Justice or Politesse
I think this Jay Nordlinger item illustrates a pretty profound ideological divide:
Wanted to share a note that made me smile — maybe it will you, too. A reader wrote in response to an item I have in today’s Impromptus about personal wealth and personal politics. He said, “Fifty-five years ago, my New Deal dad said of some of his friends, ‘I never knew a Communist who was good to his maid.’”
Perfect. And it reminded me of an old line, which I learned — and learned the truth of — long ago: “A Marxist is someone who loves humanity in groups of 1 million or more.”
I have no particular interest in defending Communists or people who are rude to their employees. But the interesting thing here is that Nordlinger appears to believe that if you could actually prove that people with left-wing political views are disproportionately likely to be rude to their subordinates that this would in some substantial way debunk left-wing politics.
The point of left-wing politics, however, is not to secure polite treatment of maids as a matter of nobless oblige, it’s to secure justice and equality for the individuals whom fortune has not seen fit to reward with material wealthy. In a society with a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, after all, there just aren’t going to be very many maids in the first place. What’s more, the people doing the maid jobs will have appealing other labor market opportunities. And even if they lose their job, their families will still have access to decent health care and education while they search for a new one. Consequently, a rudely-treated maid would have the chance to stand up for herself and most likely secure better treatment. Nordlinger’s idea seems to be that as long as most people are mostly treated nicely by those placed above them in the social hierarchy that the objective powerlessness of those at the bottom is irrelevant.
It recalls the notion of “compassion conservatism,” an appeal to the idea that the halves out to toss some scraps to the halve-nots, as opposed to a fight for real social and economic justice.
79 Responses to “Justice or Politesse”
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October 16th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
Your blah-bomb better work, Nordlinger.
Seriously, he’s just re-writing George Will’s latest petulant screed about liberals in tony neighborhoods being red in tooth and claw, or something.
Man, if the Prius set scares Will that much, he’s a bigger fop than I’d imagined.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
“halve-nots”? Really?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
Matt,
You need some sort of new, improved spell-checker: one that understands syntax and content. The rich are not the “halves” (although sometimes it seems they have half a soul), they are the “haves”.
I really don’t know what a “halve-not” would be. It can’t be a “whole” because every whole has two halves. Therefore it must be a “hole”…of nothingness.
To avoid offending folks’ racial sensitivities I won’t talk about singularities.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:22 pm
The final sentence is comically full of typos. I count 4 errors.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:25 pm
I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who was so horrified by the lack of editing in this post that they felt compelled to comment on it. I do not want to pile on, so I will merely second vg and Anandakos’ comments.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
an appeal to the idea that the halves out to toss some scraps to the halve-nots
I’d like to think that was an extremely clever statement by Matt (i.e., a play on “how the other half lives”), unfortunately, after “wide Latina,” I can’t.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
But if a conservative is rude to his maid, it’s okay.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:26 pm
I suspect that most Communists didn’t have maids, not in the 1930s and not since.
I’d also suspect that one of the first things a socialist society, communist or otherwise, would do is to try to abolish or at least minimize the institution of domestic servants.
Indeed, if _I_ were designing my ideal Florence-in-the-Andes or whatever, one explicit goal would be to have as few domestic servants as possible (except for elderly people, the infirm, and others who actually needed help around the home).
October 16th, 2009 at 3:28 pm
Re: But if a conservative is rude to his maid, it’s okay.
Dostoyevsky, one of the icons of modern concervative thought, was famously abominable towards his domestic servants.
He did feel guilty about that, though, which I guess gives him a free pass in the concervative mind.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Indeed, if _I_ were designing my ideal Florence-in-the-Andes or whatever, one explicit goal would be to have as few domestic servants as possible (except for elderly people, the infirm, and others who actually needed help around the home).
But you’d still make the young boys you enjoy whipping dress up in maid’s outfits, right? Just to be clear.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
When I hear conservatives talk about how nice they are to their maids, I can’t help but think about Paul’s advice as to how masters should treat their slaves well, and how in the 18th century people likely thought of themselves as very good, moral people if they didn’t beat and abuse their slaves. Can’t say that mindset’s changed much.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
The quoted passage is pretty funny in its sense in which it assumes that the people whose views count are the people with maids. Obviously many communists were trivially not kind to their maids given that they lacked maids to be kind to.
