TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 74

Grant Martsolf: My guest today is Dr. Jeffrey Hansen. Jeffrey is a senior philosopher at the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science. He's edited two books and authored two others: most recently, Philosophies of Work in the Platonic Tradition: A History of Labor in Human Flourishing. Jeffrey is also an Anglican priest.

We'll be discussing several topics including “work” and “meaning.” Welcome to the show.

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson: Thanks so much for having me.

Grant Martsolf: I do eventually want to get to work in “meaning,” which is the bulk of what we'll be talking about, but I want to start not by talking about the philosophy of work, but ecclesiology.

So, what does Anglo-Catholicism uniquely have to offer to the modern church?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson: One thing that springs to mind is that Anglo-Catholicism, I think, views the liturgy as a potential model for how society as a whole should operate. That, in the liturgy, we get a glimpse of how people are meant to relate to one another outside of what you would call, say, a liberal standard (liberal small “l”) political context and in the kingdom of God as it's being instituted and advanced in our world.

So I think that society itself could be modeled on the liturgy in the Anglo-Catholic imagination and how it might extend itself. We see that work having been done in the early 20th century with some of the more radical elements of the Anglo-Catholic movement. Stuart Hedlund, for example, a devout Christian Socialist – which is a word combination of words that I think has always been allergic to the American sensibility, but had serious cachet certainly in the UK.

Grant Martsolf:  So draw that out a little bit more how public life can be modeled after the liturgy. I'm really intrigued by specifically what you mean by that.

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  Well, I think the liturgy provides something like a cosmological vision. And when I do my preaching or when I try to teach on theology, I guess what I'm trying to present to people is a kind of cosmological view of the Christian mind and imagination. And I don't know if that's the best word for it, but it intersects I think, with some other possible trends coming out of, say, Eastern Orthodoxy that are also emphasizing this cosmological or symbological dimension of the faith. That Christianity is not a therapy. It's not a social program. But it’s a view of reality that is comprehensive and exhaustive and the liturgy participation in it acclimates us to that cosmology and shapes our being according to its inner logic, not only in terms of our thinking, but even our bodily postures and gestures and dispositions are shaped by the discipline of the liturgy.

And I think ultimately what we're trying to convey, and that the Anglo-Catholic tradition is sensitive to in terms of the celebration of the Mass, is something like that deep cosmological vision of reality itself. Which means that it's going to have social impact, right? It's going to have an overflow in terms of how we think about our dealings with one another, what we owe to one another and how, I think, we ought to conduct ourselves, even, say, economically or with respect to our political associations.

The liberal political order on my view is premised on what John Millbank would've called a “primordial violence,” a vision of reality according to which conflict is the norm. And that the name of the game politically is to somehow manage conflict. I take it that the Christian logic is not that, but is the logic of abundance, of superabundance. And we're invited to participate in that, which means that we have to cultivate a very different mindset. We are not in rivalry with our neighbors over limited goods, right? We are not in a state of primordial conflict that has to be then kind of managed in ad hoc ways, or according to, say, certain techniques or managerial tactics. These are all Band-Aids. We could look back to a figure as ancient as Augustine to, I think, prove that to us. So that the social order has to look more like participation in abundance rather than rivalrous or contentious competition. René Girard, of course, would have a lot to say on that as well.

And I think the liturgy trains us out of that, of that mindset and causes us to look toward a logic of abundance and what that implies in terms of some of our practical decision making. I think we ought to prioritize and look to ways that we can support our fellow Christians especially in our immediate local context. The Catholic church is Catholic, not because it's universal, but because every locality, every instance of the Church is the whole, right? So we are not localists in the sense that we're appealing to the local as a kind of bulwark against the anonymous swarm, but we're looking to the local because it's an expression of the universal. And that means to me that our concern for where we've been placed, our concern for the people amidst whom we've been placed is itself the calling. It's the calling to serve the universal within that. But that means that we have to think, for instance, if I have a fellow parishioner who's trying to make a living as a carpenter, if I have the opportunity to support him by buying a table that he's crafted by hand for maybe a slightly more money than I would've paid at Crate & Barrel, then, perhaps I should do that.

Grant Martsolf:  Thanks so much for that. This was a really interesting perspective on Anglo-Catholicism.

I want to move now to some of your research on work. I want to talk a little bit about the nature of work itself. Must work, to be considered good, actively engage all forms of human strength, namely the strength of the body, mind, and spirit?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I think the best work probably will do something like that in varying levels of engagement. Some work which we’re apt to call “intellectual” or “white collar” or something like that will emphasize certain aspects more than others. And in that event, it may be that we should be doing different kinds of work, even if some of that is avocational or unpaid. Ruskin talks about this. He thinks that even gentlemen should have a handcraft of some sort. They should know how to do certain kinds of things that are more bodily in terms of their orientation.

