Good Work

July 07, 2010

Good Work

Friends Dorothy L. Sayers and C.S. Lewis had much in common. They were—and still are—well known for their fictional writing as well as academic work. Both were also committed Christians (Lewis after his conversion in 1931), and turned their talents to writing Christian literature, including apologetics, and what we might now call ‘public theology’, integrating theology with issues of public concern. One of these issues was the relationship between Christianity and work—a topic of perpetual relevance to Christians living in the world. From our perspective more than half a century on, it’s worth revisiting their thoughts to glean what insights we can, and to see the differences and similarities between their concerns and ours.

Sayers’ thoughts are preserved for us in the transcript of a speech entitled ‘Why Work’, delivered in 1942.[1] Lewis’ essay ‘Good work and good works’ was published in 1959.[2] There is considerable overlap between the two pieces, and it is on these that this discussion focuses: (i) the notion of ‘good work’, especially as it applies to Christians; (ii) the problems industrialised economies throw in the way of a Christian attitude toward and practice of work; and (iii) what Christians can do in response.

Work worth doing

Exhortation to do your job well is not standard sermon fare. We are frequently—and rightly—exhorted to evangelise our colleagues and to be ‘godly’ at work, but the ungodliness we are to avoid is usually fleshed out as stealing, lying, and the like, not the ungodliness of failing to be like God the worker. Yet Lewis and Sayers are both convinced that people in general, and Christians in particular, ought to do good work.[3][4]

What is good work? Lewis writes:

Of one sort [of job], a man can truly say, ‘I am doing work which is worth doing. It would 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.’ ... Of course jobs of this kind need not be agreeable. Ministering to a leper colony is one of them. (p380)

Lewis sees the defining characteristic of good work as work which would be worth doing even if no-one was paid to do it.

Sayers agrees: doing good work is ‘doing well a thing that is well worth doing’ (p125). Like Lewis, she believes it is critical to good work that it be work worth doing[5] but she adds that it must also be done well, that is, that it be true ‘to the standards of its own technique’ (p139). Good work will be characterised by ‘honesty, beauty, and usefulness’ (p137), unlike bad work which is wasteful (p131), shoddy (p133), pretentious and tawdry (p139): the wine tastes good; the tables don’t wobble; the shirt wears well.

It is interesting to note that both authors contrast good work with work worth doing only for the sake of money. While adequate recompense is important and appropriate, it’s not what makes work good. On the contrary, Lewis considers work done for ‘the sole purpose of earning money: work which need not be, ought not be, or would not be, done by anyone in the whole world unless it were paid’ (p380) as the worst kind of work. Into this category he puts prostitution and advertising advertising space. Similarly, Sayers states:

We should ask of an enterprise, not ‘will it pay?’ but ‘is it good?’; of a man, not ‘what does he make?’ but ‘what is his work worth?’; of goods, not ‘Can we induce people to buy them?’ but ‘are they useful things well made?’; of employment, not ‘how much a week?’ but ‘will it exercise my faculties to the utmost?’ And shareholders in – let us say – brewing companies, would astonish the directorate by arising at shareholders’ meetings and demanding to know, not merely where the profits go or what dividends are to be paid, not even merely whether the workers’ wages are sufficient and the conditions of labor satisfactory, but loudly and with a proper sense of personal responsibility: ‘What goes into the beer?’ (pp132-33)

Questions of pay and profit, while important in their place, are not the ones that should be asked when we are trying to determine whether a venture is going to generate good work.

It is perhaps stating the obvious to say all people ought to do good work where possible: it is, by definition, better than bad work. Yet Sayers and Lewis both see good work as something that should especially characterise Christians. Sayers argues:

[Work] should be looked upon ... as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfil itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself, and that man, made in God’s image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is well worth doing. (p125)

... The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is church embroidery, or sewage farming. (p140)

Because we are made in the image of God—a worker who does good work—we will find joy and satisfaction in doing good work. By doing good work, Christians glorify God; where Christians do bad work they bring Christianity into contempt (p141).