But it does remind me of Bertie Wooster’s great explanation of why he was not a communist. “As I understand, the basic idea is that chaps like you would chase chaps like me down the street with butcher’s knives.” (From memory rather than a direct quote).
October 16th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Gee, maybe someone should tell Yglesias he produces a lot of typos. I’m sure it would be news to him, and I’m sure he’d be interested to learn it.
It’s a little nuts that three of the first four comments are entirely about the typos, with nary a substantive point to make. I don’t know abot anyone else, but I read this blog for the news and the commentary. I’m a bit anal, so I notice the typos – but I long ago decided to ignore them, as (1) they don’t seem to be going away; (2) they very, very rarely actually impede my comprehension, even in extreme cases like today’s sentence; (3) I am sufficiently interested in the blog posts that I’m willing to look past the typos.
If you’re interested enough in the blog not only to read it but to click through and comment, you probably would match all of those three criteria, whether you agree with Yglesias’s viewpoint or not. So why comment about the flipping typos, when you know both that they’re not going away and that they’re not the point of the commenting function?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Hector, I’m curious, if in your society I wanted to clean other people’s homes for a living, and I found someone willing to pay me to do that, what would the punishment be for myself and my co-conspirator? It’s not a rhetorical question, I’m genuinely curious. In the same vein, would I be allowed to cook for other people?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:35 pm
In a society with a relatively egalitarian distribution of wealth and income, after all, there just aren’t going to be very many maids in the first place. What’s more, the people doing the maid jobs will have appealing other labor market opportunities.
I understand the second part, but not the first. Leaving aside our cultural stereotypes about servants and maids, why would an egalitarian society have less of a need for low skill manual labor?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
“When I hear conservatives talk about how nice they are to their maids, I can’t help but think about Paul’s advice as to how masters should treat their slaves well, and how in the 18th century people likely thought of themselves as very good, moral people if they didn’t beat and abuse their slaves. Can’t say that mindset’s changed much.”
I’d say it’s changed a lot. Now people who draw analogies between 19th century slaveholders and modern people who employ domestic staff think of themselves as very good people for doing nothing at all. And they don’t need any scripture to do it. Progress!
October 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
The conservative point, and there is one, is that it is always easier to spend someone else’s money than your own or regulate someone else’s behavior rather than your own. So whether to that extent is a very effective jab against liberalism I do not think so, but it is an effective response to those on the left that think that purpose of government is to punish, correct, or restrain the powerful minority of people who are acting too greedy, selfish, or rude.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
@Warren Terra #13,
Ouch! Here I thought I was just making some third-level puns with Matt’s Mangled Syntax®.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Matt Yglesias is a great writer, but he would be a better one if he learned how to spell.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
And this is the great con-game of conservatism: it tries to sell the masses on the idea that “freedom” is the absence of government when just as often freedom is something that we get from government — especially when that government comes to our defense and levels the playing field against all those rich and powerful oligarchs that crop up in every society and who would turn us all into household servants of one kind or another if only they could get government out of the way.
Now, can government turn tyrannical. Of course it can. Government is a tool, a human construct like anything else, and can always be corrupted. Just like capitalism is a tool, or the free market is a tool, and is just a human construct that can become corrupted no matter how much free market fundamentalists try to paint the market as some immutable and perfect force of nature that should never be touched with human hands. But to prevent our government from becoming our oppressor is the reason we have democratic checks and balances. And to prevent capitalism from becoming our master is why we need a government with the power to keep it fair and honest.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:39 pm
“What’s more, the people doing the maid jobs will have appealing other labor market opportunities…”.
Yeah, so don’t treat the help like dogs or they’ll run off and become neurosurgeons or bank presidents.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:40 pm
This is just another riff on the well-known ‘Liberals are all Elitists’ theme.
Rightwingers have to do this because they know that liberals stand for greater equality while they don’t. So basically their argument comes down to baseless innuendo something along the lines of, do you believe us or your lying cheating eyes.