I recently visited a school very much organized around a classical-type education, the seven liberal arts. They also teach all the students blacksmithing, drawing, leatherwork and woodworking. And that's an express effort to engage the body in education. But those things also have an impact on the mind.

I think it's important not to make hard and fast distinctions there either. I think learning to draw, for instance, in the classical educational program was really viewed as a way of learning how to see reality as it. Drawing is not a matter of perfecting a fine art so much as it is a matter of perfecting the faculty of perception, right? So how do we, how do we look at reality. And thinking about that, saying connection with what Simone Weil has to say about attention or what Iris Murdoch has to say are really just ways of engaging the body in a whole-person effort to attend to reality properly, which is itself a project that has moral implications, right? To be able to attend reality is to be able to respond to it as well.

And we can think about that in certain just very ordinary instances, it seems to me that the person who is asking for money on the side of the road as we're waiting at a stoplight is someone that we are disinclined to pay attention to because we know what that would mean, right? That would mean that we would then feel moved to somehow help that person and if we're not inclined to do that, then we look away, right? So that we govern our moral responses to reality in large part by what we choose to pay attention to.

And I think something like the engagement of the body does have that higher implication, as it were. It's not just a matter of learning how to work steel or work wood or work leather or draw properly. It's a matter of attuning ourselves to reality itself. And much work does that, I think Matthew Crawford eloquently described that in his book about how manual labor really does engage the mind in ways that we, I think, tend to overlook or to give second place to.

So I think, at the end of the day, probably all forms of work, at their best, do indeed draw on the full range of human capacities.

Grant Martsolf:  Right. So in that case, what is work?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson: I pick out one definition, in the beginning of the book, which I think serves well to answer to our contemporary instincts about this and that we want to say, and I think not without some reason, that work is something like “a purposeful activity designed to make an alteration in the external world.”

That, I think, has some merit, but I think it does fail to capture another whole dimension, which is the degree to which work was conceived in the pre-modern period as also being an effort to alter one's own character or one's own self or way of responding to reality. So I take it that work is something broader in the sense that it's not necessarily an effort at making a change in the external world, but it is an effort directed at changing reality.

And that may be the reality of your own self or the setting in order of your own character, which takes some expenditure of effort. And I think that's something that we see in Ruskin's work, being emphasized, that work is a cost or an investment of effort of one's own life in the securement of some good. And that may be an external good. That may be the creation of a product, paradigmatically. But it may also be the winning of some genuine good that can only be had with effort. And that might be something like the building of virtue or the production of beautiful character or the production of a work of art that isn't obviously a product of a work process, but is the product of the effort of life expending itself.

Grant Martsolf:  So talk a little bit about not just work itself, but a Platonic understanding of work. Was John Paul II inherently a Platonist thinker regarding work? I think particularly of Laborem Exercens, his wonderful encyclical on work.

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I ended up not including John Paul II, in part because I was surprised to see the extent to which his encyclical, to which you just referred, really borrows or heavily relies upon John Locke's analysis of work, which is one that I thought really takes us away from some of the pre-modern conceptions and for the first time, in my view, ties work inherently to the production of money, which is something that Plato, for instance, strenuously opposed. In his view, work is not inherently related to the earning of money, and that that is a different art that could be practiced alongside and generally is practiced alongside a number of other possible crafts or things that we would want to call a person's job, but it's not generative of money inherently. Inherently, for Plato, work is directed toward the improvement or the remediation of some flaw in an aspect of reality. So it meets a genuine need. And it's possible to make money at work, of course, and in most cases people do, but it's not intrinsically ordered to the production of money.

For Locke, property follows upon labor because you have a property or right to property in your own person, according to his analysis, which it seems to me may very well contravene directly something like the claim of St. Paul, that you don't have a claim to your own person; that you are not your own.

And I wonder whether Locke doesn't take us down, ultimately, a real bottleneck that leads us to some of the problems of modern liberal society as it's currently ordered that we were already alluding to at the beginning of our conversation. Locke, I think, has a faulty view of liberty. I think Locke also overemphasizes, and it does so in a way that is heretical, the genesis injunction to take dominion over the earth. According to a popular thesis by Lynn White Jr., that biblical mandate is the ultimate origin of a lot of our problems with the environmental depredation. I found in my study of the history of the philosophy of work that there is very little expiation on that idea in pre-modern thinkers. Very little. It really seems to me to come to its own in the modern period, and especially with Locke.

