Video Meliora, proboque; Deteriora sequor

Of Human Bondage

I've been thinking more about work these days and how fortunate I am, especially after reading a July 4th article about a Mexican immigrant who owns a small grocery mart but can't afford to hire anyone. He secured a $15,000 loan recently to keep the place afloat and works 12 hours a day seven days a week. Let me say that again slowly. 12 a day, 7 a week. He tries to take one day off every three months. Wow.

I quoted Wilde who anticipated the Distributists with a line about how machine-like jobs make machines of us and how art is the proper job of man. In this he seemed to intuit that work was made for man, not man for work, as the Catechism teaches, although the Catechism makes no distinctions between jobs (more on that later). John Adams famously said that he must study politics and war so that "my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

So Adams understood that what the generations should bequeath was not so much wealth, but wealth in the form of liberty to study porcelain instead of politics. Or wealth in the form of being able to choose your job instead of having a job choose you. But studying painting, poetry and music doesn't much sound like work to me.

My friend 'Hambone' and I hash and re-hash the subject of work and the one given in our hashing and re-hashing is that it is to avoided at all costs. (Unless it's writing.) There's a reason a job is called a "j-o-b", see the OT. But I'm pondering work and how my view of it appears to painfully dissonate with the Catechism's. Which means that my view is wrong. Ouch. The Catechism is far less disdainful of work than I:

"Human work proceeds directly from persons created in the image of God and called to prolong the work of creation by subduing the earth, both with and for one another. Hence work is a duty: "If any one will not work, let him not eat."...[Work] can be redemptive. ..Work can be a means of sanctification and a way of animating earthly realities with the Spirit of Christ...Love for the poor is even one of the motives for the duty of working so as to 'be able to give to those in need.'"

The Catechism doesn't appear to be a big fan of early retirement. Although I have plans to do volunteer work and write during retirement, I'm not sure God would be impressed.

So tying up Adams and Wilde and the CCC I guess we can all agree that work was made for man. But work seems to be such an all-encompassing term given that my job is unbearably easier than that Mexican immigrant's. And yet my work is painful compared to a porcelain-appreciator, as Adams would have. We Americans are living off the capital of a system that works extremely well, and that seems to be part of a natural evolution in an industrial society. The evolution begins, like in Japan and South Korea, with low-wage industrial crap jobs. They "pay their dues" in a sense, as the U.S. did around the turn of the 20th century. Economic growth explodes and the children of those low-wage earners in Japan and Korea have reaped quite a harvest, a harvest not of their making but a harvest nonetheless. But it is hard for a nation to help the Third World avoid the dues-paying. It's hard if not impossible for America to use her great wealth to will Third World nations into the global economy. I believe in giving to charities which help poorer countries although I wonder if it may only be prolonging their pain by putting them between a rock and a hard place - neither fully industrialized nor neither fully agriculturalized. It seems misery lies in the in-between, like wars that are fought tenderly enough to afford no resolution. Paul Theroux in his book on Africa makes the point that he suspects many Africans would be better off doing subsidence farming but have now lost those skills due to reliance on aid and/or a semi-move to an industrial society.