Reflection with Andrew Taggart on Work & Life

[03:29] Paul: welcome to the conversation with Andrew Taggart. I am Paul Millerd. I do a bunch of writing online. I do a bunch of creative work online. I'm currently in lockdown in Las Palmas, Spain. I'm traveling with my wife and we decided to stay to stay and not continue traveling several weeks ago.

So I've been trying to see where I can do something and engage with people and connect with people. And this is what I have to offer right now. I am excited about this conversation with Andrew. I His writing, probably in 2018, was something that aligned with a voice that had been in me for a long time about who is the human and what is his role with work. And it's really, in a sense, given me permission to explore a different path, pursuing things like the gift economy and connection over scaling or connection over monetizing. And trying to trust The Pathless Path along the process.

I've been in many conversations with Andrew and have received a lot of his wisdom and just wanted to explore some of how he's thinking about our present crisis, how it might be an existential opening to a different way of being, how it might be changing how we conceive of work, and changing how we conceive of who we are. So I will walk you through a short agenda just to give you a sense of where we are and where we're headed. We will do a short kickoff and intro. This is now. In about 2 minutes, Andrew's going to give us a short introduction to his idea of total work. We'll then do a short group hello where people will, will go pretty quickly.

I want to do that just because we have a bunch of people. Introduce yourself, where you're from, and a question you're sitting with this week, and we'll move through those. I'll then lead a short Q&A with Andrew, and then we'll do a short breakout. I don't know if anyone's experienced this. It's pretty fun. Andrew and I together may give you a prompt question to talk about in the one-on-ones, and then we'll bring it back to a group discussion, open Q&A, and then kick it over to Andrew for some closing thoughts.

In the meantime, if you have any questions you'd like me to ask Andrew, just put them in the chat. And we will get to them. So right now I am going to kick it over to Andrew to share an introduction and intro to Total Work.

[06:54] Andrew Taggart: It's lovely to be with you all today. Some of you I know, others I do not know. I'd like to begin just with a moment of silence. Since you're already on mute, you are already in a certain respect silent. So follow me in this moment of silence, please. Let's take a moment of silence for those who have recently died.

And for those who are right now dying. And for those whose lungs feel like lead and who can barely breathe. And for those who are feverish and are now reaching for their thermometer to see whether they have the telltale signs of the virus. And for all the caretakers who on the front lines right now may also in time be affected and infected. And for all the home caretakers who are caring for their sick loved ones, and for all the people right now who are in the midst of panicking, in the midst of anxiety attacks, and for all of those who are just plain scared. And overwhelmed by newfound uncertainty.

And perhaps a moment of silence for all of our newly discovered neighbors living in China and Iran and Italy and Spain and the UK and around the world. Those who become closer to us than we could have possibly imagined. So let's just take one moment of silence for all these people, and perhaps also for those I haven't mentioned. Okay. Now I'm to say something about the nature of total work. The transition is impossible, but I begin nonetheless.

Let's say that we could divide very roughly European if we divided history into three basic time periods: ancient, medieval, and modern. This is a very common historical approach, or at least it used to be one. If we did so, we'd find that in Greek antiquity and in ancient Rome, we had a conception of the human being which was a political conception. This is why Aristotle called man, or human beings, zoon politikon, that is, political animals. And it's from the Athenian city-state and from the Roman Republic that we have the birth of very thick rich political terms, the common good, citizen, political deliberations, direct democracy, republicanism, civic humanism, and so on and so forth. So we have to say that they regarded themselves as, ontologically speaking, political beings.

Now leap forward to the medieval period, where we find a new or fairly new conception of human beings, namely human beings are religious or contemplative creatures. It's not for nothing that one of the prominent medieval institutions was a new one, namely the monastery. The monastery was a site in which the reality of contemplation was realized. But we have to understand that the entire world was understood in theocentric, God-centric, as well as cosmocentric, that is organized, beautiful, orderly, holistic terms. C.S. Lewis once said that if you were to walk in the medieval world, it would be as if you were in the midst of a globe, in the midst of a surrounding circle, something that enclosed you and something to which you belonged.