Some of what Sayers has to say about work – that it is our delight and source of fulfilment, and even what we live for – jars a little with Christian eschatology: surely we don’t live for fulfilment in this world, but wait patiently for satisfaction in the kingdom (James 5:1-11). Some of her ideas seem to belong in the garden of Eden, and look rather too shiny for the gritty reality of a fallen world. To remember how things ought to be, though, and by comparison how far this world falls short, is valuable in itself—a point to which we will return.

Lewis’ argument is briefer: we should do good work because in so doing we follow Christ’s example and the apostle’s precept. When Jesus turned water into wine, it was good wine—‘wine really worth drinking’ (p378). Regarding the precept, Lewis doesn’t specify which apostle or command he has in mind, but it is probably Paul in Ephesians 4:28 (KJV): ‘Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.’ Paul does not recommend just any endeavour that will pay – it must be good, honest work.

The Challenge of Industrialisation

The problem for many who want to do good work is that circumstances are against it. Sayers and Lewis agree that industrialisation, however unintentionally, has undermined good work. The efficiency of production made possible by industrialisation means that we are now in the situation of having to convince people to buy things they don’t need in order to generate a sufficient demand to keep people employed—in Sayers’ words, a ‘whirligig of wasteful production and wasteful consumption’ (p131). Much of the work generated by this system is the antithesis of good work, as previously defined, and is valued not by its inherent worth but its contribution to keeping this ‘whirligig’ going. As a result:

The greatest insult which a commercial age has offered to the worker has been to rob him of all interest in the end product of the work and to force him to dedicate his life to making badly things which were not worth making. (Sayers, pp137-38)

[T]he great mass of men in all fully industrialised 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 article is so made that it will go to pieces in a year or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a sufficient turnover. (Lewis, p378)

Granting this analysis, Christians are in an awkward situation. On the one hand, we want to glorify God and care for those impacted by our efforts by doing good work. On the other, we find ourselves in an economy where this kind of work is often not valued, while opportunities to do poor work abound.[6]

Responding as Christians

Sayers and Lewis have been in quite close agreement up to now, but they diverge in their views on how people ought to respond to the consequences of industrialisation. Sayers’ proposal is conceptually simple:

Shall we be prepared to take the same attitude to the arts of peace as to the arts of war? I see no reason why we should not sacrifice our convenience and our individual standard of living just as readily for the building of great public works as for the building of ships and tanks – but when the stimulus of fear and anger is removed, shall we be prepared to do any such thing? Or shall we want to go back to that civilization of greed and waste which we dignify by the name of a ‘high standard of living’? (p130)

We could – you and I – bring the whole fantastic economy of profitable waste down to the ground overnight, without legislation and without revolution, merely by refusing to cooperate with it. I say, we could – as a matter of fact, we have; or rather, it has been done for us. If we do not want to rise up again after the war, we can prevent it – simply by preserving the wartime habit of valuing work instead of money. The point is: do we want to? (p132)

Sayers is convinced that if people valued work for what it is, not for its cash value, this attitudinal change could singlehandedly cause an economic revolution. As for the problem of generating jobs and production in a context of valuing work not money, she recommends voluntarily adopting the relatively frugal stance forced on war-time England and using the resultant funds for the production of great public works. In practice, of course, this approach faces a major hurdle: ‘do we want to...’

Lewis takes a different tack. Conceding that we have to keep producing more than we need in order to keep people in jobs, he cynically applauds the space-race ‘harm-minimisation’ strategy, where powers fabricate ‘costly objects which they then fling overboard’ (p381). While amusing, this flippancy sits ill in our current globalised context, where there are more than enough genuine needs in the world to absorb the excess efficiency and produce of industrialised countries, were only enough people willing and able to convince political and business leaders to do so. Lewis explicitly refrains from advocating this kind of action, but the exhortation he does offer is valuable:

The main practical task for most of us is not to give the Big Men advice about how to end our fatal economy – we have none to give and they wouldn’t listen – but to consider how we can live within it as little hurt and degraded as possible.

It is something even to recognise that it is fatal and insane. Just as the Christian has a great advantage over other men, not by being less fallen than they nor less doomed to live in a fallen world, but by knowing that he is a fallen man in a fallen world; so we shall do better if we remember at every moment what Good Work was and how impossible it has now become for the majority. We may have to earn our living by taking part in the production of objects which are rotten in quality and which, even if they were good in quality, would not be worth producing – the demand or ‘market’ for them having been simply engineered by advertisement. Beside the waters of Babylon – or the assembly belt – we shall still say inwardly, ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning.’ (It will.)

