Derivative Thoughts on the Nature and Purpose of Work

The last thing I expected when I followed Reverend Galt's link to Matthew Crawford's NYTimes article, "The Case for Working with Your Hands," was to hear echoes of the great Christian thinker, Dorothy Sayers. But the connections were inescapable.

Mr. Crawford found himself as a highly-educated "knowledge worker," trapped in less-than-desirable conditions in which he was expected to "project an image of rationality, but not engage in too much actual reasoning," while he also underwent "a bit of moral re-education" which demanded that he suppress his innate sense of responsibility and integrity for the sake of meeting quotas and bolstering the company's bottom line. 

Ms. Sayers' discontent stemmed largely from what she calls, "...the appalling squirrel cage of economic confusion...in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based on Envy and Avarice," and in which "consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going."

On the surface, Crawford's arguments appear to be economic and practical, while Sayers' are overtly theological, yet their premises and conclusions run parallel on a number of levels and both authors support the overarching belief that: Work has intrinsic value which is not attached to, derived from, or measured by its monetary profitability.

Sayers:" The habit of thinking about work as something one does to make money is so ingrained in us that we can scarcely imagine what a revolutionary change it would be to think about it instead in terms of the work done."

The foundational value of work is not bound up in profit, but rather in man's creation as an Imager of God. Again from Sayers: "[Work] should be looked upon - not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself...it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing."

Both Crawford and Sayers assert that the primary motivation for work should be that it provides satisfaction and delight. One way to make that true, is by directing people toward careers that fit their interests, talents and abilities.

Crawford: "...maybe it isn't true that all 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build or fix things. When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other option. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid."

Sayers: "At present we have no clear grasp of the principle that every man should do the work for which he is fitted by nature. The employer is obsessed by the notion that he must find cheap labor and the worker by the notion that the best paid job is for him. Only feebly, inadequately, and spasmodically do we ever attempt to answer the question from the other end and inquire: What type of worker is suited to this type of work? [Thus] the right men and women are persistently thrust into the wrong jobs."

Another consideration for ensuring that work is satisfying and delightful is to make the work itself worthwhile.

Crawford: When hired to write abstracts for magazines and professional/academic journals, Crawford's experience was that the work and the product were valueless. He was taught that there's a method needs to be applied and that this can be done without understanding the text [which he was summarizing]. “I felt trapped in a contradiction: the [quotas] and fast pace demanded complete focus on the task yet that pace also made real concentration impossible. I had to actively suppress my own ability to think, because the more you think, the more the inadequacies in your understanding of the author's argument come into focus. To not do justice to an author who had poured himself into the subject at hand felt like violence against what was best in myself. I had to suppress my sense of responsibility to the article itself and to others - to the author as well as the hapless [readers] who might suppose that my abstract reflected the author's work.” He recounts incidents where co-workers intentionally sabotaged their abstracts in order to compensate for their boredom and feelings of being confined and stultified. "Everyone is highly concerned about economic growth on the one hand and unemployment on the other, but the character of the work doesn't figure much in public debate. On the nature of the job itself, the dominant political and economic paradigms are mute. Yet work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences."

Sayers: "Work should be the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction and the medium in which he offers himself to God.

No one is required by economic or any other considerations to devote himself to work that is contemptible, soul-destroying, or harmful. 

We should ask of an enterprise, not 'will it pay?' but 'is it good?', of goods, not 'can we induce people to buy them?' but 'are they useful things well made?', of employment, not 'how much a week?' but 'will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?'"

But not only should the work itself not be demeaning or valueless, but the thing produced should be worthy as well.

Crawford decided to leave the cubicle life and open his own motorcycle repair shop, where he found great intellectual satisfaction in the necessary problem-solving, as well as delight and meaning in the product he produced. 

Crawford: “Seeing a motorcycle about to leave my shop under its own power, several days after arriving in the back of a pickup truck, I don't feel tired even though I've been standing on a concrete floor all day. Peering into the portal of his helmet, I think I can make out the edges of a grin on the face of a guy who hasn't ridden his bike in a while. I give him a wave. With one of his hands on the throttle and the other on the clutch, I know he can't wave back. But I can hear his salute in the exuberant 'bwaaAAAP!' of a crisp throttle, gratuitously revved. That sound pleases me, as I know it does him. It's a ventriloquist conversation in one mechanical voice, and the gist of it is ‘Yeah!’"

Sayers: In a world where we thought more carefully about work, “We should fight tooth and nail...for the quality of the work that we had to do. We should clamor to be engaged in work that was worth doing, and in which we could take pride. The worker would demand that the stuff he helped to turn out would be good stuff. There would be protests and strikes not only about pay and conditions, but about the quality of the work demanded and the honesty, beauty, and usefulness of the goods produced. The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of his work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making.”

The only Christian work is good work well done. For the Christian worker, his satisfaction comes, in godlike manner, from looking upon what he has made and finding it very good. The Church's approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables! As we are, so we make. 

Finally, work is made satisfying and delightful in its social implications- that is, the way it builds community, bonding us to those from whom we learn and those whom we serve.

Crawford's foray into motorcycle repair taught him that it would probably be impossible to do such work in isolation, without access to a collective historical memory; you have to be embedded in a community of mechanic antiquarians. These relationships are maintained by telephone, in a network of reciprocal favors that spans the country. “My business is based entirely on word of mouth. I sometimes barter services with machinists and metal fabricators. This has a very different feel than transactions with money; it situates me in a community. The result is that I really don't want to mess up anybody's motorcycle or charge more than a fair price.”

Sayers' talks at length about the worker serving the work itself, not the community. Though it sounds odd at first, her point is that once you begin to do your work for the sake of pleasing others, the quality of the work suffers from a false focus, you begin to feel that others "owe" you something for your pains, or you end up merely filling a public demand without regard for the quality of the thing produced. The only true way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself a part of the community, and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.

The conclusion: Work has intrinsic value and can be made satisfying and delightful for the worker by fitting the work to the worker, making both the work itself and the goods it produces worthwhile, and by attaching ourselves to a community via our work. 

I have only extracted small nuggets of truth from Mr. Crawford and Miss Sayers, and I highly encourage you to read both intelligent, thorough, and thought-provoking essays in their entirety! Sayers' essay "Why Work?" can be found in a compilation of her essays titled, Letters to a Diminished Church, or in the link provided.