The way I look at it, the moment one of these rightwingers makes such an insinuation, it’s time to pile on the errant individual. Ignoring it is a sin.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
@Doug #17,
Well you know what, Doug? The purpose of government is to “punish, correct, or restrain the powerful minority of people who are acting too greedy or selfish”. They used to be called criminals and barbarians, but Republicans call them heroes.
Rude I will grant you.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
“material wealthy”?
“the halves”?
“out to toss some scraps”?
I’m not surprised that Matt went to the same school as George W. Bush.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Shorter NROns: compassion is for the help.
(This can be seen in the conservative claim that personal charity is the answer to all social woes, since it comes with implicit moral strictures.)
October 16th, 2009 at 3:42 pm
@Ted Frier #20
Bravo!
October 16th, 2009 at 3:45 pm
I like “halve-nots,” and intend to dedicate myself to finding a plausible excuse to use it.
I’m a patient man. I can wait years.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
Matt Yglesias is a great writer
I wouldn’t go that far. He’s bright, he has a lot of opinions, and he has a hamster wheel for a blog.
The conservative point, and there is one, is that it is always easier to spend someone else’s money than your own or regulate someone else’s behavior rather than your own.
No the point is to distract by challenging the sincerity of your opponent. It’s the equivalent of “there is no global warming because Al Gore flies in an airplane.”
October 16th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
“The point of left-wing politics, however, is” social status.
If you want American maids to be paid better and have better working conditions, you’d support immigration restriction.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Why do maids need anybody else’s help to stand up for themselves? They quite capable of it on their own. Watch Zoila on Flipping Out. And what is this social hierarchy? A maid is temporarily and voluntarily agreeing to providing services for cash, just like a law firm or a doctor.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Are you trashed? If so, maybe there’s some sort of Post Goggles thing which holds off on posting things until later or something.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Steve, if we agree to add a post in your name saying “I hate brown people…uh, I mean, economics! measurable IQ differences!” to every comment thread, will you agree not to post here?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Yeah, so don’t treat the help like dogs or they’ll run off and become neurosurgeons or bank presidents.
If your ran your own one man cleaning service you can charge about $75 to come in every two weeks and clean up. If you were able to do 3 houses a day that would work out to be about $60k a year.
Is it possible that some people would prefer to work on their own, owning their own business, rather than be a Neurosurgeon or Bank President.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
lance Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 3:47 pm
Why do maids need anybody else’s help to stand up for themselves? They quite capable of it on their own. Watch Zoila on Flipping Out. And what is this social hierarchy? A maid is temporarily and voluntarily agreeing to providing services for cash, just like a law firm or a doctor.
O shut up.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
“I’d also suspect that one of the first things a socialist society, communist or otherwise, would do is to try to abolish or at least minimize the institution of domestic servants.”
So… who takes care of the kids?
October 16th, 2009 at 3:56 pm
I wonder if Nordlinger had Strom Thurmond in mind.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
In my post at #3 I forgot to give an example or two for the rich with half a soul. I nominate Steve Sailer and lance as “Daily Paradigm” finalists.
October 16th, 2009 at 3:58 pm
I’ve worked for right wing conservatives and left wing liberals. I’ve known conservatives who were some of the most human, fair people and left wingers who were raving cheap-skate assholes. A person’s personal politics has NOTHING to do with their humanity, or their views on social justice and equality. They just have a different point of view.
And for the record, communism was egalitarian in speeches and fantasies only. In practice – everywhere it was practiced from the USSR to Cuba – it was indistinguishable from despotic fascism. A small group of elites – with maids and servants they undoubtedly took advantage of – lording over the masses they despised while espousing the rhetoric of egalitarianism.
Communism = failure, incompetence and tyranny.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
“They need me Anthony to fight for them, they are so helpless and powerless” — sort of demonstrates Nordlingers point.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
“(except for elderly people, the infirm, and others who actually needed help around the home).”
My job pays my family’s bills. My wife has a job because she wants to maintain a career, although her job barely covers the child care. Since we both work, we do have need for some help with the cleaning, etc.
Does our need count as “actual”? Or are we the man, keeping the people down? Let’s say my wife and is a successful attorney and I and work many, many hours a week at the local library. Does that count as actual need?