I also think that Locke has a view of the Fall that entails that labor is actually a postlapsarian condition and not a prelapsarian condition. For the monastics, for all the theologians in the Middle Ages, they were very clear in their affirmation, up through Luther, that work was part of the created order. That human beings were made to work.

This was a surprising revelation to my students when I taught this material at Harvard. The one thing they found most alarming was that Adam had a job in the Garden of Eden and was therefore meant, according to the created origin and the perfected state of humanity, to work. They all seemed to be under the impression that he was meant to loll about enjoying the fruits of the garden without doing any tending or keeping of the garden. But of course, that's exactly what he was enjoined to do by God.

So I think there are a number of ways in which Locke takes us away from the Platonic tradition, and I was surprised to find that John Paul II, in that encyclical, depended, I thought, a great deal, without mentioning Locke by name, but depended a great deal on Locke's basic view of these matters, and then attempted, I think, to limit their most pernicious possible implications. I'm not sure that will work. I'm not sure if you can do that, having begun from metaphysical foundations or theological foundations that are unsound in the first instance. So I'm not convinced that John Paul II is actually in line with this tradition in every way that he might be from the very beginning.

Grant Martsolf:  It seems to me though that his articulation of the objective and subjective nature of work, at least in that sense, seems to be flowing from a Platonic tradition.

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  Sure. That there's scope for something like the way in which work meets certain inner needs or doesn't just produce, say, effects in the external world, but has an effect on the human being. And I think that's right. He's sensitive to the ways in which work is a source, not just of money, but as a source of meaning, of community, of affirmation, a certain kind of dignity that comes from work that I think he wants to support. And that seems right to me. I think that's correct. And I think his appeals to the necessity for work to be adequately compensated for a person to say, sustain a family, or things of that sort, that work be an opportunity for a building of community, and of course, he's thinking here certainly of the power of the labor unions in Poland and the effect that they had on overthrowing the Soviet regime. So I think he's aware of what work can do at its best, but I'm not sure that he has the fundamental principles in place to really vindicate those intuitions or to support them in a more grounded way.

Grant Martsolf:  And one other thing that I noticed as I'm reading John Paul II, and you just alluded to this, is that he seems to me to have the Polish steelworker in mind. And so he's really sort of grounded in this industrial economy when he thinks about what work is.

So I also saw that, in your book, the last philosopher you cover is Simone Weil, who died in 1943, as society was still fully entrenched in industrial society. Has the philosophy of work caught up with the conditions of work in a postindustrial society? Who are the writers thinking hard about what this means since the nature of work has changed so tremendously, in the last 60, 70 years?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  It's very difficult to say. I don't think philosophy of work officially has caught up, no, I don't think so. Kwame Appiah came and gave a two-part talk on work here at Harvard a couple years ago. I thought it was very good. It spoke out of some of the same kinds of concerns and themes that are present in my book and that are present in the tradition, but I'm not sure it broke new grounds, specifically in terms of speaking to the realities of a postindustrial economy. I'm not sure I'm seeing that being done in formal circles.

I think Derek Thompson's article in the Atlantic on the Religion of Workism, I thought, was an effort to speak to that. And it was an awareness that work is now being approached by the wealthy in a way that is more consuming of leisure time rather than yielding of leisure time. It's being invested with perhaps too much expectation of providing meaningfulness. And the degree to which, say, young people are now saying by a factor of 95% that the most important thing in their future is to have a fulfilling career: this outstrips the answer to make a positive impact on other people's lives, which only 81% of young people are saying, and the answer to be happily married, which only 47% of people young people are ranking as their top priority out of life.

So he worries that that's a change insofar as work is no longer being viewed as a potential source of drudgery in need of reform or an area of life that needs to be limited in terms of its impact and absorption on our mental and physical energies, but actually is being freighted with too much in the way of expectation that it will deliver all possible goods to the human being, including something like a source of meaningfulness, a source of dignity, a source of affirmation.

And perhaps the post-industrial economy is demanding too much of us. You look at the kinds of zip codes where Amazon wants to build a new headquarters and they tend to be in areas where there's high concentrations of young college graduates who are unmarried. This is the perfect employee now for the knowledge economy, right? This someone who has 80 hours a week to give to the job, and who is prepared to give them in the hope that somehow that will deliver all possible goods, that there is little else for which they have to live. So that's a somewhat disturbing sign.

