. Therefore more loans must be written. So our mortgage broker writes loans that he knows to be bad, and makes a lot of money. Stripped of the kind of judgments that are at the very heart of the idea of “credit,” shot through with bad faith, his work is now predicated on irresponsibility, rooted in the absence of community. Whatever lingering fiduciary consciousness he may have has become a liability, given the general rush to irresponsibility by his competitors. The work cannot sustain him as a human being. Rather, it damages the best part of him, and it becomes imperative to partition work off from the rest of life. So during his vacation he goes and climbs Mount Everest, and feels renewed. The next summer, he becomes an ecotourist in the Amazon rain forest. It is in this gated ghetto of his second life that he inhabits once again an intelligible moral order where feeling and action are linked, if only for a couple of weeks.
Wholehearted Activity
Aristotle’s understanding of happiness can shed light on those activities that truly engage us; maybe it can teach us something about work and leisure as well. His account is grounded in a more comprehensive understanding of creatures: to understand any particular sort of being, the best way to proceed is by looking at it, and taking note of its characteristic activity. That activity represents the “end” of the creature, its purpose. In Greek, its telos. In English, this teleological understanding of happiness gets condensed in the proverbial saying “Happy as a pig in shit.” Rolling around in shit is what pigs do, and they dig it. Frolicking