Maybe you could give a few example of people who have non-actual need for domestic help so I can have a better understanding.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Just to jump in here:
1. Maid does not mean cleaner, servant does not mean service sector employee. What Hector is getting at is that, in an egalitarian economy, you’d still have plenty of people working in home cleaning services, and you’d have home house aids for the elderly and disabled, and you’d have child care providers and the like – but they wouldn’t be servants. They wouldn’t live in your house, they wouldn’t be on-call 24/7, and there wouldn’t be the paternalistic social and cultural baggage (and in some cases, legal baggage) that comes with being a servant.
Instead, people who worked in the service sector would be treated like the independent professionals that they are, people with whom you’ve contracted for a particular amount of work at a fair wage for a fair day’s work, and whose connection to you ends when they present the bill.
2. Norlanger’s larger argument, that lefties are self-interested, emotionless, anti-egalitarian, and elitists, and that conservatives are humanist-because-traditionalist, warmly emotional-because-not-enlightenment-or-intellectual, and populist-because-religious-and-did-we-mention-not-intellectual, is not really worth engaging.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:09 pm
That’s only because most people come by their politics by environment, mostly family. If you were to limit your sample to those who very deliberately choose their politics, I think you’d find a correlation between politics and personality with regard to empathy (or lack thereof) with people who are “other” (such as maids are to their employers).
October 16th, 2009 at 4:11 pm
Nordlinger manages to achieve two levels of stupidity just about two sentences.
Of course Marxists think in terms of millions of people. Marxism is a form of economics, not a seminar on inter-personal relations.
And Nordlinger is going for the ur-source here, the myth that justified slavery- “Why, Mammy is a member of our family”.
And so she was- a member of the family that got whipped on a regular basis. Strange to say, most house slaves didn’t feel any happier about their owners than the field slaves did. Go figure.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:25 pm
And so she was- a member of the family that got whipped on a regular basis. Strange to say, most house slaves didn’t feel any happier about their owners than the field slaves did.
A lot of them did, because it was a pretty common practice to put slaves who were, err, intimately related to the family, almost as though the master or another male relative was like a father to them, in the big house.
Moreover, how do you think the plantations maintained control? There was definitely a hierarchy putting house slaves on top. They were trained to think of themselves as above the field hands, who were far more likely to be sold en bloc to traders, or worked to death, or whipped, or whatever. Many suboverseers were black themselves.
Divide and rule is an ancient technique, and it was certainly used on plantations in the American South.
That, and the continuation of the Slave Patrol, which was an institution that guys like McPherson believe had a serious positive impact on Confederate fighting abilities, was how rich plantation owners like Wade Hampton III could go off to play soldier and get their heads taken off by Springfields and Parrot rifles (yay for Northern industry, you racist fucks!) or die of malaria or dysentry, yet still have the plantation system work more or less unchanged during the war.
However, whenever a Union army managed to occupy a territory for more than a few days, the whole thing pretty much collapsed, which is why things like the March to the Sea and the desolation of South Carolina worked so well.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
However, I should say that in opposition to my previous comment, I also think there’s a strong effect involved here in that some people are empathic interpersonally (and usually only with people the frequently interact with), but not in the abstract.
In other words, some conservatives can be kind to their maids because they think of the maids they particularly know as people, while they think of poor people and people of color and the like as “other” and so, in the abstract, care very little about their welfare (and are also willing an eager to vilify them).
And Nordlinger’s comment it true in the same sense: there’s a certain personality type who intellectually affects empathy in the general and abstract, yet lacks any sort of empathy in actual interpersonal interactions.
Both examples are people whose ability to understand other people is limited in some important way. Perhaps it has to do with the distinction between intellectual and emotional empathy. The latter example, Nordlinger’s communist, has embraced empathy in an intellectual sense and as a result, finds that he can apply it in the abstract, intellectual context, but not the personal (where his emotions get the better of him). The former, the conservative who is kind to his maid, doesn’t embrace empathy as an intellectual concept, but finds that in actual interpersonal situations, his emotions get the better of him and he empathizes with his maid, and so is kind to her. So what’s common to both is that they order their intellectual world one way, but find that their emotional world is ordered differently.
