As I read Matthew Crawford's "Why We Drive," I was struck by the book, not so much as an ode to awesome driving— which it is—but as a long observation of two modes of being in the world, two political stances that I have increasingly come to identify as Liberalism and Catholicism. Why We Drive: [...]
The tiresome cant about the work ethic notwithstanding, Americans do not celebrate, or even recognize, the dignity of labor. Although they profess to disdain both the idle rich and the idle poor, they do not at the same time esteem those who must work for a living, even as most count themselves among that number. [...]
There is dignity and value in work. You who live in America once knew this. You did not think lesser of a man because he got his hands dirty with honest toil. To the contrary, you thought it a grand thing to build and to create. But all that has changed. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if [...]
The most prevalent of all human ills are these two: a man’s discontent with the work he does and the necessity of having to kill time. Both these ills can be, in part, cured by liberal education. In support of this thesis, that liberal education is to be understood in terms of leisure, I should [...]
Writing can simultaneously take a lot out of you—you feel pleasantly exhausted after firing off a big piece of work—and make you feel wondrously light and buoyant. How is this? I think it is because writing is simultaneously work and leisure, a mental strain and a contemplative joy. We are used to dividing our waking [...]
Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poem “The Cry of the Children” recognizes the injustice of the exploitation of child labor, but her protest is not so much against the eternal class struggle as it is against the failures of her culture to remain true to its long-held beliefs. Her poem is thus a call to conserve culture [...]
I like the idea of celebrating “homo faber”—man the maker or worker. Work is something that is part of our dignity, a triumph of the human spirit. The celebration of work is something desperately needed in our culture today. “Why are we celebrating Labor Day? You don’t belong to a labor union,” one of my [...]
The ordinary daily life of men in Christian culture, who work not only in the sweat of their brows, but for the love of their families, there is also love of work. When men cut wood or go to war or make love to their wives, and when women spin or wash and reciprocate that [...]
When the holy Abba Antony lived in the desert he was beset by accidie, and attacked by many sinful thoughts. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be saved, but these thoughts do not leave me alone; what shall I do in my affliction? How can I be saved?” A short while afterwards, when [...]
What if the fundamental problem in the American academy is a loss of institutional identity that has nothing to do with conservative or liberal ideology? What if the modern university simply is no longer dedicated to being a house of learning and a community of scholars? Jake Meador’s article in The Atlantic* about the decline [...]
When the government began to define “essential” services, I began to question the relationship between man and his labor: Does man simply work to provide the means to live for his household or does he engage in work for its own sake? The rising unemployment numbers, which of course is the natural consequence of a [...]
What made Aaron Feuerstein famous was not success but his attitude in the face of catastrophe. When a fire destroyed the textile mill he owned, he faced the decisions of whether to rebuild and whether to continue to pay his 1,400 workers, who were left destitute in the dead of winter. His decision became a [...]
It is up to our “little platoons” to restore the respect for work that alone can restore health to an economic order. It is a long road, but a good start on going down the that road is to read carefully our historians and poets. M. Stanton Evans once said, in defense of free markets: [...]
Sometimes all that is needed is one person to take a stand in the workplace, one person who is willing to take the abuse and insults, one person who is not afraid to risk things that matter to him. Such risk-taking inspires others. Socrates observed that cowards experience pleasure every time they back down, while [...]