jobs

It takes no great mental effort to see that the powerful people and institutions are using the coronavirus shelter in place time to dispense with as many of the "jobs" as they can.  Many sheltering people will have no job to return to.  So what better reason to start thinking about the meaning of work?

Anyone lucky as I have been to have spent my working life managing and working a small farm has a head start here.  Much as the economics profession and the corporate elite would like to have us think that work is about money and nothing else.  Farmers, at least diversified smaller ones, know better.

I have been fortunate to happen on two women thinkers recently that helped me open to this subject.  Ellen Davis, biblical scholar, writes in her examination of the circumstances surrounding the building of the Tabernacle in Exodus that traditional cultures thought that "the active form of wisdom is good work"  This thought certainly occupied the hearts and minds of the farming men who taught me and the women who taught and fed me sixty five years ago.  Though they would never have questioned it, in just five or six short decades since, this understanding of work has nearly vanished from us, in favor of the modern notion that work is something you do the least of in return for the most money.

Davis continues:  "Wisdom does not consist solely in sound intellectual work; any activity that stands in a consistently productive relationship to the material world and nurtures the creative imagination qualifies as wise."  She continues:  "The modern failure to honor physical work that is skilled. . .has resulted in the devaluation and humiliation of countless workers."

Susanne Langer, twentieth century philosopher, picks up the theme, observing that a great threat to mental security is the modern mode of working.  She says that". . .the nearest and surest source of mental satisfaction has dried up. . .Technical progress is putting Man's freedom of mind in jeopardy." 

The money is not the issue.  The tech industry could be made to write each of us a monthly check and it wouldn't be a financial burden to them-they are that rich.  But no one can give us the meaning back.  For that we will have to create among ourselves an entire new society and economy.  We must create our own meaning.  Elites cannot provide meaning, only control. 

summer

In summer when my shadow grows to about my height it is time to walk out to the pastures and the fields.  The cattle are uncomfortable this first hot day and the hogs as well.  We got the cattle to shade and the hog sprinkler started and now it is the end of the day; time to walk out and let the sweat dry in the fitful breeze to see what has become of the world as we got through the time from noon til now. 

I can see what weeds are coming in the corn, judge how the grass regrows after we made a too early start in the north pasture and try to figure if the bulls can stay where they are for another two or three days.  It is also a time to quiet the mind, begin some plans for tomorrow and look forward to a night's rest.  For me, it is also a time to ruminate on how unusual the work I have been blessed with really is in the modern world and to contemplate how little the world can tolerate the draining of meaning from work and what it has done to all of us.