The Death of Efficiency
A possible fable.
Ever since the industrial revolution, Western culture has been engaged in a near messianic pursuit of efficiency. It’s become an overarching societal obsession to which we’re all bent in one form of labor or another. But is it good for us? Is it really a wise aspiration? And what are we gaining vs. what we’re losing?
Here’s a picture of efficiency in action:
Notice your reaction. Is it one of pleasure or unease, peace or anxiety?
Here is another picture of a very different kind of work.
This is Gustave Caillebotte’s masterpiece, The Scrapers, one of his most well known and beloved works, for obvious reasons. Notice your reaction again. It’s probably of a kind with hearing birdsong or looking at a natural landscape. The breath slows, the body calms. Note the natural light, the conversation underway between two of the workers, the bottle of wine and half empty glass. There is work being done, but also life being lived. The two, it turns out, go together, and can be hugely satisfying when done at a human pace within reasonable hours. It’s hard to look at the painting and not sense that.
As a housepainter, I’ve done this very work, and can tell you it is immensely satisfying to pull a well sharpened scraper across old varnish and feel it curl up under the blade as the newly exposed wood blushes in fresh light. I’ve also had conversations that were likely much the same as the two in the painting. Conversation comes naturally in a work environment. Whatever self consciousness might arise between two people sitting across a table or desk vanishes in such a situation. I guess the term would be comradery.
As part of this series, Caillebotte produced a study of a father and son. The father is sitting with his back against a wall sharpening a scraper, with his young son standing beside him doing the same. I couldn’t find a copy online to share, but the comfort and familiarity between the two is palpable. When I saw it I thought of Robert Bly’s Iron John, about the crisis of masculinity he saw in modern culture. Bly pointed out that for generations, fathers and sons worked together, with the father passing his knowledge to the son, and the son getting to know the father in his prime, physical years. (Similar stories can be told from a feminine perspective, but Bly was specifically concerned with the masculine.) Industrial production and the obsession with efficiency, he said, ruptured that bond, with fathers now pulled away all day to factory or office building, and the son sent off to school, not having the benefit of seeing his father work and doing the same work beside him.
Again, what is being gained and what is being lost? We know we’re losing species. We know we’re losing languages. But are also losing depths of relationship that we’re now so far removed from that we don’t even realize it.
There’s a lot more that can be said about our adulation of efficiency. Books can and have been written about it. Here, I offer something different, an imaginary tale of efficiency as a person, who like any person has a life span. I wrote it while taking a course in ecological economics, taught by Stanford educated Fred Jennings, who has his own take on economics, what it is and how it might better serve us.
Now seems a particularly appropriate time to share it.
The Death of Efficiency
Yes, he’s had a quite a run,
and he thinks he’s just getting started.
“Soon I won’t need hands!” he cries.
“Or even wires. Remember cable?”
He chuckles, looking up
with eyes of cool blue calculation
peering through the black for Mars,
icy, radioactive Mars
like it were a lover.
“You’re dying”, I say.
He looks at me, incredulous.
“It’s natural. Things run their course.
You’ve run yours. Eventually
nobody will want you anymore.”
His eyes narrow like streams of digits
“I own you,” he says,
“clunky little craftsman
with your slow toad hands.”
“Oh,” I say, looking at them
and moving my fingers.
“I own more than you. I own your dreams.”
“The sleeping ones
or the waking ones?” I ask.
“You waste time!” He hisses.
“But there’s a difference.
One I receive. One you peddle.
One arrives unbidden
as water up from a spring.
The other crawls out of an advertising studio
gets passed around like a playing card
till it’s edges are worn, numbers smudged.
Then it’s cleaned up, sold all over again.
Till people figure out the game.”
He looks over my head.
“Apparently you don’t see
the masses behind you. They run towards me.”
I look into his eyes, round and floating in sea brine.
Apparently, you haven’t noticed
the shape of our home, and everything on it.
They will pass us both, and then come around again.
Round Earth. Round life.
And when they realize
they are racing nowhere
while you take everything
what then…? And by the way,
what is the strange pleasure you get
cheating life of time?
He returns his gaze to mars.
"One day I’ll link
my brain to a computer.
Then I’ll have it all."
*
Begging to be remembered,
Efficiency sits on a curb
that’s slowly being overtaken by moss
and the star-shaped purple flowers
that grow in the moss. Watching the people
walking by, he grimaces
as they choose the slowest, most meandering
routes.
A father and son come along.
He looks up at the man.
“You gonna raise that boy lazy
like everyone else around here?”
The boy looks up at his father
who looks down on the old man.
"For generations you divided us
took our common growing years
and best daylight hours
and fed them to productivity.
But my grandmother
was among the ones who figured it out
found the language trails
through your spells.
And my father peace-stormed with the Water League."
He swept his arm in a wide gesture of abundance.
"All this plump soil, flowing moisture, rising green
was waiting all the time.
You should wander it awhile
see what you’ve been missing."
The two ambled on
while Efficiency sat fidgeting
eyeing his watch.
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Have I been waiting here all this time to hear you talk more about your work and about things like efficiency? I think the first time I browsed your natural plastering work I'm like why doesn't he write more about this??
That's not at all to disregard all the other amazing writing you've done, it's more to point out that I think the things like efficiency and the current state of our planets health are one and the same. I'd go as far to imagine the reason for all your good writing and the way you see the world is because of your plastering work; the slow, repetitive work, the flow, a less cluttered mind.
Reading a great book at the moment, Remembering Peasants.
Nice piece, Rob. As one poetry prof of mine once put it (regarding an essay suggesting how great it was that we could get all the readings of a poem since so much was published about it)--what's the rush? As Thoreau put it, "Why are we in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises?" There seem to be two competing philosophies based on two basic analogies: the one that goes with the machine, and the one that goes with music (or flow). No doubt the mechanical clock has played havoc with our sense of efficiency. Glad you wrote this.