Grant Martsolf:  And I'm going to return to this question of Workism in a little bit. But I am interested in thinking through some of the implications of Platonic thinking in the postindustrial economy. One question I have is: what are the internal goods associated with working, for example, the Dunder Mifflin Paper Company?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  It can be difficult to discern in the way that we've constructed such jobs now. So I'm thinking here of Zeynep Ton who works at MIT Sloan Business School, formerly of Harvard, who speaks about what she calls is a Good Jobs program. And the idea of the Good Jobs program is that we look at jobs like Dunder Mifflin or we look at jobs especially in retail or in service industries, and we throw our hands up at those and think, “Well, those are just not ever going to be good jobs, and it's too bad that somebody has to do them.” But she's not content with that stance of resignation and says, “Well, the fact is that those can be good jobs, but they take certain kinds of restructuring of expectations.” We have to, I think, make of those positions jobs in which the occupants thereof are actually being listened to by management. And management is prepared to be responsive to what they're hearing from people who work say lower-level service sector type positions. Those people have to have their time scheduled in a respectful manner that recognizes that they cannot be told one week out what their schedule is for the next week, but that they have other things in their life that they have to plan around.

And so I think, in order to see what the internal goods of such a job might be, we need certain kinds of structural rearrangements to how those jobs are performed. And she's shown, with a tremendous number of case studies that there's evidence-based reasons to believe that these strategies work. Retention in such positions is notoriously low, but it can be changed a great deal if people who occupy such positions feel that they're being acknowledged and that their opinions and their observations of their working conditions are actually being responded to in a meaningful way. So, rather than, say, dictate that every store has one hour to unload the contents of a delivery truck, if at one store there's 50% larger retail footprint, the workers say, “Look, we can't unload a truck in an hour. We need an hour and a half.” Then management has to be prepared to say, “Okay, you got an hour and a half, no problem.”

The internal good of a position like that could be something like empowerment, right? Something like dignity, right? Something like control over the quality and type of work that you're doing. But that will only be possible if there are certain kind of structural changes that are made.

We have a mountain of social science evidence that certain kinds of features to any job, no matter how seemingly menial or beneath the recognition of academicians that might appear to be any job can be improved. And they are, they are sort of things that you would expect. Task variation. The ability to do different kinds of things. The ability to set your own schedule, your own priorities. The sense that you are heard and acknowledged and responded to meaningfully at your job. I mean, these are things that are possible in any work setting. But we have to be resolved to actually make them possible, which is something that we've denied workers in various sectors fairly aggressively and have told ourselves that it can't be any other way, when the fact is it can. And there are businesses that do conduct themselves according to these principles.

Grant Martsolf:  So in his book, The Corrosion of Character, Richard Sennett argues that one of the problems with contemporary work is that it's often exceedingly abstract. What impact does the abstract nature of much postindustrial work have on the worker?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I think it can be demoralizing for a great many people. I think that there is a certain type of individual for whom the pride of being able to point to something that they have made is extremely important, extremely profound and rewarding. I think for some people it is difficult to take the same sense of pride in a job that is so abstract that it seems to produce nothing. And this is perhaps part of what lies at the basis of David Graeber's book on Bullshit Jobs, is that these are jobs that are what they are because they generate nothing of value. And one of the consequences, it seems to me, of the collapse of the industrial economy in this country is that there's a certain kind of worker for whom the ability to point to something, a motorcycle, a building, someone's home, a swimming pool, and be able to say, “I made that,” that opportunity is lost. And so I think there is a concern. And a lot of more abstract forms of employment, forms that perhaps you or I, or a lot of people listening to us find perfectly rewarding and satisfying.

Grant Martsolf:  Yeah. So it's funny that you mentioned Graeber, because this is literally my next question. As you alluded to, David Graeber wrote this book called Bullshit Jobs and he estimated that about 50% of jobs meet no real explicit human need. Is this an overestimate or an underestimate?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  50%. I guess that's a fairly safe bet, right? It’s easy to make the case that that's neither exaggerated nor deflated, if you split it down the middle. That's tough to say. I don't know enough about where jobs are currently allocated or what surviving percentage of individuals, say, do in fact still work in productive arts or in manufacturing or things like that. I'm not sure where we're at numerically.

It seems to me certainly the danger of your job failing to meet a specific human need is probably higher in the more abstract areas or the more knowledge economy areas, right? It's easier to argue that a job that's productive of something of actual value also answers to a genuine human need. I mean, this, this standard was set by Plato himself, right? This is what he thinks makes a techne what it is, right? A craft is something that answers to a genuine human need and solves it. I think we probably have a fair number of jobs today that cannot be said to meet that rather elementary criterion.