So in this sense, there’s four kinds of people. Those who are empathic both specifically with people they know and generally with people they don’t (stereotypical gushy woo-woo liberal). Those who are not empathic with either group (stereotypical misanthropic conservative). Those who are empathic with those they know but not with those they do not (stereotypical religious cultural conservative). And those who are not empathic with those they know but are with those they do not (stereotypical leftist intellectual). These are stereotypes to the point of cliches, but there’s some truth in them.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
What I mean by that is that sure the house slaves wanted to be free as much as the next guy.
But they definitely enjoyed a relatively privileged position in the plantation hierarchy.
So the whole thing worked for the most part, until a bunch of Yankees showed up and said, how about y’all just leave? In which case, they said, fuck it, and they left. Meaning that when freedom became not merely possible, but likely, they, as it was said, voted with their feet.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
42: I have to concur with this pretty strongly. Most political identifications are tribal, but it’s not hard to detect the themes underlying the distinct ideologies in today’s America.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
I have to concur with this pretty strongly. Most political identifications are tribal, but it’s not hard to detect the themes underlying the distinct ideologies in today’s America.
I’d say just listening to Dixie tells you a lot about the distinct ideologies in yesterday’s, today’s, and tomorrow’s America. That, and thinking about where it’s still considered acceptable to play the song in the first place.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:43 pm
Joe @ 27:
I like “halve-nots,” and intend to dedicate myself to finding a plausible excuse to use it.
I’m a patient man. I can wait years.
Joe, some people prefer their walnuts cut into two pieces, or even chopped beyond recognition. I, and the other halve-nots, only eat whole ones.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
But it does remind me of Bertie Wooster’s great explanation of why he was not a communist. “As I understand, the basic idea is that chaps like you would chase chaps like me down the street with butcher’s knives.” (From memory rather than a direct quote).
Funny, but that my explination of why I AM a communist
October 16th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
@Greg – “War Nerd” Gary Brecher had an essay that talked about his grasping the dynamic of the Civil War as a kid by listening to a record of songs from the war, esp. “Dixie” and “Battle Hymn of the Republic” back-to-back. It kinds of wanders in from somewhere else and then back away, but his writing’s worth following.
October 16th, 2009 at 4:53 pm
God dammmmmmit learn how to spell
October 16th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
I as a halve not actually prefer to eat the hole ones.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
Greg,
If I recall correctly you’re a historian? I wonder if you, or anyone here, knows if there have been many studies on the political views of domestic servants, as a class, particularly in societies riven by the conflict between socialism and capitalism (I’m thinking about Latin America for most of the last century, parts of Asia after WWII and parts of Europe before).
If I recall right, Marx considered domestic servants part of the ’sub-proletariat’ and predicted they would throw in with their bourgeoisie patrons when the sh*t hit the fan. Was that ever borne out in reality?
October 16th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Re: Maid does not mean cleaner, servant does not mean service sector employee. What Hector is getting at is that, in an egalitarian economy, you’d still have plenty of people working in home cleaning services, and you’d have home house aids for the elderly and disabled, and you’d have child care providers and the like – but they wouldn’t be servants
Ideally, I’d have everyone living in homes that were small enough that they could and would be socially expected to clean them themselves, though if you really wanted to hire someone I suppose you could. And child care would be taken care of collectively, by paid professional child care centers. and yes, obviously sick people, disabled people, old people, and people with children having serious conditions would need professional help and be able to get it.
Too Many Steves,
I would think that the ‘no maids’ principle would be better enforced by social sanctions then by legal sanctions, the same way that taking home a random girl from the club that you just met, would also be socially frowned upon.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
Warren Terra Says:
October 16th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Gee, maybe someone should tell Yglesias he produces a lot of typos. I’m sure it would be news to him, and I’m sure he’d be interested to learn it.
It’s a little nuts that three of the first four comments are entirely about the typos, with nary a substantive point to make. I don’t know abot anyone else, but I read this blog for the news and the commentary. I’m a bit anal, so I notice the typos – but I long ago decided to ignore them, as (1) they don’t seem to be going away; (2) they very, very rarely actually impede my comprehension, even in extreme cases like today’s sentence; (3) I am sufficiently interested in the blog posts that I’m willing to look past the typos.
