On the third week of class, we were assigned two videos to watch: Our Loss of Wisdom, featuring a lecture by Barry Schwartz; and Gustav and the Alienation, a Hungarian short animation. These videos shared a common theme on Max Weber’s ideas, including rationalization and bureaucracy. In the following essay, I will describe the videos and analyze how they relate to Weber’s theories.
In Our Loss of Wisdom, Barry Schwartz seeks to remind us of the virtues of moral work. He presents the job description of a janitor from an ad to illustrate the dehumanizing affect it has on prospective workers. When describing the work of janitors, Schwartz (2013) says that “human interactions involving kindness, care, and empathy, are an essential part of the job. And yet, their job description contains not one word about other human beings (TED-Ed)”. His point is that job descriptions which do not convey a sense of moral meaning lead to alienation, a relaxation of values, and less overall wisdom.
Gustav and the Alienation presents a different set of conditions, caused by increased regulation. The worker in this video is first seen going through the motions of a monotonous job routine (stamping papers). After work, he bustles his way through an aggressive crowd as he makes his way to a diner. The sights and sounds of the city are nauseating as he hallucinates about surreal representations that leave him feeling frustrated, wary, or depressed. At one point, he reads a newspaper in rapid succession, discarding the pages with the same rapidity as he did with the papers at work. At the end, we witness a failed suicide attempt. He goes to drink the night away in a large industrial pipe, one stacked among many, which resembles the building he lives in upon waking. This final hallucination sends him screaming down the street.
Max Weber suggested that after the Protestant Reformation, western civilization entered a phase where one’s work ethic became the most blessed offering a person could make to God. Prior to this, it seems that being virtuous and wise were stronger attributes for getting a believer into heaven. Once the Protestant Ethic took hold, a chain reaction began where increasing prosperity and production lead to ever-increasing capital gains, thereby fertilizing innovation, technology, science, and runaway growth. Weber coined this term rationalization: an increase in government regulation resulting from technology-based complexity. “Thus, in steering the course of societal development, values, traditions, and emotions were being displaced in favor of formal and impersonal bureaucratic practices” (Applerouth & Edles, 2016, p. 145). The long history of rationalization since the 16th century has resulted in the addition of more and more bureaucracy, leading to the present- a time when we have more it than ever.
Bureaucracy is a facet of rationalization that Weber saw as inevitable. The complexity that results from increased production means that governments need more regulation to keep things in balance. It has the effect of placing everyone in multiple hierarchies of systematic rules that depress and alienate the spirit. “The bureaucrat adopts as his own the detached, objective attitudes on which the efficiency and predictability of bureaucracies depend” (Applerouth & Edles, 2016, p. 192). This inevitability meant that bureaucracy would become the peak of rationalization; that as society got more complex, greater hierarchies of regulation would be needed to keep it functioning well. As a result, many bureaucrats feel less freedom, for they are restricted to their codes of conduct, whether it is on the job or by forced participation in government regulation.
In Gustav and the Alienation, we see Weber’s theory played out as a caricature of modern living. The worker is surrounded by bureaucracy. His co-workers are all doing monotonous things the same way he is, which leads one to believe he is a base unit in a hierarchy of bureaucratic organization. Whatever his function is does not matter; the emotions he conveys; the hallucinations; the misery he feels each day as he navigates his way through life, all provide evidence that rationalization has peaked in the form of this bustling city. The attempted suicide is further evidence of Weber’s belief that bureaucracy stymies freedom, for the worker is surrounded by order that desensitizes the spirit. And it is not just him; everyone around him looks vaguely robotic, as if they are barely living, as if they are all just cogs in the machinery of the city.
Barry Schwartz echoes this sentimentality as well. The first thing he mentions in Our Loss of Wisdom is the description of a job that does not emphasize human interaction or moral instruction. He describes a process that leads to the total alienation of the worker, just like Gustav in the video. Schwartz (2013), referring to the subtle oppression of bureaucracy, says that “moral skill is chipped away by an over-reliance on rules that deprives us of the opportunity to improvise and learn from our observations” (TED-Ed). His job gives Gustav no room improvise, express himself, or socialize with others. As a result, he suffers from a psychosis with terrible symptoms like hallucination and suicide ideation. Gustav appears to be trapped in an “iron cage”, a concept Weber invented to describe the conditions of an individual in a hyper-rationalized society that leads to a total lack of control under its bureaucratic systems.
Schwartz also demonstrates Weber’s theory by pointing out the misplaced values that have resulted from a society centered around a distorted work ethic. Rather than morality, character, and wisdom as our guiding motivations, we place more value on duty, efficiency, selfishness, and abundance when it comes to making a living. The work ethic Weber described in The Protestant Ethic led to a runaway capitalist system in which the desires of the individual were used as a moral compass, rather than the wisdom needed to improvise by bending the rules and serving other people. It seems the more rules there are in place, the less we can step outside them and serve a community by the fruits of wisdom.
Above all others, Schwartz (2013) cited wisdom as the virtue we need most “...because it’s what allows other virtues- honesty, kindness, courage and so on- to be displayed at the right time and in the right way” (TED-Ed). He implies that if we are taught things like moral character and wisdom in our schools, the distorted work ethic that Weber described would be reshaped. That would lead to less overall bureaucracy because more people would have the courage to break the rules every now and then. Maybe that is what Gustav and the city dwellers needed in the animation, practical wisdom to open their hearts to the community instead of keeping them locked up in a metaphorical “iron cage”.
Weber’s ideas resonate through contemporary culture in a lot of ways. There are countless pieces like Gustav and the Alienation that illustrate the depravity of bureaucracy. Another that comes to mind is the music video to Paranoid Android by Radiohead. In this video, also animated, a similar pattern emerges in a similar city. The only difference is an angel saves the day at the end. The great irony of Weber’s theory is that a religious movement generated the sciences needed to facilitate the prosperity they were trying to appease their God with. Then the Enlightenment came, which put science ahead of religion as the great motivator of progress, persuading successive generations to lose touch with God. Paranoid Android seems to yearn for a simpler time when morality and wisdom were easier to practice, when magical thinking and divine intervention were still possible. The message is that if we do not heed the advice of Schwartz and Weber; if we do not rein in prosperity by reaping the fruits of wisdom; if we continue to forget the better angels of our nature, we may end up like Gustav.
References
TED-Ed. (2013, February 2). Our Loss of Wisdom. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYu0kMCxFEE
Elisofnyc. (2006, January 26). Gustav and the Alienation. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKVD-PVYPY4
Applerouth, Scott, & Edles, Laura Desfor. (2016.) Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory. SAGE Publications Inc.
Radiohead. (2015, January 23). Radiohead- Paranoid Android. YouTube.
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