People's lives were saturated, therefore, with religion in ways that are almost impossible for us to grasp today. Now move forward to Protestantism and Protestant Reformation and into modernity. The fundamental new ontology or conception of a human being that's been reigning for some 500-odd years is an economic conception. Human beings are economically understood. So this is why economists used to speak of Homo economicus, economic man. Total Work, then, actually is this long, winding, unfolding historical process whereby human beings more and more come to see their lives drenched in economic terms.

Total work is then the colonial spirit which saturates and permeates not just our individual mentalities, but also the social order. I'm just going to— limits of time, I'm just going to speak about time. So two examples come immediately to mind, and as we go through this conversation today, you'll notice more and more examples of how our economic conceptions are bathing or drenching the way we conceive of ourselves. The first one that comes immediately to mind is this: we start at exactly 2 PM Mountain Standard Time, 4 PM Eastern Standard Time. You can't actually get around to what E.P. Thompson called time discipline until it's the case that you have the invention of the clock and thereafter the dispersal of clocks.

Clocks become centrally concerned in 19th century English factories. And what transpires is a kind of tense, rigorous disciplining of factory workers so that they would be able to conform their actions and their conduct to the dictates of the clock. Now, it's obvious to us that we just come at 2 o'clock, 4 o'clock, whatever time it is there. And if we arrive 5 minutes late, we feel guilty. So that's just one simple thing that structures our way of being in the world today. The second one is very interesting here, namely that we have people from all over the world.

That's made possible by standardization of clock time. So we now have time zones. According to some scholars, time zones are really the effect of trying to allow for railroads to sync up their time as they move across the vast American countryside. It's not natural, of course, to have 4 PM in Boston and 2 PM in Denver. That is, in the proper sense, a social construct. It's not a bad thing per se, but it does in fundamental ways structure the way we think and live.

I'm just beginning here with two very simple examples. Once you begin to move from those examples upward and outward, you begin to see that you feel guilty if you're not being productive, you feel guilty if you're not being efficient, you feel overwhelmed if there are too many tasks to do. You're essentially concerned, perhaps, if you are, with gainful employment. The job becomes a central concept only in the 19th century and following. By the 20th century, we begin to think that Universal employment or near-universal employment is the fundamental answer to the question of how we have livelihoods. You think of your day in terms of schedules.

You think of perhaps being here in terms of the opportunity cost. You could have been somewhere else doing something else. Once you begin to investigate the matter more, you begin to see that work— a work-centric understanding is very much you might say, at work, and what I'm also calling the work society. So it's just now, I think, that we may be in the midst of the possibility of a collective existential opening. And I think in the Q&A, I'll try to say more about that. But this is what is the condition of possibility for this conversation today, is not just reaching out and the sense of care and concern.

It's also that I think that Paul and I are tuning in and seeing that right now there actually could be a crack such that people are beginning to investigate matters that for the longest time have been taken for granted. For me, that's the birth of philosophy. That's when philosophy really rises up in our lives and becomes meaningful. So I think that's all I want to say. Thanks so much for listening on mute.

[19:04] Paul: We went a little over on the intros, but I felt that people were enjoying kind of the space to put their energy out there, their questions, so kind of just let that flow a little. What I heard from people are a few themes. It's one, what can I offer? Two is, how can I make sense of what's going on and what does it mean for the future? Another thing I heard, which I think we might touch on, is how do we recenter on perhaps moving past our conceptions of work and focusing on some of the people who might have a right conception of work and this crisis might fall even more adversely on? Time and nonlinearity people talked about, and Babak at the end with, "Used to love work, now what?" So I wanted to send it back to Andrew with a question about leisure.

And Andrew, you've written about leisure as something people have kind of lost the meaning to. Leisure today, we think of throwing on our sweatpants and watching Netflix. But for most of time, people thought of leisure as a way of contemplating the mystery of the universe. You've said an openness to what there is in the world, a disposition of being in the world open to apprehending reality. What is the role of leisure amid this crisis and how people can relate to what's going on and think about their role as human?

[20:58] Andrew Taggart: There's a joke that Roger Scruton tells when he's trying to summarize Joseph Pieper's book on leisure. I'm not going to guarantee you that you'll laugh, and you're muted, so I can't really tell if you will laugh or not exactly. But here's the joke. All right. So the joke that Roger Scruton tells in summary of Joseph Pieper's book on leisure is the following: Don't just do something, stand there. All right.

