|
Theodore Roszak, Person/Planet 215-217, 218, 220, 221, 222-223,
232, 235-236 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978):
To have a vocation is to work with responsibility--not in any merely
legal sense, nor in the sense of fearing that one will be pointed
out as a slacker by one's work mates . . . but in the sense that our
work is ourselves; we are at one with it because it grows from all
that we have chosen to become in this life. It is our personal emblem
and pledge of honor before the world. We care about our vocation,
because if it is misused or proves inadequate, all that gives our
life distinction and meaning is called into question.
It is a stubborn fact of human experience: Except in the most technical
legal sense, I cannot hold myself responsible for work that is personally
meaningless, let alone for work I despise. Meaningless work, despicable
work, is work I blame on others; I treat it as a mere necessity, an
imposed duty. I may even feel ashamed that I waste my life at such
work. So I say to myself (and secretly to the world), "I am only
doing this because I need the money, or I need the grade, or I need
the credit, or reputation, or publicity. I am doing something my boss
wants to have done, or the system needs to have done. I did not invent
this job; I do not believe in it; I do not endorse it. If I had my
way, I would be doing something else. So don't hold me responsible
for its waste, its shoddiness. . . ."
In this way, I seek to distance myself from the job. And that, essentially,
is what alienation is: the withdrawal of self from action, the retreat
of the person from the performance. Work then becomes a foreign object
in one's life which is, at most, a means to an end, but no proper
part of one's real identity. Alienation is not . . . an estrangement
merely from the means and fruits of production. It is also estrangement
from the activity itself which allows us to deny our responsibility
for what we do. And this is what surely follows when work has no craft
to it: no challenge, no taste, no personal style. Work of that kind
is a zero, a hole in the middle of one's life. It is life wasted,
and nothing breeds more rebellion and resentment in us than the experience
of having a precious piece of our life extorted from us, stolen away,
used up. Confronted with work of this kind, we withdraw into fantasies
of being elsewhere, doing other things . . . watching the clock, planning
for the weekend. We are everywhere but right here, at work
and in our work.
. . . . If we have a vocation, we are responsible to our work that
it should be well done; we are responsible for our work that it should
be well used. We want it to be intrinsically excellent by the highest
standards of our craft or profession; we also want it to be of good
and honorable service in the world. In our vocation, we wish to see
the good achieved in both its senses: the well crafted and
the ethically right. Only one force will provide this double-edged
sense of responsibility--and that is love: the love we bear toward
the work we do. Just as there is no way to talk about vocation without
talking about responsibility, so there is no way to talk about responsibility
without talking about love. To what and for what can we be responsible?
. . . . [W]e can hold ourselves responsible only to what we love and
for what we love.
* * * *
What are most people in premodern societies? They are peasant farmers,
artisans, craftsmen, housewives--and children learning these livelihoods
from their parents. In more primitive societies, they are hunters,
fishermen, gatherers, nomads. Now, all of this is skilled work of
an indisputably useful nature. It requires careful training, a mastery
of cultural lore, the constant exercise of judgment and initiative.
In doing the work, one experiences one's own competence and strives
toward a standard of excellence that is respected by one's fellows.
There is a difference between a good farmer and a bad one, between
a good hunter and a bad one--a difference the community appreciates
and cares about, because the work is necessary value to all concerned.
To become good at these things is an exercise of one's cunning, experience,
inspiration--qualities that, in some measure, extend and define the
personality.
Even under the bleakest conditions of social exploitation, working
people in these societies, at least among themselves, can be a community
of mutual appreciation and critical regard--not simply because they
are being "nice" with one another on the job like bored
office workers exchanging pleasantries and good humor, but because
their work is a real measure of competence at a significant project
in the world. This is an irreducible cultural and personal value,
for there is, at last, such a thing in our nature as an instinct of
workmanship that can tell an honest job from a fake, and cares about
the difference.
Wendell Berry, A Continuous Harmony: Essays Cultural and Agricultural
93-94, 121-124 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/First Harvest ed.,
1975)(1972):
Nearly all the old standards, which implied and required rigorous
disciplines, have now been replaced by a new standard of efficiency,
which requires not discipline, not a mastery of means, but rather
a carelessness of means, a relentless subjection of means to immediate
ends. The standard of efficiency displaces and destroys the standards
of quality because, by definition, it cannot even consider them. Instead
of asking a man what he can do well, it asks him what he can do fast
and cheap. Instead of asking the farmer to practice the best husbandry,
to be a good steward and trustee of his land and his art, it puts
irresistible pressures on him to produce more and more food and fiber
more and more cheaply, thereby destroying the health of the land,
the best traditions of husbandry, and the farm population itself.
