Division of Labour

division of labour

rulers, compassionate, of delicate sensibility,
whose stomachs turn
when the victims’ brains spatter
onto their gleaming black boots.
the unruled, ruled by the rulers,
robust and untroubled, do the dirty work.
economical, efficient division of labour
and in the end everyone is innocent.
the ones never harmed a hair on anybody’s head
and the others only carried out orders.

Hans Ley, from: Lyrische Pflaster für wunde Seelen — translated from the German

I. The Scene

The poem refers to a recorded event. In August 1941 Heinrich Himmler attended a mass shooting near Minsk. According to those present, he felt sick; he was visibly shaken, and he was spattered.

The disgust was real. That is the starting point, and it is no excuse.

II. What Followed from the Disgust

It would be wrong to see in this disgust a remnant of conscience that came too late. It did not come too late. It arrived — and it was answered.

For what followed was not a pause but a question of procedure: the shootings, it was said, could no longer be asked of one’s own men. From this consideration, methods were developed that spared the perpetrators the sight — first gas vans, then fixed installations.

The division of labour was not extended in spite of the disgust, but because of it.

This puts the matter in a different light from how it first appears. The disgust was not what could have stopped it. It was the occasion for the next step. What provoked it was not the killing but the manner of carrying it out — and manners of carrying things out can be changed.

Anyone who concluded from this that the sensitive man was at least no hypocrite would have misunderstood what happened. This is not about hypocrisy. It is about the fact that feeling and action can be separated without the one acting noticing any contradiction. That is worse than hypocrisy, because it requires no pretence.

III. The Line

From here a line runs onwards, and it has its own logic.

The guillotine. Introduced in France in 1792 and justified as progress: the same method of execution for all estates, a quick death, no misdirected blow, no dependence on the executioner’s skill or condition. All of that is true. And in the same stroke the executioner who strikes becomes a man who operates a lever. The deed is still there; carrying it out has become a flick of the hand.

The installation. A century and a half later, the flick of the hand is an opened tin, its contents poured through a hatch. The one carrying it out does not see the result. Everything else — delivery, registration, disposal — is distributed among offices, each of which does something that, taken by itself, kills nobody.

The briefcase. Today an authorisation is enough. It consists of a sequence of numbers, it is entered into a device, and whoever enters it feels nothing that would correspond to the effect. Between the movement of the hand and what follows from it there is no longer any resemblance.

The vanishing point of the division of labour is automation. First the deed is distributed among many, then each partial step is simplified until a device can take it over, and in the end a single movement remains that has nothing in common with its effect.

Every step along this path has been justified with the same reasons that are always used to justify the division of labour: more reliable, more economical, less of a burden on those involved.

IV. The Word

Division of labour is the concept used since Adam Smith to explain prosperity. Everyone does what they do best, no one has to be able to do everything, and all together achieve more than each on their own. That is the foundation of every developed society, and it is true.

The same word explains why, in the end, no one is responsible any more.

This is no play on words, but one and the same process. A task is broken down, each step is given to someone in charge of it, and the sum produces the result. Only what is divided here is not work but responsibility — and responsibility behaves differently when it is divided.

Work adds up. Ten people achieve more than one.

Responsibility does not add up. It thins out. Ten people who each do a tenth bear less together than one who does everything — not because less happens, but because each can point to his own part, and a tenth falls on no one.

V. Where the Division Tips Over

Not every division relieves people of responsibility. A hospital works by division of labour, a machine tool is built by dozens, an aircraft by thousands. None of this is suspect.

The point at which it tips over can be named: when a partial office can no longer see the result it is working for.

As long as the surgeon sees the patient, the division holds. As soon as someone merely processes a form whose effect he does not know, the feedback is cut — and with it the possibility of measuring one’s own work against its result.

Two things then happen at once and support each other.

The one carrying it out can no longer judge, because he does not see the whole.

The one deciding no longer has to look, because he determines the process, not its execution.

Both are sincere when they say they did nothing. And both are right — for their part.

VI. A Necessary Distinction

The same structure is found in processes that have nothing in common with the foregoing except precisely that structure. A supply chain across six countries, at whose beginning no one looks. A key figure that takes the place of the goal, so that no one is responsible for the goal any more. A procedure made of many rules that ends in a decision nobody ordered.

These cases are not comparable with the historical one, and this sentence belongs here explicitly. Anyone who uses the one to explain the other trivialises the one and inflates the other.

Only the question carries over, not the verdict: does the partial office see what it is working for? Where the answer is no, something is wrong with the procedure — and how much that weighs is decided not by the structure, but by what happens at the end of the chain.

VII. Why It Is So Hard to Change

Because the division is not the fault but the achievement.

A community that did only what a single person can survey would remain limited to the size of a village. Everything beyond that requires people to work on things whose whole they do not see. Whoever abolishes that abolishes modern society.

So the answer cannot be to divide less, but to restore the feedback: to make sure that every partial office learns what becomes of its work.

How unwelcome that is can be seen from a proposal made in 1981. An American legal scholar suggested implanting the launch codes for nuclear weapons in a capsule next to the heart of a volunteer. Whoever needed them would first have to kill this one person with his own hand. Everything else would remain as it is.

The reply from the Defense Department was, in essence, that this was terrible: having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgement.

That was exactly the point. The objection confirms the proposal. It is considered an advantage that the decision is taken without the feeling that belongs to it.

VIII. What Remains

The disgust was the last obstacle. It did not sit in reasoning but in the body, and so it could not be argued away.

It could be engineered away.

Not through numbing and not through persuasion, but through procedure: through division until no partial step looks like the whole any more, and through automation until nothing is left of the last movement of the hand but the pulling of a lever, the emptying of a tin, the entering of a sequence of numbers.

In the end the beast has won — not because it was stronger than conscience, but because it learned to evade it.