So you didn't laugh, most of you, maybe a little smile. All right.

[21:32] Paul: Thumb up.

[21:33] Andrew Taggart: A gratuitous thumb up. Or what is it? What is he trying to get at there? Well, If you take a crisis, most of the things that we're talking about right now, and indeed Jordan Hall and John Vervaeke would call this a metacrisis, that is to say the coronavirus is, I would call it a catalyst that's revealing to us the ways in which chained together fragile systems are beginning to be corroded. So the metacrisis, which is a planetary crisis as people will call it today, is actually showing its vulnerability to something like a virus. Now, what we usually hear about on the news or in conversations or on Medium or on Twitter is the following.

It's a Leninist question. What is to be done? It's a very good question. But what Pieper was trying to offer was a different starting point. The starting point was the following. Now is actually the time to contemplate such as we're doing here today, the contemplation is the condition of possibility later on for right action.

So we can come to leisure and the meaning of leisure now. The ordinary sense of leisure, that is the modern mistaken sense of leisure, is that it's tantamount to free time. Quantifiable time left over when it's the case that one is not working or at work or working on oneself or working in some metaphysical or metaphorical way or another. It's like the remainder. But that's— and then we— so then we think about basically forms of sloth or passivity, as when one watches Netflix for hours on end or plays video games. So leisure is basically a consumptive understanding or consumptive conception according to this modern or late modern view.

But that is not actually the essence of leisure according to much of the tradition. Instead, leisure, first of all, is not quantifiable. It's not understood in terms of chronological time or in terms of space. Rather, leisure is— let me use a metaphor here— it's the opening of one's soul to the apprehending of what is. That might sound a little bit Taoist for those who have a Taoist predilection, and so it is. When you read a book in a certain way and you're not reading it just to acquire theoretical knowledge and you're not reading a book simply to get through it to the end, when you're reading it with a view to apprehending it, to allowing it to seek in— this is what medievalists call lectio divina.

It's a divine reading. When you read it in order to be transformed by what it has to say, and not in a self-help sort of way, but a deep transformation of your being, then you're in leisure. When you contemplate the nature of your being in an earnest sense— who am I? What am I? What is all this about?— then you're in leisure. So leisure is as I say, the enabling condition for the possibility of these wide-ranging, beautiful, necessary, vital questions.

So I might— I don't know if Paul's going to ask this question, but I might want to just quickly move then to the opening we have. So I use the term that I've used in some conversations with people and in some things that I've written, and that term I coined is existential opening. I think we might be at the beginning of a collective existential opening. By existential opening, I mean some event or set of events begins to initiate a process whereby the question is turned back on the questioner. Most of the questions we ask are objective in nature and spirit. They're about economics, politics, or psychology.

Even psychology is dealing with the contents of the mind. But an existential opening gives rise to introspective questioning. Who am I is the most basic introspective or existential question, or question rather. That typically happens when something rather terrible occurs in someone's life. Someone's mother dies unexpectedly, or someone gets into a car crash, or someone loses one's health, or someone experiences burnout, or whatever. You begin to find countless examples of how it's the case that a certain form of suffering precipitated I won't call it a crisis, but an opening and a broadening that led to a remarkable transformation in someone's life thereafter.

So my thesis is that we may be in the midst, just, or I should say, at the very beginning of a collective existential opening. By that, I mean that it's as if global consciousness is beginning to turn back on itself and ask itself questions. Work is just one inflection point for that. And so when you begin to have an existential opening of this way, you are actually involved in leisure and it becomes a contemplative act.

[27:45] Paul: We were talking earlier today about how this crisis has really centered the focus on questions of importance. And I think we've seen a lot of fluff evaporate. And I think somebody else mentioned on the call that this was kind of a relief because they were able to ask some of the— talk about some of the— I think it was Juliette. I think Johnny's mentioned this as well. We can talk about some of the more heavier things that some of us, maybe us introverted internet types, like to talk about a little more. And how are you seeing this conversation emerge?

And we talked about livelihood and focusing on work as livelihood instead of meaningful work or crushing it or performance. And how are you seeing this help us focus on the true philosophical and substantial questions of life? Right.

