[lit-ideas] Foucault -- By the sweat of thy brow
- From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "Lit-Ideas " <Lit-Ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 12 Dec 2011 12:30:21 -0800
On page 55 of Madness and Civilization Foucault writes, "In [the] first
phase of the industrial world, labor did not seem linked to the problems it
was to provoke; it was regarded, on the contrary as a general solution, an
infallible panacea, a remedy to all forms of poverty. Labor and poverty
were located in a simple opposition, in inverse proportion to each other.
As for the power, its special characteristic, of abolishing poverty, labor -
according to the classical interpretation - possessed it not so much by its
productive capacity as by a certain force of moral enchantment. Labor's
effectiveness was acknowledged because it was based on an ethical
transcendence. Since the Fall, man had accepted labor as a penance and for
its power to work redemption. It was not a law of nature which forced man
to work, but the effect of a curse. The earth was innocent of that
sterility in which it would slumber if man remained idle: 'The land had not
sinned, and if it is accursed, it is by the labor of the fallen man who
cultivates it; from it no fruit is won, particularly the most necessary
fruit, save by force and continual labor.'
". . . Pride was the sin of man before the Fall; but the sin of idleness is
the supreme pride of man once he has fallen, the absurd pride of poverty.
In our world, where the land is no longer fertile except in thistles and
weeds, idleness is the fault par excellence. In the Middle Ages, the great
sin, radix malorum omnium, was pride, Superbia. According to Johan
Huizinga, there was a time, at the dawn of the Renaissance, when the supreme
sin assumed the aspect of Avarice, Dante's cicca cupidigia. All the
seventeenth-century texts, on the contrary, announced the infernal triumph
of Sloth: it was sloth which led the round of the vices and swept them on.
Let us not forget that according to the edict of its creation, the Hopital
General must prevent 'mendicancy and idleness as sources of all disorder.'
Louis Bourdaloue echoes these condemnations of sloth, the wretched pride of
fallen man: 'What, then, is the disorder of an idle life? It is, replies
Saint Ambrose, in its true meaning a second rebellion of the creature
against God.' Labor in the houses of confinement thus assumed its ethical
meaning: since sloth had become the absolute form of rebellion, the idle
would be forced to work, in the endless leisure of a labor without utility
or profit."
Foucault's provides us with an interesting perspective not only of the
development of our treatment of the mad and indigent. It bears a faint but
unmistakable hint of Marxism, which may have prevented him from putting this
whole matter in an anthropological perspective. The Biblical account of the
Eden, the Fall and its aftermath, epitomizes the transition from
Hunter-Gatherer societies into farming communities. Prior to this
transition, hunter-gatherer women walked about picking fruit, nuts,
vegetables, etc while the men were out with hunting. Hunter-Gatherers did
not earn their living by the sweat of their brow - not in the sense that a
farmer did, planting, weeding, and harvesting his grain or the herder moving
his flocks about from place to place to feed and guard them. Prior to this
transition man relied upon God's bounty for food and clothing, but afterward
he had work for it.
Anthropological evidence suggests that man's evolution occurred by fits and
starts moving him from the jungle (a place of plenty) out onto the plains to
move about from place to place hunting and gathering. But when the weather
turned bad, few who couldn't plant grain and tend flocks survived. This
movement from hunter-gathering to farming villages and from thence into
towns occurs in the last tiny sliver of our existence. Our hunter-gatherer
existence began 1.5 million years ago with Homo Erectus. It is no wonder
that we haven't figured out the best ways of doing things in the short
period of time since civilization began. We are making do with the wrong
bodies and the wrong needs (based upon what would be right for our
hunter-gatherer ancestors).
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