And so when we examine the principle of efficiency as we now practice
it, we see that it is not really efficient at all. As we use the word,
efficiency means no such thing, or it means short-term or temporary
efficiency; which is a contradiction in terms. It means cheapness
at any price. It means hurrying to nowhere. It means the profligate
waste of humanity and of nature. It meets the greatest profit to the
greatest liar.
* * * *
The peculiarity of our condition would appear to be that the implementation
of any truth would ruin the economy. If the Golden Rule were
generally observed among us, the economy would not last a week. We
have made our false economy a false god, and it has made blasphemy
of the truth. So I have met the economy in the road, and am expected
to yield it right of way. But I will not get over. My reason is that
I am a man, and have a better right to the ground than the economy.
The economy is no god to me, for I have had too close a look at its
wheels. I have seen it at work in the strip mines and coal camps of
Kentucky, and I know that it has no moral limits. It has emptied the
country of the independent and the proud, and has crowded the cities
with the dependent and the abject. It has always sacrificed the small
to the large, the personal to the impersonal, the good to the cheap.
It has ridden to its questionable triumphs over the bodies of small
farmers and tradesmen and craftsmen. I see it, still, driving my neighbors
off their farms into the factories. I see it teaching my students
to give themselves a price before they can learn to give themselves
a value. Its principle is to waste and destroy the living substance
of the world and the birthright of posterity for a monetary profit
that is the most flimsy and useless of human artifacts.
* * * *
A better economy, to my way of thinking, would be one that would
place its emphasis not upon the quantity of notions and luxuries
but upon the quality of necessities. Such an economy would,
for example, produce an automobile that would last at least as long,
and be of workmanship to be as durable as its materials; thus a piece
of furniture would have the durability not of glue but of wood. It
would substitute for the pleasure of frivolity a pleasure in the high
quality of essential work, in the use of good tools, in a healthful
and productive countryside. . . .
"You are tilting at windmills," I will be told. "It
is a hard world, hostile to the values that you stand for. You will
never enlist enough people to bring about such a change." People
who talk that way are eager to despair, knowing how easy despair is.
They want to give up all proper disciplines and all effort, and stand
like cattle in a slaughterhouse, waiting their turn. The change I
am talking about appeals to me precisely because it need not wait
upon "other people." Anybody who wants to can begin it in
himself and in his household as soon as he is ready--by becoming answerable
to at least some of his own needs, by acquiring skills and tools,
by learning what his real needs are, by refusing the merely glamorous
and frivolous. When a person learns to act on his best hopes
he enfranchises and validates them. . . . And by his action the possibility
that other people will do the same is made a likelihood.
Wendell Berry, Standing By Words 13 (San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1983):
[W]hat we call the modern world is not necessarily, and not often,
the real world, and there is no virtue in being up-to-date in it.
It is a false world, based upon economies and values and desires that
are fantastical--a world in which millions of people have lost any
idea of the materials, the disciplines, the restraints, and the work
necessary to support human life, and have thus become dangerous to
their own lives and to the possibility of life. The job now is to
get back to that perennial and substantial world in which we really
do live, in which the foundations of our life will be visible to us,
and in which we can accept our responsibilities again within the conditions
of necessity and mystery. In that world all wakeful and responsible
people, dead, living, and unborn, are contemporaries. And that is
the only contemporaneity worth having.
What is needed is work of durable value; the time or age of it matters
only after the value has been established.
Wendell Berry, What Are People For? 139-140 (San Francisco:
North Point Press, 1990):
More and more, we take for granted that work must be destitute of
pleasure. More and more, we assume that if we want to be pleased we
must wait until evening, or the weekend, or vacation, or retirement.
. . . We are defeated at work because our work gives us no pleasure.
We are defeated at home because we have no pleasant work there. .
. . Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working
and resting kindly in the presence of this world?
And in the right sort of economy, our pleasure would not be merely
an addition or by-product or reward; it would be both an empowerment
of our work and its indispensable measure. Pleasure, Ananda Coomaraswamy
said, perfects work.
Carla Needleman, The Work of Craft: An Inquiry into the Nature of
Crafts and Craftsmanship 48-49, 51, 69, 122 (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1979):
The approach to crafts . . . is often initiated by a dissatisfaction
with the "plastic" world--that is, the world which does
not touch our inner life. Young people turn to pottery, to weaving,
to cabinetmaking, as if the life of the craftsman were simpler, easier
than the life of a businessman, and, for them, it is. And yet the
realization that the objects in modern life do not touch our inner
life, the wish to rediscover the connectedness between the inner and
the outer through working directly on a material with the body and
the best of our understanding, can lead to a shattering self-discovery.
It may bring upon me the weighty knowledge that the inner life I am
striving to express isn't there--that I have no access to an expressible
inner life. Craftsmanship begins with disillusion.
