What If Work Were Personal, Local, and Communal?

Last month, I made the point that making a better world requires people with virtues that the world demands, and that the Church is meant to be this type of community.

It’s important to keep in mind that the Church is the center of God’s new world, as we turn to some of the Catholic Worker’s main critiques of our society. With critique, it is easy to start thinking mainly in terms of institutional reform, politics, advocacy, and the like. But being the Church is the primary way that we make a just world. The Worker’s trenchant social critiques are made in the service of identifying forms of life that make it difficult to be that alternative community.

One place to begin these critiques is where Catholic social teaching itself began, in the fundamental changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution. I am no medieval romantic, and I’m thankful for many modern inventions. But it remains simply a fact that there has never been a more momentous change, probably in the history of the world, than the transition to the industrial society that we have experienced in the last 250 years. Writer Wendell Berry calls it “the one truly revolutionary revolution, probably in the history of the human race.”

One of the most vital aspects of this change concerns the nature of work. In a pre-industrial world — a land-and-craft society — most people were either farmers or tradesmen, work was personal, and it made life personal. You literally made or raised your own house, furniture, fields, food, animals, and the rest — or at least your friends or someone you knew did. This meant that you literally lived surrounded by your own creative work, or that of your family and community. Your life’s efforts were reflected to you in very tangible ways — you were touching, seeing, smelling and tasting it all the time.

Life was maximally personal, and so maximally satisfying.  It was also profoundly communal.

I recently met a man who had given up working in finance and has now become the butcher in a town of small farmers. He remarked on the palpable difference in working for people who you are good friends with. The job takes on a completely different character, for not only are you accomplishing a task, but you are also working within friendships. You are, therefore, creating the bonds of a strong local community and a healthy local economy at the same time.

I have often heard from those who grew up on farms around St. Paul 50 or 75 years ago that life was cooperative. Each season, farmers would help each other: breaking ground or planting in the spring; harvesting in fall; building a barn in the summer; haying, slaughtering, or any number of other jobs that are close to impossible to do solo. Often, tools were owned by one household but used by the whole community. Songs, stories, best practices and traditions were passed on while working. And it was not just work; the day’s meals were served by the family being helped.

There was a unity to life brought about by its rootedness in the soil. Tradition and history were essential, because how to make a living out of the earth was a local matter passed down anew to each generation — you couldn’t learn it from a textbook. Much of what we now call education and morality was simply part of living in that environment. Work was both art and entertainment, and this made a local culture. Religion, then, was not a separate compartment of life, as it is today, but that aspect of the whole that grounded it in its source and directed it to its summit.

Work under such conditions is not just a job; it’s a vocation. To live is to work, and to work is to live.

Next month, we’ll see how all this starts to change with the advent of industrialism.

Cover photo: A communal barn-raising in Ontario, Canada, in the early 20th century. Wikimedia Commons.

This essay originally appeared in The Catholic Spirit, newspaper of the Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.