And of course we shall keep our eyes skinned for any chance of escape. If we have any ‘choice of career’ (but has one man in a thousand any such thing?) we shall be after the sane jobs like greyhounds and stick there like limpets. We shall try, if we get the chance, to earn our living by doing well what would be worth doing even if we had not our living to earn. A considerable mortification of our avarice may be necessary. It is usually the insane jobs that lead to big money; they are often also the least laborious. (pp381-2)

By recognising the fallenness of the world, Lewis is able to factor it into his recommended response, and construct a retrieval ethic. Christians should seek and cling to good work—work worth doing—if they are privileged enough to have a choice; and where this is not possible, they should ‘remember at every moment what Good Work’ is, and bear with the evil of work that falls short without affirming it.

Between them, Sayers and Lewis raise a whole host of issues worthy of discussion by Christians in 2010.[7] Some of the issues haven’t changed at all—parts of Sayers’ rhetoric about the unsustainability of the mad cycle of waste and overconsumption we are caught up in could be cut and pasted seamlessly into Prof. Tim Jackson’s 2010 Deakin Lecture on Prosperity without Growth.[8] Others have changed: the complete absence of environmentalism in these discussions is notable, though with hindsight we can see it waiting in the wings. The ethics of planned obsolescence and manipulative advertising were high profile issues for Lewis and Sayers, but today we are so inured to them that we have forgotten how abhorrent they are. (A complaint made to the Department of Fair Trading along the lines that an ad should be removed because it induces people to waste money and resources on poorly made things they don’t need would be laughable!) Lewis’ exhortation to remember that such things are not as they should be is timely, especially when we cannot change them. However, perhaps a middle path could be taken between Sayers’ overly optimistic call to revolution, and Lewis’ resigned attitude to the status quo. We do have a voice, and can use it—together with our skills and wallets—to promote work worth doing, and discourage what is wasteful, pointless, and harmful. While we may not be able to change the whole world this side of Jesus’ return, we can be sufficiently different in our choices about, and attitudes to, work, that people are driven to ask the reason for the hope we have.

Dani Scarratt PhD has a background in philosophy, and is Deputy Director of CASE.

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[1] Reprinted in Letters to a Diminished Church (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2004), pp125-46.

[2] Reprinted in L. Walmsley (ed.), CS Lewis Essay Collection: Father, Christianity and the Church (London: Harper Collins, 2002), pp378-83.

[3] The word ‘work’ is used in many different ways here: as something we do (cooking, waiting tables); or as a product (soup, good service), or as a job (chef, waiter). In this essay, these are all jumbled up together. I haven’t tried to disentangle the different meanings because (i) Lewis and Sayers don’t; and (ii) it isn’t difficult to extrapolate from one to the other.

[4] ‘Good work’ is to be distinguished from ‘good works’. Hence, Lewis: that ‘good works need not be good work’ is obvious to anyone who inspects ‘some of the objects made to be sold at bazaars for charitable purposes’ (p378).

[5] The phrase ‘work worth doing’ covers over a multitude of debates that are not dealt with by our authors.

[6] Although there isn’t space here to address this in depth, it is worth noting that Sayers and Lewis offer different diagnoses as to how this economic situation arose. Sayers lays responsibility in part on human ‘Envy and Avarice’ (p126), and in part on the church for divorcing secular work from religion, the result being that secular work ‘is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends’ (pp138f). Lewis, however, cautions against a ‘glibly moral view of the situation’ (p379), seeing industrialisation instead as a natural—perhaps unavoidable—stage in the development of civilisation (pp379f). These different diagnoses in turn inform the treatments they recommend.

[7] Other issues aren’t raised but need to be: the abuses of ‘good work’ in overwork, competitiveness and perfectionism; and how good work interacts with other priorities—family and friends, rest, church, etc.

[8] The lecture podcast is available at http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2010/2943478.htm. See also Jackson’s book, Prosperity without Growth (London: Earthscan, 2009).