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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
November 6, 2011
Live to work
The debt mess in Europe, and America, with the ever-present threat of economic meltdown, belongs to that class of news stories which are boring, but important. In a sense, the sometimes violent "Occupy" protesters, in both their American and European manifestations, provide some light relief.They also provide a service, which we may not appreciate. By their very fatuity, they may draw attention to the deeper dimension of our problem: for neither the "capitalists and bankers," nor the ignorant young punks who claim to represent 99 per cent of the population, can articulate what they want. Of the two, the rich capitalists are perhaps a little clearer. They would seem to propose a world in which at least they could make a lot of money. They are not bothered by "medieval" moral issues such as, "What constitutes usury?" Instead, they wonder about what constitutes a good investment. They grasp the connection between the generation of wealth and the generation of employment. Personal experience may teach them that "money can't buy happiness," but a solid puritan work ethic insulates them from anything like despair. I like businessmen for the same reason the Vatican does, in its various "two cheers for capitalism" pronouncements (lurking between the lines of other pronouncements). The businessman, by necessity, serves purposes beyond his immediate self-interest. He cannot just appropriate things, like a government department. If his product or service won't sell, he loses money. Therefore he must endeavour to provide things people want; or can at least be persuaded that they want, through advertising. By comparison, the rest of us, who work to live, are just selfish consumers. I don't like socialists, egalitarians generally, feminists, activists of any other sort, or what I call environmentalcases. I'm sure gentle reader has discerned this by now. Yet I tend to become a fairly advanced environmentalcase myself, when I look at the products of contemporary life; and at the incredible waste, not only in their production, but in the goods themselves: each an evanescence of fashion, to be soon discarded and replaced, contributing to a culture that is inherently unstable. And yes, even the food is full of chemicals. Worse than this, disposable lives. For people, in the main today, work to live, and the great majority of them in tasks that are mindless, repetitive, and demoralizing. When the cry goes up for "full employment," remember that this is a statistical concept, that reduces us to ciphers. The modern corporation takes pride in organizing itself, so that it need never depend on an individual. And while it sometimes finds itself in fact dependent upon some "visionary" slave-driver at the apex of the pyramid - some Steve Jobs - the rank-and-file are as interchangeable as machine parts. We may understand, sometimes, why leftists believe that without unions, and labour laws, the workforce would be reduced to feudal conditions. Or rather, they might be reduced to worse, for under medieval arrangements, the baronial lord did have inherited obligations. He subscribed to some humanizing religious beliefs, and was more or less stuck with the peasants in his vicinity. Casually disposing of them wasn't an option; and if they starved, he wouldn't exactly flourish. Moreover, given the personal nature of the relation between labourers and lord, there was always the risk they might rise up and kill him. By comparison, the bureaucrat in the Canada Revenue Agency is assured of the protection of the State; and even businessmen may look elsewhere for some law enforcement. No, I will not have the Middle Ages slandered. I was reading recently several talks delivered during the last world war by the detective novelist, and sometimes mystical Anglican, Dorothy Sayers. (The book is entitled, Creed or Chaos?) To my mind, it presented the truth quite well. "Can you remember what things were like before the war?" she asked, then replied with a description of everyday life not unlike our own today. It was a world of wasteful, disposable goods; tedious jobs; and fashion trumperies. Under war conditions, people were forced to save scraps, and salvage every material particle that could be put to some good use. The factories had happily ceased to vomit cheap consumer goods. They were now operating to the highest quality standards, at full capacity. But this was to produce, for example, airplanes, tanks, and bombs, with which to obliterate the enemy. And when you think about it, that is rather wasteful, too. Her point, which was not then original - and my point for today - is that neither the war nor the peace arrangement is entirely satisfactory. We need some kind of "revolution"; but not one that merely transfers ownership of the means of production from profitseeking capitalists to totalitarian psychos. We need a revolution in our attitude toward work. This is because the notion that we must "work to live" is only suitable to animals. The proposed Christian alternative is "live to work" - in the image of the creator, which is to say, creatively, "for the sake of doing well what is well worth doing." Through two or three centuries of Industrial Revolution, progressively regulated by cradle-to-grave bureaucracy, we have moved ever farther from that ideal. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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