Being professional

Recently a friend and I talked about how much we should care about the jobs of people we know. If you value environmental sustainability, say, and someone you know works in mining (particularly a branch of mining that has little social utility beyond providing luxury goods) or if you care about public health, and a friend works for a major tobacco company, what does that say about the values of this person? Is it a good indication that your political and social stances are at odds?

Careers are an interesting thing. Perhaps I am romanticising too much, but it seems to me that a job used to reflect, quite strongly, who you are and what your place in society is. It spoke to your values and sense of societal contribution. That is, there was value in the act. There was value in the job itself. A job was a lifestyle. You had to justify why you were doing what you were doing.

Now most careers are professions. They are institutionalized. They are a means to an end. They are how you acquire the lifestyle you want rather than being a lifestyle itself. It’s the salary we care about rather than the work we do.

A profession, as I said, is institutionalized in society. The justification for the job is already there because instead of creating a service you’re filling a position. If your job has you doing questionable actions, a variant of the Nuremburg defence (“I’m just doing my job”) can be easily used to justify the actions, or even ignore the question of whether what you’re doing is questionable to begin with.

So no, I don’t think that someone’s job is necessarily a good indicator of their political and social values. I do think, however, that we should do more to think about how our job affects our society. We should think harder on how we shape our society rather than allowing our current society shape us. Because when we commit to an institution without thinking on it, we compromise our ability to contend with it.