If you’re interested enough in the blog not only to read it but to click through and comment, you probably would match all of those three criteria, whether you agree with Yglesias’s viewpoint or not. So why comment about the flipping typos, when you know both that they’re not going away and that they’re not the point of the commenting function?
===========================================================
Our entire reason for commenting on MY typos is to irritate you. Obviously we have succeeded
October 16th, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I can’t remember the blues musician’s name, but he worked as a cab driver (in New Orleans?), and at the start of one of his songs was a spoken intro about how a convention of lawyers and doctors was coming into town, which meant that “man, tips are gonna be LOW”.
So I’m not terribly convinced that it’s only liberals that are mean to the help.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Well, congratulations, I suppose. Do you feel a bit empty inside, now that your goal has been achieved? Are there lands still for you to conquer?
October 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
The stereotype tends to be that those who have worked is service positions themselves tend to be better tippers. People who are worst with service workers are those who have not worked in such positions themselves and also enjoy the rare class opportunities to have someone serve them.
Doctors and lawyers directly employ service workers for themselves (secretaries, answering services) and are typically effectively self-employed. Paying their staff and tipping cab drivers and wait staff while at conventions is money that is coming directly out of their bottom line, so it doesn’t surprise me that they are going to be very stingy and possibly even a bit short with the “help.”
I do not know whether all conservatives are good to the “help” or not. I do know that when it comes to questions of whether they should all have health insurance and that all of them should have good work environments, all of them complain.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
A decent post completely derailed by the last paragraph.
Learn to fucking proofread. It is not that difficult to avoid complete bollocks like “the halves out to toss some scraps to the halve-nots”. Save your post. Wait ten minutes before posting it. Re-read before you publish.
In all the arguments about bloggers and MSM, it’s rarely pointed out that print journalists do not publish articles with such stupid and embarrassing mistakes, but every time you make an idiotic series of typos like this, the idea that you are putting actual thought into your posts takes another hit.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Re: The stereotype tends to be that those who have worked is service positions themselves tend to be better tippers.
FWIW, I tip 20%, except when the waitress is easy on the eyes, in which case I tip more like 25-30%.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
This post will look a little odd when Yglesias hires his first man servant.
My Goldwater Republican father told me the rich were incredibly miserly tippers because they only pay for what they have to. Unlike Nordinger, I didn’t find that comment particularly insightful.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:38 pm
Too halve or not two halve? That is the hole question.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
The other stereotype is that men are better tippers because it provides them an opportunity to “show off” as a means of asserting status. Though also, abusing the waitstaff is also in some circles a means of “asserting status.”
Discussions about tipping and treatment of the service workers who work for you personally are always going to have a lot more to do with class, social status, and attitudes towards money than political policy beliefs. It is fun to point to the right-wing conservative who’s a terrible boss and say, “All conservatives are terrible bosses” or “all conservatives are douchebags to the waitstaff” and stuff like that, so I understand Nordlinger’s temptation.
October 16th, 2009 at 5:55 pm
My daughter who was a Silicon Valley barista during the height of the dot-comm boom says that the dot-comm hot shots sitting with their feet on the tables talking loudly on their cell phones were not only ostentatiously rude but very cheap tippers. Whether they were of the right or the left wasn’t clear.
Perhaps more interestingly, when I worked in support services in a Medical Center the veteran director of the building maintenance staff once told me that he had found over thirty years that the medical students and the senior physicians were invariably courteous and helpful to his workers, but the young doctors were almost universally conceited, self-centered, rude, and a general pain in the butt.
In my own experience as a (large) corporate receptionist a CEO who was far more friendly and always polite was succeeded by one who tended to look at me like something a dog had just left on the floor.
I would say, (a) these things are very important for living in a civilized world, and (b) the kind of generalizations in the original post don’t hold up. Some other generalizations may.
October 16th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
I personally tip better if a waitress is gracious, e.g. does not wince when I pinch her behind. So if my tip is low, it is richly undeserved.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
See West London by Matthew Arnold:
Crouch’d on the pavement close by Belgrave Square
A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied;
A babe was in her arms, and at her side
A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare.
Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there,
Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied
Across, and begg’d and came back satisfied.
