Older generations are familiar with a photograph titled "Lunch atop a skyscraper" (see image, below), which captures twelve men seated on a flange beam 800 feet above the streets of midtown Manhattan.  They are sitting thigh to thigh eating lunch, talking, sharing a smoke, oblivious to the danger that gravity, in combination with height, presents.

I thought of this photograph recently when I noticed that employees who work for my construction company never take lunch together.  When lunch is called, they dust themselves off, walk to their respective cars, and drive to a fast-food place or convenience store.  They return with food and eat alone in their cars.  Why this fact surfaced into consciousness may be related to reminiscing about a pre-COVID world, one in which handshakes and smiles were commonplace, but it got me thinking about human behavior and how it has shifted.

From the time I started working as a teenager on my father's fishing boat to the oil fields to construction sites, wherever I was, it was customary to eat lunch together as a crew.  Later, as an employer, I watched the custom sustained.  Superficially, the lunch break is simply a break in the workday to eat lunch, but it is much more.  It is almost a ritual.

The crew would shout their nutritional preferences over the drone of motors and compressors, and a negotiation would result in a consensus.  The most junior member of the crew would take individual orders, collect money, and pick up the order at the agreed-upon restaurant.

When he returned, the crew turned off the equipment, and then everyone washed up and sat down together.  And the ritual would take shape.  Conversation would wax and wane, from boisterous and vulgar to fraternal and encouraging.  Advice was offered, both good and bad, and the tone was always tempered by the fact that they had to work together.  It was, in many ways, a ceremony of reconciliation, the individual reconciling with the group.

Image: Lunch atop a skyscraper, 1932.  Public domain.

Each worker needed this reconciliation because he was dependent on his coworkers.  Even the most experienced tradesman was dependent on his helpers and everyone else on the site for his livelihood, productivity, and safety.  He needed to have a relationship with the people he worked with.

This all changed with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the tech revolution.  People now form relationships electronically, with no meaningful attachment or engagement.  This might seem hyperbolic, but the evidence is stark and convincing.  I have asked my workers why they don't eat together, and they responded that their lunch break is their personal time and that they prefer to check Facebook, Instagram, and emails while eating lunch rather than sharing the time with their coworkers.

In the grand scheme of things, it may seem unimportant how a group of blue-collar young men spend their lunch break.  Yes, it is a small thing, but a lot of small things expressed across an entire culture build into very big things.

The late historian Jacques Barzun wrote that one of the greatest challenges we have in the postmodern world is "the emancipation of the individual."  He saw that, in an atomized society in which each individual is capable of forming and encouraged to form his own associations and worldviews independent of either the culture or reality, society is on a path to a dark and dismal world.  Things like transgenderism, BLM, abortion "rights," COVID mandates, and the countless other intractable problems we face exist because we do not talk with each other in a meaningful way.

In the postmodern, tech-driven world, we can choose our peer groups from a smorgasbord of like-minded tech channels without fear of having to temper our voices or question our conclusions.  We are secure in the validity of our positions because contradiction can be swiped away or erased with the delete button.  We are not dependent on the goodwill of others for our productivity and safety, so we are free to dismiss or demean those with whom we disagree.

Many of those men sitting on the flange beam were part of what we call "the greatest generation."  We should ask ourselves: what made them great?  The common answer is that they built the Arsenal of Democracy and sacrificed to defeat the Axis powers, but this confuses the result with the cause.  What caused their greatness is fundamentally linked to their willingness to work hard and at lunch share a meal with the men around them.  It is an amusing thing to consider that perhaps what made our country the greatest and most powerful nation on Earth could be distilled to a couple of grimy blue-collar workers trading half a ham sandwich for a hardboiled egg — but it is exactly those acts and relationships that form the bonds that create a good and great culture.

Chris Boland can be contacted at cboland7@outlook.com.