C.S. Lewis and the Prostitution of Work

C.S. Lewis and the Prostitution of Work February 11, 2016

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Apropos of my previous outburst on the nature of contemporary work, it seems some clarification is called for regarding what exactly I consider “good work,” as opposed to the bad kind, against which my earlier piece was clearly an assassination attempt. A proper explanation can’t be done in one post, but it can at least be initiated, and some points dealt with. So for starters, I’d like to quote C.S. Lewis (excessively) from his essay “Good Work and Good Works,” which appears in the collection The World’s Last Night and Other Essays. It doesn’t answer the whole question, but it’s a decent beginning:

The idea of Good Work is not quite extinct among us, though it is not, I fear, especially characteristic of religious people. I have found it among cabinet-makers, cobblers, and sailors. It is no use at all trying to impress sailors with a new liner because she is the biggest or costliest ship afloat. They look for what they call her ‘lines’: they predict how she will behave in a heavy sea. Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly. They begin to prefer words like ‘significant,’ ‘important,’ ‘contemporary,’ or ‘daring.’ These are not, to my mind, good symptoms. But the great mass of men in all fully industrialized societies are the victims of a situation which almost excludes the idea of Good Work from the outset. ‘Built-in obsolescence’ becomes an economic necessity. Unless an articles is so made that it will got to pieces in a year or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a sufficient turnover. A hundred years ago, when a man got married, he had built for him (if he were rich enough) a carriage in which he expected to drive for the rest of his life. He now buys a car which he expects to sell again in two year. Work nowadays must not be good…

Following this observation, which I think pertains more to consumerism that directly to work itself, he addresses a point that is especially relevant for Christian audiences, and that I’ve seen crop up over and over when it comes to discussions about evil in economics:

We must avoid taking a glibly moral view of this situation. It is not solely the result of original or actual sin. It has stolen upon us, unforeseen and unintended. The degraded commercialism of our minds is quite as much its result as its cause. Nor can it, in my opinion, be cured by purely moral efforts.

That is to say, it does no good to write this situation off by saying: “Well, it’s a fallen world.” I’ve heard that one too many times and now I have learned to see such invocations of “the fall” as thinly veiled justification for a further descent. But moving on to the nature of work…

Originally things are made for use, or delight, or (more often) for both…Into this situation, unobtrusive as Eden’s snake and at first as innocent as that snake once was, there must sooner or later come a change. Each family no longer makes all it needs…we now have people making things (pots, swords, lays) not for their own use and delight but for the use and delight of others. And of course they must, in some way or other, be rewarded for doing it. The change is necessary unless society and arts are to remain in a state not of paradisal, but of feeble, blundering, and impoverishing simplicity. It is kept healthy by two facts. First, these specialists will do their work as well as they can. They are right up against the people who are going to use it…If you make bad swords, then at best the warriors will come back and thrash you; at worst, they won’t come back at all…And secondly, because the specialists are doing as well as they can something that is indisputably worth doing, they will delight in their work. We must not idealise. It will not all be delight…But, by and large, the specialists have a life fit for a man; usefulness, a reasonable amount of honor, and the joy of exercising a skill.

Then he proceeds on to the present state of affairs, which has become divided broadly into two kinds of work:

 Of one sort, a man can truly say, ‘I am doing work which is worth doing. It would still be worth doing if nobody paid for it. But as I have no private means, and need to be fed and housed and clothed, I must be paid while I do it.’ The other kind of job is that in which people do work whose sole purpose is the earning of money; work which need not be, ought not to be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid.

He lists a few examples of the first sort: the doctor, the farmer, the teacher, etc. For the second sort, he chooses only two:

The opposite extreme may be represented by two examples. I do not necessarily equate them morally, but they are alike by our present classification. One is the work of the professional prostitute. The peculiar horror of her work—if you say we should not call it work, think again—the thing that makes it so much more horrible than ordinary fornication, is that it is an extreme example of an activity which has no possible end in view except money. You cannot go further in that direction than sexual intercourse, not only without marriage, not only without love, but even without lust. My other example is this. I often see a hoarding which bears a notice to the effect that thousands look at this space and your firm ought to hire it for an advertisement of its wares. Consider by how many stages this is separated from ‘making that which is good.’ A carpenter has made this hoarding; that, in itself, has no use. Printers and paper-makers have worked to produce the notice—worthless until someone hires the space—worthless to him until he pastes on it another notice, still worthless to him unless it persuades someone else to buy his goods; which themselves may well be ugly, useless, and pernicious luxuries that no mortal would have bought unless the advertisement, by its sexy or snobbish incantations, had conjured up in him a factitious desire for them. At every stage of the process, work is being done whose sole value lies in the money it brings. Such would seem to be the inevitable result of a society which depends predominantly on buying and selling. In a rational world, things would be made because they were wanted; in the actual world, wants have to be created in order that people may receive money for making the things. That is why the distrust or contempt of trade which we find in earlier societies should not be too hastily set down as mere snobbery. The more important trade is, the more people are condemned to—and, worse still, learn to prefer—what we have called the second kind of job. Work worth doing apart from its pay, enjoyable work, and good work become the privilege of a fortunate minority.

Now, for the highbrow Catholic out there who may or may not give much credence to the words of a generalist like Lewis, it isn’t difficult to find precisely the same sentiment in the Catholic tradition, and in none other than St. Thomas Aquinas himself, who for this and other reasons, said that as few as possible in society should be concerned exclusively with commerce:

“…if the citizens themselves devote their life to matters of trade, the way will be opened to many vices. Since the foremost tendency of tradesmen is to make money, greed is awakened in the hearts of the citizens through the pursuit of trade. The result is that everything in the city will become venal; good faith will be destroyed and the way opened to all kinds of trickery; each one will work only for his own profit, despising the public good; the cultivation of virtue will fail since honour, virtue’s reward, will be bestowed upon the rich. Thus, in such a city, civic life will necessarily be corrupted.” De Regno, 139.

There’s much more to be said on this subject, but that’s a start. I’ll try to complete the picture in an upcoming post.


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