Grant Martsolf:  So what's the proper response of someone who finds themselves in stuck in a Bullshit Job? It seemed like this is actually part of Jonathan Malesic's argument in some of his earlier papers, that the vast majority of jobs are Bullshit Jobs. What you then need to do is focus on the internal goods of the job and to grow in virtue through the job, because you recognize the job itself is bullshit. Is that the response, or is there some other possibility of responding when you find yourself within a Bullshit Job?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I think there's a number of possible responses. I mean, one would be to consider the possibility that you need a different job. Which is one that perhaps answers to that need a little more urgently. We still have, I would like to hope, a fair degree of social mobility in this country that would afford such opportunities. Particularly perhaps, if you're like Matthew Crawford and you decide to ditch the think tank for learning how to repair motorcycles: training programs, learning how to repair motorcycles are not that expensive compared to, say, getting another PhD or something in the humanities. There are opportunities to retrain in directions that maybe don't seem obvious to the person who's been herded into college or college and graduate study and is now facing a mountain of debt potentially.

One could also, I think, and I think Malesic is right about this, I think there is scope to focus on the internal goods of a job that are perhaps themselves not inherently as rewarding as one might like. There are still opportunities, I think, to realize the good that comes from a certain liturgical practice, right? Even if your work is repetitive or mundane, there's a certain kind of shaping of the soul that takes place through that.

And there's a certain kind of discernment that is required to find the value within such settings. Sometimes they involve things like the exercise of, say, something like practical reason, right? If you talk to people, say, who work in a hospital cleaning up the floors. Job Crafting: you know, there's some evidence that Job Crafting is an effective way of getting people to think about the genuinely internal goods of their own work.

In a hospital, the limiting of potential for infection to already vulnerable patients is an incredibly important thing to do. If you think of your work as not so much scrubbing floors, but as something like aiding in the safety and healing of the patients in the hospital, that might alter your outlook considerably, right? You might think about your work in a much more elevated way if you realize that the cleaning needs to be done at certain times or with certain amount of discretion, right? Not to be in the way of more important things that are perhaps happening on an emergency basis in the hallway, for instance, or not in such a way as to disrupt grieving families that have gathered around the bedside of a dying patient.

Then you're exercising practical wisdom, right? You're deciding, “This is not really the right time, or this is the right time, or this is my priority right now, or this is not my priority right now.” And those are things that regrettably don't show up in the description for that job, but what are we really looking for?

Grant Martsolf:  So how do you think Plato would understand contemporary experiences of burnout? What might be his account of that experience?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  It's conceivable that such a person has attempted to do too much. I think he thinks of work as being limited in its expertise. And we tend not to think about this. Or maybe we want to believe in something like critical thinking or portable skills that somehow what we're being trained in or what our work is asking for us is some kind of nebulous skill set that is as valuable in one setting as another. Maybe that leads to people imagining that they can be omnicompetent or that they can do everything that a job requires.

Whereas I tend to think that he looks at work as being ultimately devoted to one area of expertise and that the limits to such knowledge are precisely that a person who is very capable and knowledgeable in one area is tempted to imagine themselves capable and knowledgeable in another. And I think we saw this a little bit in the shift that we could maybe date to somewhere in the nineties, perhaps, that there was this expectation that somehow if you were a CEO and you had been successful at one company or in one industry, that you should really be hired in some other industry or for some other company and you would be bound to be just as successful there as you were before. That somehow being a CEO was its own expertise. And that contrasted with a sort of an older model. Think of the Lee Iacocca paradigm, where you ascend to the chairmanship of General Motors having started at the bottom and having worked your way all the way up.

And I think Plato would say that's because that person knows cars. And they know them intimately with sort of fingertip feel for how they're put together. And that knowledge may enlarge to the point that you really know all aspects of what it takes to make cars. But you should not assume that you know everything else as a result. Or that your expertise is immediately sort of transferrable to other kinds of potential application. It may not be so. And I think that some of the experience that we've had has probably proven that there are limits to that. That it’s not necessarily the case that a successful executive in one area is going to automatically be successful in another area. That it may be that that skillset is more tied to a narrow horizon of knowledge and understanding, a narrower one than we've been led to believe.

Grant Martsolf:  So I want to talk a little bit about this notion of Workism. You brought this up earlier. It was in the last chapter in your book, which I thought was really interesting. How many hours per day should the proper Platonist work? I mean, in proper “employment” work?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  Yeah, it'd be difficult to say with some kind of universal recommendation. I think, in part, they should be working with a certain spirit as opposed to with a certain, say, number of hours in mind. And we've spoken to that a little bit already, right? That the attitude that one brings to work changes perhaps the way that you think about it and what you're gaining from it. Many people work, I think, jobs that they are not that excited about because they have higher goods in mind, and I think that's perfectly acceptable.

