During the Super Bowl they aired a car commercial called “God Made a Farmer”. It was a pleasant reminder that in this age of revolt, there is still a class of Americans, however tiny, that does manual labor every day with no hope of “career building”, and is somewhat respected for it. But there is no need to drone on about the dignity of farming, because they don’t need Internet bloggers to prop up their self-esteem.

Instead, let’s turn our idle gaze to the even more humble position of street sweeper. A West German author named Michael Ende (The Neverending Story), in his book Momo, chose to forego any outrage over the concept of street sweeping, and describe this job as not only honorable but also appropriate for his character:

Beppo [the Roadsweeper] lived near the ampitheater in a homemade shack built of bricks, corrugated iron, and tar paper […] Every day, long before daybreak, Beppo rode his squeaky old bicycle to a big depot in town. There, he and his fellow roadsweepers waited in the yard to be issued brooms and pushcarts and told which streets to sweep. Beppo enjoyed these hours before dawn, when the city was still asleep, and he did his work willingly and well. It was a useful job, and he knew it.

He swept his allotted streets slowly but steadily, drawing a deep breath before every step and every stroke of the broom. Step, breathe, sweep, breathe, step, breathe, sweep… Every so often he would pause a while, staring thoughtfully into the distance. And then he would begin again: step, breathe, sweep…

The book portrays Beppo as slow-witted, and difficult for the average person to listen to, as his thoughts wander and he doesn’t assemble them into coherent theses. But when the city is invaded by “grey gentlemen” who give humanity the tarantula’s bite and drive them to an obsession with crisis and haste (Evola’s “insane restlessness”), it is Beppo alone who senses the true nature of these “grey gentlemen” and tries to warn the people against treating them like a mundane political issue.

In other words, Ende demonstrates the importance of the man who works, knows his place, and fears those who would try to push him above it, that is, the shudra. Jobs like street sweeping require people who see some value in them — ideally some dignity that fits their position in life. I once lived on a desolate Colorado mountaintop with a lesbian cleaning service manager who believed her clients were Illuminati members, and that she and all females were secretly gods. It was really unclear to me how she could lower herself to scrub the toilets of businessmen with that attitude. When I offered to work with her team for a day, I figured it out immediately: she did none of the work herself.

In 1982, Ende had a highly productive chat with some intellectuals about his books, which was published as Phantasie/Kultur/Politik: Protokoll eines Gesparächs (no English translation). The heated conversation about principles, culture, civilization, scientism and religion, and modernity moved rapidly from one subject to the next, and I noted only a few places where the train of thought was lost. Only one of these pauses was so awkward that I actually highlighted it. Here it is:

[Erhard] Eppler: Let’s continue our talk about the street sweeper in Momo. People like him don’t exist anymore. Street sweeping is so poorly valued these days that, if we needed someone to do it, we’d have to go hunt down a Turk … … … Come to think of it, we really just use street sweeping machines these days. They’re very noisy and smelly and probably not even economically sound.

Uncharacteristically, Ende did not comment on Eppler’s uncomfortable ellipsis. In this free-ranging and lengthy conversation, where Ende pierces the myths of progress and equality, it is quite telling that the subject of Turks is the only one off the table. But the context they were mentioned in is precisely the correct one. It’s untrue that people like Beppo are “anachronisms” or “don’t exist”. By necessity, they must always exist in every era. But it is true that if Germans needed a Beppo, they would have to import a Turk, and indeed they have done so thousands of times.

Even the most equal and free socialist utopia needs shudras to take out the trash (or untouchables, as the caste may be). But nobody who buys into modernity can stand to “waste their time” with such demeaning work. It thus becomes not only economically but also culturally necessary to import people who have a different set of values and can agree to do the work. It should not be surprising that these people do not generally come from other modern nations, but from more traditionally inclined ones.

In Japan I have found a society that still supplies its own shudras. Not only are the jobs seen as worthier, there is less offloading of responsibility. Children clean their own schools and serve their own lunches, and adults carry home their own trash and sort their own recycling. Of course, they are criticized by the West for not taking in foreign pariahs to do the dirty jobs, and demographics necessitate some sort of breaking point in the future for this thoroughly “anachronistic” nation.

But rather than applauding, we must be concerned for those who do such importing; such a nation is in danger, not just from the mere need for foreigners, but from what that need symbolizes. And for the immigrants we should have sympathy, for being forced to adapt to the host nation’s values while continuing to work beneath the dignity of its native citizens must be a breeding ground for resentment.

But do not think them victims. In the end, you know, they’ll inherit the earth.