Are you brawny or brainy?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in City Journal,

Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from “abs,” “glutes,” and “cardio” to “ripped” and “toned” to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

...But as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?

...Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOs—who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)—and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

...In a society that supposedly despises menial jobs, the television ratings for such programs suggest that lots of Americans enjoy watching people of action who work with their hands, even if (or perhaps because) they are sometimes overweight, unkempt, and coarse. Mike Rowe became a media celebrity for his Discovery Channel reality series Dirty Jobs, in which he not only tried but also enjoyed said jobs—to the delight of viewers.

...Physical labor also promotes human versatility: those who do not do it, or who do not know how to do it, become divorced from—and, at the same time, dependent upon—laborers, in psychological as well as concrete ways. Lawyers, accountants, and journalists living in houses with yards and driving cars to work thus count on a supporting infrastructure of electricians, landscapers, and mechanics. Without them, life grinds to a halt, unless one has rudimentary knowledge of such tasks—or the time and willingness to learn them.

...The diminished cultural awareness about those who work physically is a touchstone to a number of our present pathologies. Anyone who has watched videos of privileged Yale students shouting down professor of medicine and sociology Nicholas Christakis—because his wife, Erika, had suggested that politically correct censorship of campus Halloween costumes was excessive—should recognize that something has gone terribly wrong at our universities. The malady has metastasized well beyond the contempt for free speech and the prolonged adolescence of young adults squabbling about their preteen-like Halloween celebrations. The vast majority of students who encircled Christakis were affluent and privileged, regardless of the efforts of some to cite their minority status as proof of victimization. Had any of the professor’s accusers ever worked hard physically, thereby learning the difference between being a Yale student and picking grapes or painting houses? Yale compounds its cocooning problem by lavishing coffee bars, rec rooms, and elegant living quarters on twentysomethings, while investing them with the power to scream at and disrupt speakers not to their liking.

...The notion of physical work, or lack of same, also underpins the United States’ massive illegal immigration problem. Yes, Mexico seeks to export its dependent poor, to create a powerful expatriate community in the United States, and to garner over $25 billion in remittances; and yes, corporations demand cheap labor in hospitality industries, construction, and agriculture. On the political front, La Raza activists want a steady stream of unassimilated immigrants in need of parity with U.S. citizens—and thus requiring self-appointed ethnic activists and a careerist industry of identity politics; and the Democratic Party hopes to turn the American Southwest from red to blue, given new demographics.

...In his final play, Bacchae, the Athenian playwright Euripides explored the nature of wisdom and who possesses it. After a frenzy of killing and destruction, he seems to conclude that neither the rational and conventional King Pentheus (“You’ve got a quick tongue and seem intelligent, but your words don’t make any sense at all”) nor the ecstatic emotion of the divine Dionysus and his bacchants (“Angry gods should not act just like humans”) were models for emulation. Best, instead, is the day-by-day life without pretense: “Various men outdo each other in wealth, in power, in all sorts of ways. The hopes of countless men are infinite in number. Some make men rich; some come to nothing. So I consider that man blessed who lives a happy existence day by day.”

Read more here.

Physical work

Some excerpts from Victor Davis Hanson, writing at City Journal,

...as we continue on this trajectory, initiated in the Industrial Revolution, from less demanding physical work to rare physical work, is something lost? Something only poorly approximated by greater leisure time, non-muscular jobs, and contrived physical exercise?

...Donald Trump was the first politician in recent memory to refer to working people with the first-person plural possessive pronoun of endearment—“our miners” and “our farmers,” as if physical work was still critical and honored. Otherwise, most of popular culture promotes the idea of a bachelor’s degree as the first stepping-stone of the cognitive elite on the path toward professional and graduate schools, certification and degree branding, interning, and ending up largely physically inactive but inordinately well compensated and intellectually and psychologically fulfilled. So inured are we to the ideal of a cursus honorum that we don’t even need to mention that it is an obvious means to escape a supposedly limited life of laying tile or overhauling transmissions.

There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

The proliferation of hard-work reality-television programming reflects this apparent need, if only vicariously. Indeed, the more we have become immobile, urbanized, and distanced from hard work, the more we tune in to watch reality television’s assorted truckers, loggers, farmers, fishermen, drillers, and rail engineers. Usually, these supposed “losers” are filmed in rough physical landscapes of Alaska, Wyoming, Colorado, or out at sea, where they sweat, grunt, smoke, and swear as they toil to bring us our seafood, wood floors, arugula, and high-performance gasoline. The subtext of these shows is that the human dinosaurs who do such work are as tough and wild as the environment in which they labor.

...What is it about physical work, in its supposed eleventh hour within a rapidly changing Western culture, that still intrigues us?

...I learned more from teaching students at California State University, Fresno, than from my students at Stanford—not because they knew Greek and Latin better (most did not) or because they were more ethical (again, not necessarily true) but because they often worked 20 hours or more per week at minimum-wage jobs and thus had a far wider range of experience with (and empathy for) characters and events found in Aristophanes, Euripides, and Hesiod in the premodern world of the Greeks. They were also more circumspect in addressing their complaints, angst, or unhappiness, as if they had already learned from unenviable off-campus jobs, in a way that their Stanford counterparts had not, that the world is not necessarily kind and compliant.

If incoming Yale students’ orientation or first-year community service required them to cut the quad’s grass, chainsaw tree limbs, fix clogged sewers, and work side by side with those who did, there might be less obsession over Halloween costumes and a greater reluctance to curse at faculty with the secure knowledge that they would only politely nod and smile back. Unfortunately for Yale students and for our elites in general, the world outside privileged bubbles operates on quite different premises. Perhaps this studied isolation accounts in part for why our governing classes have done such a poor job of understanding the global community in recent years.

The notion of physical work, or lack of same, also underpins the United States’ massive illegal immigration problem. Yes, Mexico seeks to export its dependent poor, to create a powerful expatriate community in the United States, and to garner over $25 billion in remittances; and yes, corporations demand cheap labor in hospitality industries, construction, and agriculture. On the political front, La Raza activists want a steady stream of unassimilated immigrants in need of parity with U.S. citizens—and thus requiring self-appointed ethnic activists and a careerist industry of identity politics; and the Democratic Party hopes to turn the American Southwest from red to blue, given new demographics.

Read more here.