[28:52] Andrew Taggart: So Total Work presents life as if it were upside down. It suggests that sustaining life, or what Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher, calls bare life, is actually the reason for being. Hence, there is no room for what Greeks called the good life. So bare life becomes, or surviving, then ends up being larded with all these sundry terms that don't fit. Meaningful work, socially impactful work, social purpose-driven work, and so on, as an ideological justification for what, let's be honest, is the most banal activity we could ever perform. We have to start with something very simple.

Work is banal. Okay, so if we start there, then the crisis begins to reveal something really quite wonderful. That is, if you take work to be— by banal, I just mean nice enough, hopefully interesting enough, ideally socially beneficial and not socially harmful, and something that helps one make a living— then we have the starting point for reinvestigate an earnest modest reinvestigation of the nature and importance of work. So I would say that work at this point is starting to feel as if it were infrastructure. I'm using that metaphorically here. This is why in the United States in particular, I don't know whether this is true in the rest of the world, people are really starting to contract back and see that work is about livelihood.

They're worried not about whether or not the creative class event they had going on in the Bay Area has been canceled, They're worried about whether they still have a livelihood. So we've hit this brass tacks, get real moment in which people are starting to see, ah, it wasn't about whether or not it was the wonderful career with the zazzy titles. It's first and foremost about whether or not there is a viable, sustainable livelihood. So that's the first starting point. If we can actually get our— get clear about the fact that as I've been arguing for years, work is at bottom livelihood, then we can begin to open ourselves up to two more matters that I've already hinted at. So the second development— so first of all, let's begin to investigate what is it to have a decent livelihood, not just for me, not just for my own, but for everyone.

So it's an important, properly understood economic as well as political question. Now let's move from infrastructure upward to the nature of the good life. Then we have basically two questions that are starting to be opened up here. The first has to do with what I'll call here very broadly the ethical and political. People are starting to think about whom can I care for? How can I be generous?

How can I give? Who is in need? These are genuine ethical questions that are amazing insofar as they'd almost been forgotten for so long. but they're obvious to us when it's the case that there is a time of genuine need. So there are more words such as— I've been seeing words like care, concern, compassion, serving, love, and so forth. So that's the ethical side.

The political side, of course, has to do with how we're able to develop political communities that are not centered on work, but rather are centered on what Aristotle called the common good. My hypothesis is going to be that we're going to start to see, as this crisis gets worse initially and then as it abates, that there will be pockets of experimentation whereby people will be involved in collective forms of living, initially virtually, but then possibly in actual community. So that's the ethical-political question, or set of questions, that are opened up. The second one, and the last point I'll make, has to do with the contemplative. Or the contemplative aesthetic. That is, people really are starting to ask questions.

I saw this. I started philosophizing with people just after the economic collapse of 2009. And lo and behold, those are the people who were starting to get in touch with me just because they were starting to ask those questions. It wasn't anything that I was doing in particular. It was what people are calling now kairos or zeitgeist. The kairos or zeitgeist was such that it was helping to give rise to asking and seeking to contemplate basic questions.

Who am I, for example, if I'm not a worker? Who am I if I'm not the doer? What is this all about if it's not about success, status, wealth, social standing, and the like? What really is life about? At bottom? These two sets of questions are the ones that I'm very intrigued by.

So just to recount: one, at the infrastructural level, livelihood; two, the ethico-political question about how we engage with and act in the world out of care, concern, love, and so forth; and three, the contemplative one, who am I? And if I were given more time, I would knit these three together in a certain way to show that they actually are self- and mutually reinforcing, but perhaps this is enough to get it started.

[34:22] Paul: I really appreciate that. I think one thing worth noting, every day here in Spain, everyone goes outside of their house and stands on the balcony and cheers for healthcare workers and frontline workers. And I think there's going to be, and perhaps already is, an awakening that these people are not in careerist type jobs. The nurse, the doctor, the policeman, the Uber delivery person. These are incredibly essential people who are operating with care or at least have the opportunity and space to care. And I think this, it's exciting to see some of these people appreciated.

Instead of just whoever makes the most money or whoever has the highest status. And that's one thing I've seen in Spain I thought was worth offering. But we're going to shift now to a short breakout where you'll have an opportunity to connect one-on-one with another person. Andrew's going to offer us a question just as a prompt for that. And people seem to have been enjoying these. Basically, I'll click a button, put you into breakout rooms, it will send you over, it should work smoothly, and then it will smoothly bring you back to the room.

