Carving the Ox
Why We Trust Sweat More than Skill
Cook Ding was a master, butchering animals with balletic precision. So impressive was his craft that one day his employer, Lord Wen Hui, asked for an explanation. He hadn’t always had the skill, the cook said. When he started, he had seen the animal in its totality, just one big hunk of meat, so he had hacked away to produce the cuts he wanted.
After three years, however, he had come to realise that it was comprised of separate parts and between them lay empty space. His knife was thin and if he slid it into the gaps, well “the flesh falls apart like a lump of earth falling to the ground.” A bad cook needed to change his knife once a month, a good cook once a year. It was nineteen years and thousands of oxen since Cook Ding changed his approach and his knife was just as sharp as it had been on that first day.
Faintly Hollywood? Certainly. An accurate description of the craft of butchery? Probably not. But the author of the story, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, was not writing a how-to guide for taking apart animals. He was offering a parable to hint at his approach to life.
What though, would Cook Ding’s colleagues have thought? Not very much, probably. To them he might have been an annoying show-off. There they were, sweating away with saws and cleavers while he rocked up, flashed his knife around for a bit and did a perfect job. Sickening. He was prancing around, but they were working. And he was getting all the credit. The lord wasn’t interested in them, only in Cook Fancy-Pants.
But their effort was just as noble as his skill. More noble actually. They were putting in the hours. They were taking things seriously. None of this airy-fairy Dao nonsense, just good, honest graft.
For hard work is a virtue. And it is one recognised across the spectrum and across the globe. The recent Green victor in a by-election promised to stand up for those who “work hard”, while “Grind culture” fetishises late nights and early mornings. The Anglosphere has the Protestant Work Ethic; the Japanese have karoshi – death from overwork.
And it is not unreasonable that this is the case. Hard work is sacrifice. It is, on many occasions, a form of suffering and suffering is a way of displaying that we belong or deserve to. The numerous, sometimes quite unpleasant, hazing rituals American college fraternities put their pledges through are designed to allow them to show that they are willing to suffer to be members of the tribe. They won’t cut and run when the going gets tough, they won’t free-ride on the labour of others. They’ll be there for us when the mammoth fixes its beady eye on the hunting party and starts pawing the ground.
There is something faintly suspicious about those who don’t work hard, no matter how much they might produce. If they don’t suffer now, we can’t be sure they will suffer when we need them to and so we shouldn’t really trust them. We shouldn’t fully admit them to the group. Perhaps they are telling us they don’t want to belong. That we are not important enough to them for them to want to conform. Which is just rude.
For we take ourselves as a universal reference point. Our group is the good group. Any reasonable human being would want to join it. Our abilities are the standard by which the world works. If something is difficult for us, it is just difficult. That is all there is to it. Anyone who can do our job without working hard must be cheating. That they might smply be better than us at the task in hand is not an idea we generally entertain.
There are, sometimes, exceptions to this. An old boss was happy, during an appraisal, to concede that I seemed to have a natural talent for the job, but felt the need to suggest that I at least try to make it look like I found it difficult. Other members of the team were not wildly happy that they were there when I deigned to rock up in the morning, and still there when I pushed off at the earliest possible opportunity. The art I needed to learn was, with apologies to Ovid, to hide my art.
Did he have a point? Quite probably. I was young, I was cocky. I was, looking back, I am sure faintly insufferable. To some.
Did I follow his advice? Of course not. I was young. I was cocky. I was making the numbers and, in an industry renowned for frequent and lucrative job changes, I was looking for a good time, not a long time.
Perhaps Cook Ding was the same. Perhaps he too had a bunch of head-hunters on speed-dial (or the Ancient Chinese equivalent).
Or perhaps the whole problem lay in a misunderstanding.
For if you think about the story, he obviously had worked quite hard in the past. Not just because initially, he had hacked away at the oxen, sweating like the other cooks. But he had also done something else. He had observed. He had learned. And he had designed a new process which utilised what he had discovered. A process which allowed him to achieve the same result with less effort. They had just come in, got their heads down and did what they had been taught until it was time to hang up their aprons. During that period, he was working harder than they were.
The problem was that they couldn’t see it. They had no idea what he was thinking in the kitchen while their own minds were wandering off to China’s Got Talent. Perhaps, like the equine artist George Stubbs, he had an elaborate pulley system at home, allowing him to spend his free time observing animal carcasses from all angles, better to understand them. All they could tell was that he wasn’t working as they were. Hard work was less important than visible work, work they could understand. Had he invented a Stubbs-like contraption and showed it off to his workmates, they would probably have thought him obsessive, and not a little strange.
What is positioned as a moral good is often just a demand for conformity. A demand that others behave like us, do what we do in the way that we do it. That they suffer to display their desire to belong. How much nobility is there in that?