We see this with first generation folks who come to a new country. They may very well work jobs that are beneath them, you know, in terms of their level of education and accomplishment from the culture that they relocated from. I've seen this in my own family. But they do that because they have in view the success of their children, for example. And the expectation that “while I may have to put up with an inadequate job or a job that doesn't really allow me to develop my gifts to the highest possible level, I have in view a higher good. And that good is the opportunity that my children will have to succeed and to allow their talents to really flourish.”

And that's something we've seen human beings do over the eons. And I think it's a perfectly acceptable attitude to take to work for a Platonist, because a Platonist is always going to be able to say, “there is something higher than this.” That no work is ultimate. And the danger of Workism is that it's being elevated to a place of ultimacy.

So I think if there are alternate goods for which you're working, the number of hours or the amount of work you do may be a function of that. You know, what am I trying to accomplish, or what need am I trying to meet? And if the need is to feed the family, then that may involve more work of a paid official nature than you might like. But it may be that that is the sufficient motivation for doing it.

Grant Martsolf:  You see one particular reaction against Workism is this idea of “quiet quitting,” where you keep the job, you're not very engaged and you kind of do the work, but not really. And so one interpretation of this is a virtuous rebellion against what is a disordered system. But at the same time, it could also be interpreted as reneging on some unspoken agreement with your boss, right? They thought they were getting one thing and you said, “Sorry, I'm rebelling against Workism, so I'm just not going to work.” Is quiet quitting a moral act?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I can see the temptation in a way, because, as I've said already, I think there are systematic changes that are needed and that we have good evidence to believe are effective. I mean, they're not just morally motivated. But the willingness of management to listen to workers and respond to their genuine needs and requests and insights and observations… I think a moral case can be made, but it's also the fact that I think this just makes your company a better company. I mean, I think it minimizes expenses, it minimizes needless turnover. There are certain kinds of economic benefits that come with it.

So I could see a person, who feels themselves trapped and unable to change systematic conditions in ways that I've already suggested are desirable both economically and morally, might very well be tempted to a kind of passivity or of resignation while yet remaining, as it were, on the job. The caution I suppose would be: are you thereby removing yourself from the opportunity to realize genuine goods that might yet be present in terms of, say, the building of community, the opportunity to in fact change your environment from within? That is a worry, I think, both for the dissatisfied and also, it's a worry even for the highly satisfied.

I mean, we have good reason to think from a quite a bit of social science evidence that people who look at their jobs as not something that they're just sleeping through, but something that they feel called to often have very strong senses of meaningfulness in their lives. Very high degrees of satisfaction. Interestingly, we see this very prominently among people who work with animals: zookeepers, veterinarians. That they feel at very large percentages that they are called to their work and that there's nothing else that they could do, that they could see themselves doing.

But the downside to that is that there's opportunity for exploitation there as well, right? I mean, because if you feel as if your job is a calling and you can't imagine never doing anything else, then, maybe I don't have to pay you that well to do it, right? Or maybe I can ask quite a bit. And it turns out you're pretty willing to do a lot of maybe dangerous, difficult, or unpleasant tasks because you can't see yourself doing anything else.

So, it seems to me that there are a couple of different ways that people could maybe fail to miss out on the internal goods of a work practice and this would be one of them. Although again, I wouldn't be prepared to condemn that outright, simply because I do understand what would motivate it, particularly in a situation of powerlessness, right?

Grant Martsolf:  So how do we think about the relationship, then, between meaning and work? There's obviously these two poles where, on one side, we obviously know that work is very important for meaning in life, but at the same time, Workism seems to be that relationship between work and meaning that's disordered. How do you think about that relationship?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  Yeah, I guess part of why I was interested in the Platonic tradition as such is that I think it navigates between these two streams. I think that's part of why I find it attractive is that there is certainly a strong correlation between work that is satisfying and self-reported meaningfulness.

People derive a lot of meaning from their work, and often I think in ways that, again, we have to be very careful not to be elitist about. The elitist looks at certain sectors, looks at Dunder Mifflin, let's say, and says, “I cannot imagine that that would be meaningful for people.” Often it is, and we should not bring elitist judgements or preconceptions to our assessments of what kind of work people are capable of finding meaningful. Because there's a wide range. There's quite a bit of working experiences that people can find meaningful and that contribute to their sense of meaning in life very positively.