Disillusion is an extraordinarily interesting state of being, having
immediate and far-reaching effects. It is a sacred state, a state
that has power. It acts at once to still the voices of mere discontent.
It is an active, not a reactive state, and if the craftsman can bear
to stay there, not to turn away, he begins to detect an opening in
himself through which he can learn.
And of course he turns away. We turn away. We never expected to be
so shaken, down to the roots. We never before understood that in a
real exchange we have to give up something. We visualized the world
of forces as if it were a supermarket into which we could enter and
fill our shopping carts and go home again. We never thought about
paying.
Disillusion, the recognition that I am not what I thought I was,
that I don't know what I thought I knew, that I can't do what I wish
to do, is the payment that opens us to the creative dialogue. It renders
the craftsman, strains him through a very fine cloth to rid him of
impurities so that he, like the material substance of his craft, can
be available to be worked upon.
* * * *
The way I walk, the way I play cards, my relationships with other
people, the way I weave or carve or throw, express me. But only in
crafts is the result of that expression frozen in time and space like
a still photograph, distinct and separate from myself, small enough,
calling to be seen.
* * * *
It takes time to learn from the craft. After the first rush of enthusiasm,
or the second, the weaver may withdraw into himself and begin to study
at the loom. His designs are simple, either bands of color or geometric
figures that are vaguely American Indian in feeling. He begins to
feel something about design and he begins to have a sensation about
it as if he could, when he looks at a design, taste it in his mouth
and sense it with his body. His eyes convey the design to his body
and if he keeps his body still while he looks he can sense the design
better.
What looks good on paper may not be right for the a rug. It all depends.
Always while designing he feels on the edge of a secret and the secret
both eludes him and lures him.
* * * *
Crafts are about one thing: the secret of how to work.
John Jerome, Stone Work: Reflections on Serious Play and Other Aspects
of Country Life 31 (New York: Viking, 1989):
Joinery, it now occurs to me, must be the foundation of all craft.
You put two things together to make something else, to accomplish
some purpose; the better they fit, or work together, the greater the
pleasure from the making. Stone, wood, glass, metal, mud, any material,
any combination, it's the fitting together that turns work into pleasure,
turns tedium into trance.
Harry Remde, "Close to Zero," in D.M. Dooling (ed.) A
Way of Working 49-55, at 50-51 (Garden City, New York: Anchor Books,
1979):
At every moment he [the person who works with craft] works close
to a boundary, an invisible wall that defines the path to the next
moment, that moves ahead of him as he follows it, a wall that he never
quite touches. Patience in the craftsman is the willingness to recognize
and obey the movement of this wall. At each stroke of the tool he
brings his work up to it. His wish is as slight as the separating
of the next fibers of wood, the rising of the next particles of clay.
His thoughts and movements are bounded by the wall. His emotion makes
nearness to the wall satisfying to him. When he has finished the movement,
the wall moves beyond, establishing the further step. Again he moves
close to it. The movements of the wall and the craftsman are nearly
continuous, nearly the same.
He remains aware of this process. He never permits the wall to be
beyond the periphery of his inner vision. He attends to the material
without losing sight of the wall. This is the highest degree of his
patience. If he attempts to ignore the wall, to go beyond it without
completing the movement, he will lose the wall. He will be without
direction. For him, the wall provides a way; it makes his progress
possible. Moment by moment, he follows the wall.
Roger Gould, "Transformations During Early and Middle Adult Years,"
in Neil Smelser & Erik Erikson (eds.), Themes of Work and Love
in Adulthood 228-230 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970):
When we begin our work life in the twenties or earlier, we start
with assumptions about work that originate in childhood and reflect
our parents' values as well as our own reparative fantasies. These
ideas have not been tested and are contaminated by an idealizing process
in which we hope that the work will not only be pleasurable but also
will aid us in overcoming feelings of inadequacy, smallness, and uncertainty.
When we attach ourselves to particular work, we are likely to stay
with it because, if we are successful, it confirms our status as adults.
In return for this gift of adultness, we tend to accept the explicit
and implicit value system of the particular organization or career,
becoming narrower in relation to our full potential while becoming
deeper in relation to a specific real-life competency. The work becomes
us, not just our activity of choice. . . .
Work during the twenties serves so many developmental functions that
it makes most of us willing to work long and hard without questioning
seriously the fundamental value of what we are doing and why we are
doing it as long as we are constantly feeling better about ourselves.
To the degree that a job becomes a career and becomes an open pathway
to escalation in the future, the sense of optimism increases with
the sense of competency. When the job is not linked to escalating
roles, that optimism is blunted. . . .
