LABOR DAY traditionally celebrates pride in work and the solidarity of workers, but this year there is fear instead of pride, lonely anxiety instead of solidarity. Half a million new jobless claims were filed last week, and unemployment reached 9.7 percent in August, with 10 percent almost certainly coming soon. Three million jobs in manufacturing and construction have simply disappeared. The majority of people over 50 expect to postpone retirement because of 401k losses, making it all the harder for younger people to find jobs, or to advance in careers. The new economy has pulled the rug out from under recent graduates. Those who still have jobs carry heavier workloads, while forever keeping one eye peeled for the coming pink slip. Management has been as devastated as labor, and professions that once defined genteel security, like journalism and publishing, are themselves in danger of disappearing. Teachers, for God’s sake, are being laid off!
What is going on here? Tested categories of economic analysis have all been applied. Depression. Recession. Business cycle. Soft landing. Money supply. Credit crisis. Catastrophic deficits. Statistics. Data. Globalization. Mumbo jumbo. Are we to be consoled that every society on earth is at the mercy of such disorder, or that the one reliable social law - impoverished groups and individuals always take the hardest hit - is holding true? After two years of expert predictions being shown up as wild guesses, and mathematical projections as stabs in the dark, a mask has been ripped from the face of the science of economics, exposing primitive superstition. The debunking of the academic study of the structure of wealth is equivalent to astronomy being shown up as nothing more than astrology after all. “I saw the best minds of my generation,’’ to take off from Allen Ginsberg, destroyed by the smug assumption that they knew what the hell they were talking about.
What’s missing is language in which to express the sneaking suspicion that beneath today’s massive economic dislocation is some kind of species-changing shift in the way humans relate to work itself. Fifty years ago, alarms were sounded about something called “automation,’’ while “futurists’’ warned that human labor would be replaced by machines. Because the vision focused on manual labor, with robots running assembly lines, and self-driven harvesters crossing the fruited plains, some foresaw a liberation from the sweat and mindlessness of hard physical effort. But the automation that really changed things has been intellectual, with computers now in competition with the mind as the fountain of invention. Screen technologies, centered on the Internet, have changed not only the way we access information, but how we understand it. The meaning of knowledge and wisdom are being upended right before our eyes.
The humanities PhD, to take one sacred example, is hard-earned certification signifying the mastery of book-centered research supporting a body of learned expertise, but what happens when book-centered research is made redundant by the search engine, and expertise is not learned but Googled? What happens, for that matter, when “reality’’ itself has become unreal, as nothing demonstrates more powerfully than the bizarre reinvention of television entertainment around “reality shows’’? Even time and space have been altered by the immediacy of wireless communication, which replaces sequence with the instantaneous, and absence with permanent presence. Through all the “labor-saving devices’’ and “artificial intelligence’’ that have been spawned, humans are left feeling less liberated than exiled.
The nightmare of modernity, since Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, has been of an invasion of the home planet by creatures from some other world, but we have reversed that story. With our laptops and iPods, not to mention, say, our laser beams and drone bombers, we stand on the threshold of a world inhabited by aliens all right, but, as our home planet becomes something unrecognizable, the aliens are we ourselves. The single largest symptom of this condition is the trouble we have with work. Labor Day was once its simple celebration, but this year’s holiday confronts us with a whole new task. Our real work now is to rescue work.
Correction: Last week I cited Senator Edward Kennedy’s line as “The dream will never die.’’ I should have written, “shall never die.’’
James Carroll’s column appears regularly in the Globe. 