The other thing that we can certainly say with a great deal of scientific assurance from the social science literature on this is that unemployment is one of the most damaging things to your sense of life satisfaction and self-reported meaning. It is an effect that the longer unemployment goes on, the more severe it is, which suggests is one of the ways in which we are able to nudge closer to a causal inference.

We're constantly told that correlation is not causation. And that's true. But one thing that we do see is that there's reason to believe in causal inference where there's what we call a dose effect. Where one month of unemployment has a 1/12 impact on your life satisfaction, 12 months has 12 times worse an impact on your life satisfaction, 24 months, 24 times worse, right? So the longer that unemployment goes on, the worse it is for your long-term life satisfaction.

This is even more so true than other what you would think comparably traumatic events in life, or even arguably worse events, for instance, including the death of a loved one. The death of a loved one always has an immediate and very harmful impact on a person's life satisfaction. But you actually tend on average to get over that and to have life satisfaction return to baseline much more rapidly than you do in when you're facing unemployment. So unemployment is a really damaging state of affairs. We know that with a fairly high degree of confidence.

Again, a wide range of work can be meaningful and has a very positive impact on meaning. But I suspect that there's a law of diminishing returns in much the way that we see there's a law of diminishing returns with income, right? So that people who have insufficient money coming in to meet their needs are very unhappy and very unfulfilled, and with good reason. People who have adequate income flow for their needs report very high degrees of meaning in life and life satisfaction. And then people with astronomically high incomes actually tend to drop off again. That the likelihood of their having self-reported meaning in life or life satisfaction starts to actually dip back down. And so I would suspect there's something similar when it comes to work that the as work becomes freighted with more and more expectations of meaning, it actually starts to deliver less and less.

Grant Martsolf:  So I want to talk a little bit more about meaning more generally. I want to put this in the context of my students. As part of one of my classes, I ask students to talk a little bit about what their lives mean, and they struggle. And actually I've noticed that it's been increasingly difficult over the years that I've been teaching for them to really articulate what their lives mean. So if meaning is really comprised of purpose, significance, and coherence, what do you think my students are most missing?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  That's difficult to say. I haven't been in the classroom in a long time, and I feel the deficit of that because I know I'm no longer as intimately aware of what kinds of challenges young people are facing. All I can do is observe these and look at some of those statistical problems.

It's likely, I think, that coherence, which in our research methods we've divided between a global and an individual dimension, is probably lacking in part because, I suspect, education is not conducted around imparting a sense of global coherence. That the aspiration is no longer to provide an intellectual framework for understanding the meaning of human life as a whole. And some philosophers are going to tell you that's not a not a problem, right? That we don't necessarily need a global theory of meaningfulness as a whole. I would be interested to discover in our empirical research what kinds of impacts low-reported global coherence might yield. I don't know, but I would be interested to discover, because I think if in fact there are poor outcomes associated with low self-reported global coherence, that that might put the lie to some of these philosophical views that say all that matters is sort of a sense of coherence in your own individual life. There might be an open question as to whether or not such things even possible apart from a sense of global coherence. So I would imagine that there are some deficits there.

Purposefulness – I would imagine high achieving college students would have some sense of that. I think that probably, if you think back to David Brooks's report on the Organization Kid, which is now kind of out of date, I'm sure, but at least at that time I would think that that student, that high achieving student, probably has been imparted with a sense of purpose in that they have always been able to be furnished with goals that seemed attractive and be motivated to achieve them. If there's a deficit there, it might be that they're no longer sure why they are bothering to achieve those goals or what they really add up to beyond, say, the next thing, right? You know, the college admission, graduate school admission, job in academia, whatever it might be, job in the profession. I could see that purpose unmoored from something like a larger vision of where all this is going could itself be a problem.

We, again, split purposiveness into three categories or three dimensions, and again, I'd be interested to see what the empirical research yields on this, but we're of the mind that purpose could be quite mundane, [it] could be your goal for the day or for the week. That there could be a set of larger, overarching purposes toward which you feel that your life is directed: getting through college, getting a job… And that there may yet be a third and highest level of purpose, which would be something like calling or vocation or mission, to which I've already alluded.

And again, I don't know how completely those things will hold together or if there is any kind of measurable outcome of a negative sort that would be associated with, say, high sense of purposiveness and goals, but a very low sense of mission or calling or vocation. But I would hypothesize that it's possible that a person might have a strong sense of purpose without having a unified or overarching sense of calling or mission. And that may explain some deficit in perceived meaning that young people are experiencing.