And then we'll bring up some open Q&A from people and then go to a closing reflection. Andrew?

[36:11] Andrew Taggart: Yeah, let me present you with two questions. The first, first is the following: what sorts of things in particular are you struggling with when it comes to total work here and now, that is during this period? So start where you are. That's the first question. What are you struggling with? The second question that would be wonderful to consider would be the following: if it's true that you really aren't a worker If it's true that you really aren't a doer manifesting your will in the world in the form of working on yourself and then that of working on the world, then really, who or what are you?

So if you're not a worker, who are you?

[37:07] Paul: I appreciate everybody coming to this. I've been just really energized by these conversations and exploring these ideas. I think I've been thinking about them for the last 3 years. I know Andrew's similarly. I think many in this call maybe longer than that. And I think they're going to become more central.

And it'll be interesting to see where that goes. Andrew and I are exploring potentially building something that goes a little deeper with this. We're calling it a course right now, but we're really trying to be generative with this and kind of see where it goes. We can follow up, but you can also send a message if you'd be interested in learning more, if that takes shape and evolves. But seriously, just thank you. I don't fully know what I'm doing with these things, but it feels like these conversations, people are finding them fulfilling and worth attending.

So I get a lot of value out of them too.

[38:28] Andrew Taggart: So let me provide some— so thank you very much everyone for being here today. Let me provide some just brief concluding remarks. Thomas just said, outside of work, I, that is one, doesn't know who I or one is. Allow that to be a contemplation. How did that come into being? How did that come to seem commonplace for us to believe that when one is not working in some capacity or another, one does not know who one is, one does not know oneself?

You ask that question enough, you remain with it long enough, And it seems utterly bewildering that that could be true for us today. After all, in some respects, it seems completely false. You quoted Whitman: I am great, I contain multitudes. Well, what are those multitudes? Why do we not ask questions about the multitudinous and varied aspects of our being, or even, might I say, of being in general? This is just one simple, beautiful, sinewy line of inquiry one could follow.

And if you follow that line of inquiry all the way to the end, it will be amazing what happens. Before, I promised that I'd say something really brief about how these might be brought together, the three things I said before: the one about livelihood, the other about the ethical-political, and the third about the contemplative aesthetic. Here's one way of thinking about how this collective existential opening might look. First of all, people— a fairly large number of people start to see, oh yes, work is that which enables me to support myself as well as those who I care about. It also enables me to perhaps be generous. When it comes to being able to support the lives of others.

It's interesting enough, slightly fulfilling or fulfilling enough, fairly socially beneficial. And it even cultivates in me certain virtues, such as the ability to take responsibility for what it is that falls within my ken. So it's not nothing, but it's like work that's been humbled. It's been made modest. It's been put in its place. We've gotten into right relation with work.

So that's the first. And we can ask ourselves, what could then be built on top of a world in which people have livelihoods? And that's where the magic starts. So the magic starts when people are able to resume being political animals. And that's in a robust sense. Politics is not just the sort of thing that we are spectators of.

Politics is that which we fundamentally participate in. Politics is really the way in which we deliberate about what is good or best for all of us in this community. So you might say this is the politics of care. I care about you and others, and we care about one another, and we care about the well-being of all parties involved. So notice that the livelihood actually makes possible what people today will call the bandwidth for being able to engage in political questions of this nature. And the other one is I really do think people would start to be open to asking themselves all these wonderful questions about What is this all about?

Who am I? Why are we all here? What does it mean to love one another? These are not just Monty Python questions. These are not questions that postmodernists thought were silly. These are very earnest, dare I say perennial questions.

So what would actually happen if it were the case that we could have a contemplative practice? My wife and I are Buddhists in large measure. And that contemplative practice itself would not only be appreciated as an end in itself, but then would also feed into the ways in which we think about and engage in politics, and both of which would be made possible by livelihoods, which is no more and no less than a livelihood. This is my— this This is my own picture. I'm not suggesting the world is going to turn out this way, but I do think that this is a very reasonable understanding of how we set to right various levels of reality. So I think I want to end there today, and I just want to reiterate my thanks for all of you coming today, and then I'll pass it back to Paul Millerd.