* * * *
[Following this period of developing competencies in work] [t]here
is also a dawning recognition that we have paid a high price for this
achievement. We begin to question self-imposed limitations upon our
future career course. . . . During the early thirties, we begin to
be a more divided self and a more interesting self. . . . As long
as it rids us of our childhood mythic smallness, we are not capable
of totally surrendering work as a defense, but the grip of work as
a defense is lessening in favor of work as a self-defined and slowly
discovered meaningful activity. . . .
This process of questioning and seeking occupies a relatively small
part of our time and energy in the early thirties but grows to larger
proportions during the midlife decade, thirty-five to forty-five.
If in response to the questioning and accelerated transformational
process we engineer better and better fits between our inner needs
and current job activity, the questioning process is satisfied and
work continues as a labor of love. If, on the other hand, the questioning
process does not lead to shifts and changes that are small but cumulative
during the course of the thirties, our suppressed growth develops
into a major break that demands psychological work. This break may
take several forms: renewed repressions, often fortified by alcohol
or acting out; prematurely becoming old, dull, and dutiful; psychological
or physiological symptoms; deterioration of interest level and concentration;
or other mental disturbances requiring the reconsideration of the
meaning of work. These are the potential mid-life crises which may
or may not end in midcareer shifts.
In the midlife period, while striving for authenticity and generativity
as the organizing themes of the transformation process, serious and
urgent questioning takes place about the meaning of work. During this
time of profound changes and major revitalization opportunities it
is most important to identify idiosyncratic meanings of work. Underutilized
talents and capacities are still locked away, defensively isolated
in response to one's childhood thinking about the core of the self.
Douglas LaBier, Modern Madness: The Hidden
Link Between Work and Emotional Conflict 7, 25, 27, 203 (New York:
Touchstone/Simon and Schuster, 1989) (1986):
[F]or an adult, work plays a major role in
determining one's level of development, by either stimulating life-affirming
attitudes and supporting development, or, through frustration and
oppression, stimulating regressive attitudes.
* * * *
Careerism has become the main work ethic of
our times. At root, careerism is an attitude, a life orientation in
which a person views career as the primary and most important aim
of life.
* * * *
[C]areerism also has a dark side. . . . For
many of us, careerism brings with it a gradual loss of self, integrity,
or inner core, independent of and apart from our career position or
worth to the organization. . . .
People . . . express the downside of careerism
through semiconscious attitudes of self-betrayal, despair, and unfocused
self-criticism. The price of successful careerism is feeling trapped
and caught as they navigate upward through lawyers of hierarchy, fueled
by visions of recognition, power, and position that lie just ahead.
* * * *
Among the many obstacles to positive change
for the career professional is the presence of the "cover story"
and "hidden plot" in people's lives. The cover story is
the explanation one gives oneself and communicates to the world; a
plausible rationale for one's behavior and motives. Beneath it lies
a hidden plot, as in a Shakespearean drama: the true story, sometimes
unconscious and often the opposite of the cover story. It in fact,
directs and motivates the person's thoughts and actions. People often
tinker around with the cover story here and there; make it smoother
here, more persuasive there. The unconscious or semiconscious aim
is to avoid exposing and confronting the hidden plot for fear that
facing it would cause too much disruption, or would be too demanding
of rectification. When the cover story is firmly entrenched, no change
may be possible, unless a crisis occurs or the person gets professional
help.
C. Wright Mills, The Sociological Imagination 195-196 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1959):
To the individual social scientist who feels himself a part of the
classic tradition, social science is the practice of a craft.
* * * *
It is best to begin, I think, by reminding you, the
beginning student, that the most admirable thinkers within the scholarly
community you have chosen to join do not split their work from their
lives. They seem to take both too seriously to allow such disassociation,
and they want to use each for the enrichment of the other. Of course,
such a split is the prevailing convention among men in general, deriving,
I suppose, from the hollowness of the work which men in general now
do. But you will have recognized that as a scholar you have the exceptional
opportunity of designing a way of living which will encourage the
habits of good workmanship. Scholarship is a choice of how to live
as well as a choice of career; whether he knows it or not, the intellectual
workman forms his own self as he works toward the perfection of his
craft; to realize his potentialities, and any opportunities that come
his way, he constructs a character which has as its core the qualities
of the good workman.
What this means is that you must learn to use your life
experience in your intellectual work: continually to examine and interpret
it. In this sense craftsmanship is the center of yourself and you
are personally involved in every intellectual product upon which you
may work. To say that you can 'have experience,' means, for one thing,
that your past plays into and affects your present, and it it defines
your capacity for future experience. As a social scientist, you have
to control this rather elaborate interplay, to capture what you experience
and sort it out; only in this way can you hope to use it to guide
and test your reflection, and in the process shape yourself as an
intellectual craftsman.
Return to: Imagining Our Work as Craft
 Course
Readings Home Page
|