Moral Envy: one of David Graeber's greatest insights

Yesterday brought the sad news of the sudden death of the anthropologist and author David Graeber – a free thinker in turbulent times. David is credited in giving us the “99%” and “1%” divide, which underpinned the narrative of the Occupy Wall Street movement that followed the 2008 Financial Crisis and has influenced others such as Extinction Rebellion. If his 2011 book “Debt – the first 5,000 years” made the moral case against financial inequality and debt bondage, it was his 2018 book “Bullshit Jobs – the rise of pointless work and what we can do about it” that reaches an even more intriguing conclusion: that of “moral envy”. At a time of increasing automation, climate change and the economic disruption of COVID-19, it is perhaps his concept of “moral envy” that will be one of his legacies. Whilst academics have written about the morality of envy for centuries, Graeber applies it to the world of work:

By 'moral envy' I am referring here to feelings of envy and resentment directed to another person, but not because the person is wealthy, or gifted, or lucky, but because his or her behaviour is seen as upholding a higher moral standard than the envier's own

In his Bullshit book (don’t be put off by the title if you have never read it or his flippant style), Graeber deals with some of the profoundest of all issues. First, why do we work, or at least why do we spend so much of our lives working when technology increasingly means this is not needed and that jobs could be shared around? Graeber reminds us that intellectuals of the late 1920s such as John Maynard Keynes and Bertrand Russell were already advocating a 15-hour week as a way of eliminating unemployment and narrowing social division. He asks the question again of the modern age when inequalities have grown even further and once again fuelling far right-wing populism. He asks the question alongside two others:

• Why is it that 40% of workers (including many well paid “professionals”) not only hate their work but also feel they add no value at all to society?
• Why is that many of the workers who do find their work rewarding are often poorly paid? 

Society seems to reward many meaningless jobs whilst under-rewarding many caring professions even though these jobs that cannot be replaced by robots. His book has renewed relevance just two years later as we ask again why is it that so many essential professions in the fight against COVID – such as healthcare professionals, care-workers, supermarket workers, machinists, seafarers and warehouse workers - are generally so poorly paid?

Graeber skilfully dismisses some of the usual lazy answers to these questions from both the political right and the left. In particular, he rips apart notions of the inherent dignity of work as being an overhang from Victorian moral teaching and unaligned with the evidence base of human evolution and ethnographic studies of indigenous communities working to survive, where a 15-hour working week is the norm not the exception. The only explanation that Graeber can find, underneath it all, is that of moral envy.

Graeber argues that far from believing in the inherent dignity of work, many of us believe that work should not be rewarding in anything but financial terms. If we are lucky enough to be working in caring or other professions that has a beneficial impact of human beings, then this is reward enough – it is somehow morally polluting to also pay these jobs well. Some economists might explain this away through market forces. But looking into the future, Graeber argues that these same caring jobs that cannot be automated away and matter most at times of crisis such as COVID-19, and yet still we pay them poorly. He goes still further saying that those elements of caring work that can pay well (e.g. doctors, human rights lawyers, the media, creative industries, renewable energy) are now under stranglehold of the liberal establishment - in fact it is a good way of defining the elite itself :

The 'liberal elite', then, are those who have placed an effective lock on any position where it's possible to get paid to do anything that one might do for any reason other than the money

Polemical yes, but certainly with more than a grain of truth inside. If the human rights world is any indicator then the liberal professions are self-sustaining with incredible high barriers to entry: littered as we are with Oxbridge and Ivy League graduates from privileged backgrounds.

Graeber has left us with much of the shorthand of how we think about life since the 2008 Financial Crisis and the wrongs that have never been righted. He was never afraid to criticise cosy liberal assumptions as well as those of the populist right. But perhaps as we look to the decade ahead and the need for Just Transitions from high to low carbon industries, as well as investing in all our caring professions, it is our need to overcome moral envy that is critical for those reforming capitalism from outside or within.