Grant Martsolf:  So in their book The Coddling of the American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt argue that one major challenge to the development of young adults into maturity is the prevalence of what they call “snowplow parenting,” which is an approach to parenting that attempts to move all barriers to children's success, so, essentially attempts to remove all suffering. Could this be part of the reason why my students have such a hard time coming up with meaning their lives is they haven't suffered enough?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I think this is possible. The fact that you mentioned that explicitly, I wasn't thinking of Haidt and Lukianoff necessarily, but one thing that I could say, and with respect to something like purpose is that one of the more demoralizing, I think, things you can do for young people in their development is lavish them with unearned rewards.

And that tends to be the sort of where we're at. And we've heard some criticisms of this. But part of having purpose in life and having been furnished with purposes in life that you then go on to achieve without any kind of real struggle may itself be part of the problem.

I think there's increasing evidence that people have to be allowed to fail. They have to learn from the experience of failure, how to pick themselves up and continue or re-strategize or reorient or whatever might be needed tactically to address a problem.

I've heard young people complain about the perception on the part of their peers, that their peers seem not to be able to do this, or seem to be incapable of navigating small challenges without, say, the immediate intervention of their parents. When my grandfather was 17 years old, he was at war, and his mother did not hear from him for, except intermittently, for five years. So that's a very different level of maturity, right?

Is suffering something that we ought to valorize for its own sake? No. There's a lot of suffering that is entirely pointless in my view. But we do find that people will say lower on average socioeconomic status also tend to have higher degrees of interpersonal relationship and families and friend networks and support networks, and they have considerably higher self-reported meaningfulness. People who lack those things that lack close personal relationships tend to report very low levels of meaning in life. And the reason for this would seem to be, plausibly, that people with less material advantages rely on those family and friend networks more strongly than people who don't need them to rely upon.

And that the source of meaning that they're getting really is not material success, but is actually a relationship. That's the real driver. And so does that mean that relationships are forged in suffering or are often built up where other forms of suffering are present? It certainly seems like it.

Grant Martsolf:  So one way I see my own students suffering is just particularly high levels of anxiety and depression. I'm wondering, are there different types of suffering in this way? Can something like that experience of anxiety, which might actually be derived from the fact that they're lacking meaning, can that sort of suffering lead to greater meaning or are there types of suffering that maybe just can't be translated into the building up of a sense of meaning of life?

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  I think there are certainly some that are probably refractory to that. That would be very difficult. We have testimony from people who have undergone tremendous suffering, that they were able to find meaning from it. And so I would not want to deny the legitimacy of that experience.

I mean, one of the great works on meaning in life, Victor Frankl, is born of the direct exposure to the horrors of the Holocaust. So I'm not going to say it was impossible for the people with whom Victor Frankl was associated in the camps to find meaning in anything.

So if a person says that they're able to, then I will take them at their word on that. At the same time, I suspect strongly that yes, there are some forms of suffering in which a person cannot find meaning and ought not to be required to do so, as if somehow, they must do that. And I can see why some people also have very similar experiences and came away from them with very different conclusions on the subject. And again, I wouldn't deny that either.

Things like anxiety and depression, there are factors I think, in our society as it's currently organized, that increase these phenomena, and they are often, I suspect, responses that in some fashion are warranted by our circumstances. We ought not to discount the possibility that we're depressed because the world is depressing, and that there's a legitimacy to that response, right? That being told to cheer up or something in the face of circumstances that are not heartening is not an adequate response either, right?

So, is there something that we can detect here? Is there something that we can hear in the experience of persons who are facing this kind of suffering? There is, it seems to me. And does that mean at the very least, that we should be alert to what these experiences are bringing to the forefront of our attention, then? Yes.

Is it possible that meaning may yet be derived from them for the individuals who experience them? I would not want to deny that preemptively. I mean, it seems to me that there had better be some possibility, but it's I think it's difficult to say a priori, across the board that, “Yes, all types of suffering are potentially interpretable as contributing to meaning, or none are.” It seems to me we'd have to take things on a more case-by-case basis.

Grant Martsolf:  Well, Jeffrey, we have run out of time. I want to thank you for coming on the podcast. This was really, really great and I'm grateful for your time that you've given to me today. And I'm especially grateful for the work that you and your colleagues are doing up in Cambridge at the Human Flourishing Program.

So thanks so much for spending some time with me, and I hope that we'll get to meet in person someday.

Dr. Jeffrey Hanson:  My pleasure. It was a great conversation. I appreciate your inviting me to it.

Grant Martsolf:  All right. Take care.