The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers;
She will not ask of aliens, but of friends,
Of sharers in a common human fate.
She turns from that cold succour, which attends
The unknown little from the unknowing great,
And points us to a better time than ours.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:28 pm
Just to be a devil’s advocate a bit, you could argue that most people aren’t really in positions to create a massive amount of political change. But everyone affects the people immediately around them, and, for most people, it’s quite reasonable to say that having better political opinions at the expense of their day-to-day relations with the people around them is a bad thing to do.
October 16th, 2009 at 8:44 pm
[Singing]: To halve and not to wholed . . .
October 16th, 2009 at 8:58 pm
54 -Fanon grouped domestics with the lumpenproletariat inhabiting urban shantytowns and observed them (or perhaps instructed, it’s not clear to me where Fanon’s work falls on the prescriptive-descriptive continuum) throwing in their lot with the national liberation forces. I suppose this works to the extent one can meld anticolonialism with Marxism…but then you’re not talking about nationalist or anticolonial conflicts.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:48 am
@61 Hector: “I tip 20%, except when the waitress is easy on the eyes, in which case I tip more like 25-30%.”
Is this a Christian concept, Hector?
Myself, I follow Mother Teresa’s lead and tip the wretched an extra 33%. Now how is it that I am the one that upon death will be consigned to scream in agony for all eternity?
October 17th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Re: Is this a Christian concept, Hector?
Good point. No.
Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing which waitresses are wretched. Should I tip the waitresses I don’t find attractive 30%, or should I tip the ones I do find attractive 20%?
Tiger’s Eye,
I’m more thinking about countries where the division is based strictly on economics and ideology, rather than nationalism. Not necessarily thinking of revolutions either, but electoral struggles as well.
October 17th, 2009 at 12:56 am
Max424,
Most Christian churches don’t believe, any more, that nonbelievers necessarily go to hell. Though most of them did between about the 3rd thru 19th centuries.
For my thoughts on hell, see here:
http://patriabolivariana2008.blogspot.com/2009/09/if-thine-eye-offend-thee-reflections-on.html
October 17th, 2009 at 1:32 am
Good call out on the oppression technique mindset. “Hey we wont abuse our power too much, so let us be in charge ok, unfortunatly if we do abuse it very much you still have no choice but to obey and theres no good reason in the first place why i am in charge and not you, but hey thats ok since we are not complete asholes”.
October 17th, 2009 at 1:58 am
@72 Hector: “Unfortunately, I have no way of knowing which waitresses are wretched”
Yes you do Hector. We all do. What separates us most from other species is our ability to recognize pain, not just within ourselves, but in others.
As for Hell for and Dostoyevsky’s parable of the onion skin: if an angel is pulling me out of the Lake of Fire, up toward heaven, I have done enough good in my life (I think) for MY onion skin to be strong enough to pull up myself and roughly 12 others.
But once in Heaven, I would be wracked by guilt -for all eternity- for not having been a better man in life and capable in death of lifting all the lost souls out of Hell.
I tease, Hector. I know where you stand. You’re a good man.
October 17th, 2009 at 2:27 am
In a country with socialized medicine, maid would be a viable occupation, not just a part time gig or second job. It wouldn’t be necessary to go to college just to have a shot at affording one’s own apartment.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Re: Since we both work, we do have need for some help with the cleaning, etc
My domestic partner and I both work full time and then some (45 hours a week for me, 50 hours for him). We don’t have kids but do have cats who are capable of creating their own messes. We don’t however need a maid. We’re perfectly capable of maintaining the house ourselves. I even set aside time for gardening.
Once upon a time, before the days of labor saving devices, I understand why people might need domestic help. Nowadays. assuming one is able-bodied, I really don’t grasp the need. As for children, once they are past the toddler stage there’s no reason they too cannot be set chores around the house and yard. That was standard practice in families when I was growing up. And is it wise to raise chldren thinking everything will be done for them by others?
October 17th, 2009 at 3:52 pm
I didn’t know Marxists had maids. Wouldn’t that be hypocritical?
October 17th, 2009 at 4:28 pm
This post is further evidence that Matt Y is creating a whole new typo-based art form; typo poetry, even.
The halves and the halve-nots. Of course.