Last month, I began to introduce the Catholic Worker’s main critiques of our modern social order.
I noted the way that, in agrarian cultures, life tends to form one organic whole of work, tradition, religion, education, morality, care for the land, community and local economy. Under such conditions of holism, it is difficult to develop a “throw away culture,” as Pope Francis has called it, because each person has an interest in maintaining health in the local environment, local people and local communities.
Under industrial conditions, however, things begin to change. In a factory, or sitting in front of a spreadsheet today, to work is no longer to live, and to live is no longer to work. We come to see work as a sacrifice of our life rather than its unifying bond. Work becomes a necessary evil required to make money. We come to dread going to work, and real life begins after work ends.
Most work in our industrial society tends to have a factory character to it, even if we’re not in factories. Like in a factory, we perform tasks that anyone standing at our station (or computer) could perform, and the range of our tasks is strictly limited to ensure maximum efficiency.
Fredrick Taylor is famous for pioneering the scientific management of workflow in factories to assure maximum output. His idea was to quantify and regulate each motion with the strictest precision, knowing what each worker was doing at each moment, and incentivizing compliance. Universal surveillance mechanisms insure against deviance, and constant data collection is always laying the groundwork for the next efficiency innovation.
Each smallest move in Taylor’s factory is quantified, analyzed, evaluated and then manipulated to maximize profitability. The factory is thus one always-evolving machine, and the workers are just one part of it. Personal creativity and intelligence are minimized, and only allowed as they serve the ever-tightening canons of efficiency, defined by the bottom line.
Today, we have not moved beyond Taylorism, we have just totalized it. Our computer-based industrial economy is Taylorism beyond Taylor’s wildest dreams. Precision, calculation and surveillance are now possible at a level increasingly coextensive with society itself.
Yet just like in a factory, the first casualty is the personally-satisfying character of work itself. The standardization required for mass production — of services and information as much as wares — still means that laborers become extensions of the machines and systems they serve. We are rarely free to be truly creative, because our goals are always defined by efficiency, defined by maximum profitability. Intelligence is reduced to mere calculation. Such present day “factory work” — even when it is done at home on our laptops — rarely calls for the full engagement of our God-given personal genius.
The farmer or craftsman is always in large part artist, impressing the stamp of her personality, and therefore the very image of God which she bears, on her work. She can look upon her garden, a table, or the shirt she made, and with deep satisfaction say, “Ah! I did that. And it’s beautiful.” Industrial products, on the other hand, are impersonal. They would turn out that way whether you were there or not.
But the farmer or craftsman also lives from what she has made. She, in part, sustains her own life and that of her family and community by her own two hands. She is surrounded each day by a personal world. Not only is this satisfying and comforting, but it creates a lively sense of independence and competence. It actively develops the virtue of prudence and creates a people capable of ordering their lives and becoming masters of the art of living well.
We, however, rarely touch anything we have personally made. We are dependent upon the standardized outputs of a system, and our life becomes passive consumption of these goods and services. We lose the ability, Peter Maurin said, of organizing ourselves, and learn to demand that institutions manage our lives for us. Our applied intelligence and creativity — work — should be the unifying center of our lives. But today, to make money, we are forced to devote it to causes that have nothing much to do with the things that really matter to us.
We spend most of our lives getting ready to live them.
Next month we’ll see why this division of work from life is at the root of much of the social fragmentation we experience today.
Miller is the director of the Center for Catholic Social Thought at Assumption in St. Paul. He is the author of “We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement,” to be published Aug. 2 by Ave Maria Press.
