A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton Read Free Book Online Page A

seemed that we might have built up a meritocracy that had introduced an element of true justice into the distribution of wealth as well as of poverty. In the modern era, destitution could therefore be regarded as not merely pitiable but
deserved
. The question of why, if one was in any way talented or adept, one was still unable to earn admittance to an elegant lounge was a conundrum for alleconomy airline passengers to ponder in the privacy of their own minds as they perched on hard plastic chairs in the overcrowded and chaotic public waiting areas of the world’s airports.
    The West once had a powerful and forgiving explanation for exclusion from any sort of lounge: for two thousand years Christianity rejected the notion, inherent in the modern meritocratic system, that virtue must inevitably usher in material success. Jesus was the highest man, the most blessed, and yet throughout his earthly life he was poor, thus by his very example ruling out any direct equation between righteousness and wealth. The Christian story emphasised that, however apparently equitable our educational and commercial infrastructures might seem, random factors and accidents would always conspire to wreck any neat alignment between the hierarchies of wealth on the one hand and virtue on the other. According to St Augustine, only God himself knew what each individual was worth, and He would not reveal that assessment before the time of the Last Judgement, to the sound of thunder and the trumpets of angels – a phantasmagorical scenario for non-believers, but helpful nevertheless in reminding us to refrain from judging others on the basis of a casual look at their tax returns.

    The Christian story has neither died out nor been forgotten. That it continues even now to scratch away at meritocratic explanations of privilege was made clear to me when, after a copious lunch rounded off by a piece of chocolate cake with passionfruit sorbet, an employee called Reggie described for me the complicated set of circumstances that had brought her to the brutally decorated staff area of the Concorde Room from a shantytown outside Puerto Princesa in the Philippines. Our preference for the meritocratic versus the Christian belief system will in the end determine how we decide to interpret the relative standing of a tracksuited twenty-seven-year-old entrepreneur reading the
Wall Street Journal
by a stone-effect fireplace while waiting to board his flight to Seattle, against that of a Filipina cleaner whose job it is to tour the bathrooms of an airline’s first-class lounge, swabbing the shower cubicles of their diverse and ever-changing colonies of international bacteria.
    6 Although the majority of its users regarded it as little more than a place where they had to spend a few hours on their way to somewhere else, for many others the terminal served as a permanent office, one that accommodated a thousand-strong bureaucracy across a series of floors off limits to the general public. The work done here was not well suited to those keen on seeing their own identities swiftly or flatteringly reflected back at them through their labour. The terminal had taken some twenty years and half a million people to build, and now that it was finally in operation, its business continued to proceed ponderously and only by committee. Layer upon layer of job titles (Operational Resource Planning Manager, Security Training and Standards Adviser, Senior HR Business Partner) gave an indication of the scale of the hierarchies that had to be consulted before a new computer screen could be acquired or a bench repositioned.
    A few of the more obscure offices nonetheless managed to convey an impressive sense of the scope of the manpower and intelligence involved in getting planes around the world. The area housing British Airways’ Customer Experience Division was filled with prototypes of cabin seats, life jackets, vomit bags, mints and towelettes. An archivist oversaw a room filled