“Be Respectful”

Transform yourself to transform the World

All I wanted was a sandwich.

I walked into John’s Sandwich Shop (not actual name), a small business with a 4.5 star Yelp rating and hundreds of reviews. There was a small line, two employees making sandwiches, and the owner working the register. This is California. The heavily-accented owner was from India, or somewhere in that part of the World (I presume), and a mask-bespectacled white guy and black girl made the sandwiches. I waited for at least ten minutes to put my order in, and then the credit card machine went kaput. I could see the owner was very flustered, pacing back and forth, and he asked me if he could make a quick call to the payment processor, to which I obliged. The customer in front of me had left to go to the ATM machine. So, the owner called the payment processor, and with the card machine still down, I too left for the ATM, as they started preparing my order in my absence.

I walked to the ATM machine. My card expired last month, it turned out. Having only two dollars, I walked back home to see if I could scrounge up a working ATM card. I found one that I had never activated to a bank account with some three hundred odd dollars in it. I called to activate it and it wouldn’t work. How dependent we are on global systems for something as simple as getting a sandwich. I called two different banks and ordered two new ATM cards, making one customer service representative angry as I talked with another whom I had dialed while on hold. All of this complete, I mounted my trusty bicycle steed to make up for lost time and hurried back to the sandwich shop with credit card, expired ATM card (for purposes of illustration), and a good old fashioned paper check and pen in hand. Fingers crossed.

Upon my return, to my delight, the credit card machine was again working, as I had hoped for. The flustered owner was, again, having trouble finding completed sandwiches; he had done this same thing to a previous customer when I was waiting before. The bags were on the counter, with the names plainly written on them as I could see. The young black girl told him, “Man, it’s right there!”, meaning my sandwich. She was getting annoyed with his antics, but there certainly seemed to be no malice in it. The owner found the sandwich bag, stapled it up, and I chuckled a bit at the whole spectacle. Then he stood directly towards the girl, wagged his finger, and sternly said in his best Indian dad voice, “Don’t call me ‘man.’ Be respectful!” This reminded me of my high school friend Mohan’s father. The girl rolled her eyes a bit and shrugged the whole thing off.

So many things are happening in this interaction. California is a melting pot of cultures. Having taken a trip to Atlanta a few years ago, I now see just how unlike parts of America California is. And, I think that’s amazing. So many cultures living side by side, mostly peacefully, save for a finger wag here and gross misunderstanding there. There’s no agreement amongst cultures on who should treat whom how and why. Many traditional cultures of the World insist on respect for the man, the elders, the boss. More relaxed California culture says it’s okay to treat people another way. Who’s to necessarily say who is right and who is wrong?

The second thing happening here is “the capitalist” and “the exploited,” as deemed by left-of-center types since the beginning of modernity. “The capitalist,” some guy from India who took a leap of faith on starting a sandwich shop, puts himself through stress as someone who has to figure out how the whole thing will work; he paces back and forth trying to maximize his business’ throughput so that there is a business, for him, and for his employees. What we don’t see is the “capitalists” that lose everything and have no business because it had no profit. Something Thomas Sowell points out in his writings is that someone has to do the work of the capitalist, something Karl Marx and Engels take completely for granted. Someone has to do the planning and make sure the whole business runs as it should, all the while turning a profit. Michael Lind points out in his The New Class War just how few people work for small businesses such as these today, and he may have a point. Companies and bureaucracies have swelled to be quite large, employing some fifty percent of the population. But, despite the inefficiency of these large, bureaucratic organizations, they still need to turn a profit, to which management is held accountable.

In the grand scheme of things, we need the capitalists, the sandwich shop owners, and at this point, we need the bureaucratic bloat that feeds people and provides them with jobs. The supreme authority of government power cannot plan a global economy, with the many things people want and need. This morning I watched a talk between Glenn Loury and Cornel West (that got pretty deep at times), and the two illustrate the disconnect that happens between left and right. West takes the position that we should have love for one another and be nicer. I agree. He also points out that much of “the way things are” today come from the push and pull of collective organizing (the five-day workweek, the eight-hour day, etc.). But Loury takes the position that, ultimately, the strain of our civilization is personal responsibility. No supreme love for one another is going to plan how sandwich shops are run and provide jobs for employees; not everyone agrees to mutual love, but everyone agrees they have to eat. The sandwich shop owner needs the employees, and they need him, no matter how much stress he puts them through with his demands for how they ought to conduct themselves.

Everyone has a mutual need for others. You can’t withdraw from society, as one of Cornel West’s favorites, Dostoevsky, points out. His Raskolnikov found this out the hard way in Crime and Punishment, grappling with a crime he committed. Porfiry, an official, says to him, “A peasant would run away, a fashionable sectarian would run away — the lackey of another man’s thought — because it is enough to show him the tip of a finger and… he’ll believe anything for the rest of his life. But you no longer believe your own theory — what would you run away on?… You need a life and a definite position, the proper air, and would that be any air for you? You’d run away, and come back on your own. It’s impossible for you to do without us.”

What’s the optimal balance so that the sandwich shop owner and the employees all get what they want; adequate rewards for each doing their part, financial and social. No amount of government intervention is going to make the shop owner and his employees speak the same language. Barring a universal respect for humanity, which I think to be a possibility people can attain but is certainly not how humans come out of the box, we face the tradeoffs that come with a multi-cultural society. Eric Hoffer points out the pros and cons of a business civilization such as ours, which includes the ability to fraternize with one another, out of necessity. “The deprecators of America usually point to its defects as being those of a business civilization. Actually they are the defects of the mass: worship of success, the cult of the practical, the identification of quality with quantity, the addiction to sheer action, the fascination with the trivial. We also know the virtues: a superb dynamism, an unprecedented diffusion of skills, a genius for organization and teamwork, a flexibility which makes possible an easy adjustment to the most drastic change, an ability to get things done with a minimum of tutelage and supervision, and unbounded capacity for fraternization.”

The political process is supposed to help us figure out the optimal economic balance; we can only fix societal problems via the political process if we are united. Dividing up social rewards, however, is up to us. If you want to practice the love preached by Cornel West, it does in fact start with you, not with Twitter-bashing, Congressional demands, or further dividing the many cultures that form our society. In another ounce of Crime and Punishment wisdom, “You won’t set a person right by pushing him away… you progressive dimwits.” We are all Americans, we ought to practice an inclusive nationalism (thanks Yascha Mounk), and to continue to divide us rhetorically is to continue to play into the plot of the Democratic and Republican Duopoly that continues to let the country think it’s divided via a handful of culture war issues.

If we all practiced a bit more kindness and humility, maybe “the way the World is” would get just a little bit better, while continuing to leverage the evil “market forces” that put food on everyone’s tables. Giving other people a chance doesn’t mean a descent into authoritarianism or socialism. Far left-of-center activist Grace Lee Boggs said, “Transform yourself to transform the World.”