The Hammock Papers: Decide.

18 March 2024

Decide.

Ari Weinzweig on the importance of dignity in the workplace ...

The idea of a revolution in the workplace may, to cynics, sound overstated or maybe even wholly irrelevant, in a world where we all have a million things to do. I’d like to say the stakes are small. After all, what’s one more bit of philosophical framing or another “organizational recipe” in a company like Zingerman’s that already has an abundance of both? And yet, I have become convinced that dignity would make an enormous difference.

I am not alone in this belief. Twenty years ago, Wendell Berry published an essay entitled “Imagination in Place”:
We are destroying [our country] because of our failure to imagine it. … This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.
Dignity, learned from the courage of people in Ukraine resisting the Russian invasion, has given me a new way to “imagine it.” The idea of a revolution of dignity in the 21st-century workplace is my attempt to offer, and adopt, a different and much more positive path forward. The choice, as Berry says, is ours to make. In the Epilogue of the pamphlet, I share this quote from Anastasia, one of the protestors on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013-4, as shared in historian Marci Shore’s wonderful book, The Ukrainian Night:
Everyone needs to decide… It’s necessary to believe and it’s necessary to act. Today it seems to me a time of responsibility for every person, every person concretely. Every person is responsible for our future. Every one. Every person needs to decide.
If we don’t make that decision, it seems clear that, as Wendell Berry has written, we will be destroying so much of what we have created and failing to fulfill what we could become. It is, after all, a dearth of dignity that leads to misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, malice, and maliciousness. Whenever dignity is absent, antipathy is sure to follow.

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WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL