Notes from the boundary: Peter Hart: Simone Weil: Labour, slavery, and the limitations of aid...

Simone Weil

Note: Darfur and the Janjaweed are referenced because I wrote this piece some time ago. I've brought it forward because I think that Simone Veil was a remarkable woman. There are those who think that Margaret Thatcher was a remarkable woman. I expect that they are right . . .

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When I was in my early twenties — and much influenced by George Orwell — I deliberately took some jobs which were (at the time) decidedly categorised as ‘working class’. One of these jobs was as floor cleaner at Great Ormond Street Hospital. The experience was, I should say, salutary. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the work — which involved kitchens, stairs, corridors, and operating theatres — was the practical invisibility of the cleaner to the rest of the world. It is not too much to say that we were an unknown and unrecognised work force. We travelled to work when the vast majority of the working population were going home, and we left work when theatre performances were just about finishing.

I was lucky, in that — after a couple of months — I was given charge of cleaning a specific operating theatre. As a consequence

of this I was asked to take over the night–shift cleaning of the main operating theatres for the month of August, when the regular cleaner — Luigi — returned to Italy for his annual holiday. This,

I should say, was an experience of invisibility writ large.

These thoughts have been revived in my mind by reading about Simone Weil, a Christian mystic who yet never joined the (Catholic) church, and who put herself through a gruelling experience of labour in order to understand the plight and conditions of workers — so that her thought should be steeped in reality. Weil had no time for ‘retreats from reality, refusals to suffer the world as it is.’ Consider the following, from Andrea Nye, The thought of Rosa Luxemburg, Simone Veil, and Hannah Arendt, Routledge 1994, p63:

The physical pain of factory labor is not its only effect. Much more serious, Weil observed, is what it does to the spirit. She wrote:

[Assembly line work] is a refinement of torture: to constrain thought, to taste continually the body’s slavery. It can only be borne by mutilating the soul. Otherwise one feels as if one were delivered every day alive, to be crushed to pieces. (First and Last Notebooks, OUP, 1970, p12)

As she went each day to the factory, she found herself losing little by little her sense of human dignity, the conviction that she had rights. Day by day subjected to the arbitrary and humiliating orders by superiors, she began to feel a mark on her soul. Sitting on a bus going home one day, she suddenly realised that she would have felt no astonishment if she had been ordered off for no reason. Numbed by abuse, when someone spoke to her with any degree of kindness she started with surprise (Formative Writings, Massachusetts, 1987, p211)

Well, I should say immediately that I have never experienced working conditions anything approaching those of Veil; and it would be good if such could be relegated to the past — to history. However, we know that they cannot. We eat drink, and wear slavery and oppression every day. Indeed, there is more slavery in the world today than ever there was in the past, and the historical ‘Abolition of slavery’ was of one type only. Child labour and exploitation is endemic too across the undeveloped world. Moreover — if by demography alone — it dwarfs that of nineteenth century Britain. It is, we might say, pandemic in proportion — and vested interests will keep it so for as long as humanly possible.

At this point, you may be thinking — as I often do after reading about such statistics — ‘Of what use is it for me to distress myself over things about which I can do nothing?’ Well, it is a good point, and most of us are utterly powerless to effect any change for the better beyond the extremely limited and local circumstances in which we find ourselves. Would you go to Darfur with an olive branch? The Janjaweed would kill you without a qualm, and forget about you in seconds. Moreover, in this context, consider Seneca’s persuasive observation on anger:

The wise man never ceases to be angry, if once he begins. Every place is full of crime and vice . . . If you want the wise man to be as angry as the baseness of the crime demands, he must not only be angry, he must go mad. (On Anger, 2.9)

Equally cogent is this passage from John Cowper Powys:

In the abstract the pain of the world is bad enough, a sombre enough background for our individual experiences. But if we began to realise it in the concrete; that is to say, if we began to enter into the subjective visions of those who are suffering, it would soon become completely unendurable. (The Art of Forgetting the Unpleasant, Village Press, 1974, p9)

None of the above means of course that we need do nothing. However, if we do act, then we must be appropriately inspired — and knowledgeable. You may join Médecins Sans Frontières, but not if you are unqualified and temperamentally unsuited. Moreover, emotions may here be a hindrance to the work required. It is all very difficult. We must attend to that which we can; and if we say, ‘the rest is not our business’, then this is — strictly — a truism. It is perhaps a paradox that Simone Weil is inspiring — and happily, there is no possible fear of her being canonised . . .

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