Labor and Property

A robust understanding of the relationship between labor and property can be developed from the concepts of order and authority. In this way, we can avoid the nebulous attribution of "value".

A man, by his labor, incorporates something into an order: i.e. it is reordered to some good that is extrinsic to it; the laborer's work is given a new or deepened participation in the order of man, as it were.

The man, whose reason and will has moved it into a more noble participation, assumes authority over it. In a sense, the laborer is a lawgiver over his work. We should here avoid such misattributions as "legitimacy" or "sovereignty". The laborer has authority over his work insofar as it does not contradict with the order in which he himself is a part.

With such an approach to labor, we can honor P. Leo XIII's judgment on the relation of labor and property; viz. that man has the right to property by virtue of reason through labor.

We may also maintain St. Thomas' position; viz. that common property is by natural law granted to man to furnish the necessities of life, and private property is a matter of positive law. Positive law builds, as it were, on the natural law; human authority maintains the order of society (a perfectly natural thing) by promulgating among his subjects ordinances of reason for their common good. Labor begins as an ordinance of reason, and is carried out as obedience to that ordinance.

It is not appropriate to consider labor separately from that for which labor is accomplished; labor is immediately undertaken for the sake of the social order of the family, and ultimately for the good of the state. Here, too, various extremes may be avoided: The order of the state ought not to be contradicted by so-called "private" interests, yet without the household dimension, (most) labor becomes inordinate by reason of proportion to its end.

Because labor is bound up with order, and property is that over which one has authority by virtue of his labor, not all activities which serve to accumulate possessions are labor, properly speaking; and not all possessions are property. For example, theft, extortion, and usury are intrinsically disordered activities: possessions obtained unjustly are not proper to those who hold them, as opposed to the things a man might get through, say, farming poorly (a disordered, but intrinsically good activity).

Labor, Sloth, and Depression

The most misunderstood vice of our time is probably sloth. But to correctly understand sloth, one must first understand what a vice is. Quite simply, a vice is a bad habit, trained by repeated sin and inclining one to sin more. But a key element of every vice is a disordered passion. Our passions are good when properly ordered, but they multiply evils when disordered. Thus most vices can be defined according to specific passions. For example, fear is a useful passion that helps us avoid evil, but fear that causes more evil than it avoids means cowardice. Anger is a healthy response to confront evil, but anger that causes more evil than it battles is called wrath. Joy is felt when some good is possessed, but joy in response to evil is a sign of hatred.

It is vitally important to understand this distinction; that vice is a condition which manifests itself in the passions, but sin is a specific action. They are closely connected: Sin comes from vice, and vice is fostered by sin. For example, a man who eats too much does so because he is infected with gluttony; and every time the man eats too much, he becomes more gluttonous. But to say that a man is a glutton is only to say that he is inclined to eat too much. Knowing of his gluttony does not necessarily imply knowledge about his particular sins, past or present.

So then, which disordered passion amounts to sloth? Sorrow. St. Thomas defines sloth for us as follows:

“Sloth, according to Damascene (De Fide Orth. ii, 14) is an oppressive sorrow, which, to wit, so weighs upon man's mind, that he wants to do nothing... Hence sloth implies a certain weariness of work... Accordingly, [sloth] denotes sorrow for spiritual good...” (ST II.II, q. 35, a. 1)

Note that sloth implies a weariness of work, but that is only an effect. The essence of sloth is sorrow, specifically sorrow in response to good. A healthy sorrow is the response to an evil that cannot be avoided, which is the same as the loss of some good. When evil is first encountered, we may react with anger (in an attempt to remove the evil) or fear (in an attempt to escape it). If either fails, we are confronted with an insurmountable or inescapable evil, and we become sorrowful. Because anger or fear usually precedes sadness, both wrath and cowardice can lead to sloth (cf. Evagrios, “Praktikos,” 10).

Sloth is also called “acedia.” Acedia literally means “having no enemy” and the sense behind this meaning should be clear from what we now know. If sloth is an oppressive sorrow for good, then there is nothing left to be done in the face of evil: Neither good nor evil makes a difference. Cowardice reinforces sloth, because it keeps one at a distance from anything that might stir his soul to action. Likewise, wrath, far from being the antipathy to cowardice, is a companion to both cowardice and sloth. Wrath is an overreaction to evil and even mistakes the good for something to be despised and resisted. Often the man who spends much of his effort avoiding difficulty, forgoing many good things as a result, will become overwhelmed with passion if he finds himself cornered by it. Hence the coward may resort to wrath, and the wrathful coward is likely to be slothful, because he is so strongly moved away from anything in which he might find joy.

The effect of sloth is not always weariness for labor. Today, it is often the case that one labors too much rather than laboring too little. Laboring too much is a sign of vice because labor's purpose is to make leisure possible. If we labor to the exclusion of leisure then we are fostering sloth, because we are shrinking away from the good and are not working as we ought.

Because sloth is a disordered sorrow, it is often mistaken for “depression,” a physiological disorder. This confusion is partly due to the fact that vice generally evokes disapproval, whereas sorrow arouses pity; so a vice manifested in disordinate sorrow is unlikely to be considered a vice at all, especially by those without a sound moral formation. One who is misled into thinking that he is “depressed” would do well to make a concerted effort at cultivating the virtues opposed to sloth, and note whether his depression begins to subside.

The opposite of sloth is zeal, which is an intense love and devotion to the good. And zeal is accompanied by courage (the opposite of cowardice) which endures suffering for the sake of the good. He who has true zeal does not labor as much as he can; he labors as much as he needs to serve God and his neighbor. Likewise, courage does not suffer the pains of labor for their own sake, but for the sake of laboring well and attaining the good.

The virtues are not aimed at merely any good that one happens to notice. They are ordered in a heirarchy of goods, and ultimately at God,Who is Goodness itself. Thus all activities must be guarded by virtue according to their proper order: Pleasure and entertainment for the sake of labor, labor for the sake of leisure, and leisure for the glory of God.

Let us pray to God in the words of St. John Cassian, that He may stir up in us a feiry zeal, and that our souls, “which had been occupied by a sorrow that works death, will be taken by a godly sorrow and one full of joy. That which had been wasted by acedia, will at once be tilled by courage.” (Conferences V.23)

Labor and Technology

The most striking aspect of labor today is its relationship to technology. Technology is generally understood as the application or utilization of knowledge for practical ends. In a sense, technology is to labor what the liberal arts are to leisure. Because labor requires intelligence, it is near impossible even to think of a task of labor today which does not involve some technology, be it primitive or cutting-edge. But here I contend that technology can only be called good in the same sense that labor is called good. That is, it must be humane and ordered to its proper ends. As labor must be consciously performed for the sake of preserving man's physical nature (and by extension, the rest of creation) and disposing him for leisure-work, so technology must be consciously applied for the sake of aiding this good work. Thus, when technology hinders man's leisure (such as the worship of God), corrupts his physical nature, or distorts the order of creation in some way, it is not good and useful, but evil and destructive.

Martin Heidegger argued that there is a problem with modern technology, specifically in the relation between its application and the knowledge required to apply it. That is, the application of technology does not in itself have anything to do with the knowledge that made it possible. This can be easily observed in modern society: Always and everywhere, people make use of things whose inner workings are beyond their comprehension. And the more they make use of these things and become attached to them, the more estranged they become from reality. This is because, as Heidegger explained, technology's application determines how people understand reality. What a thing is, through its continued exploitation, becomes obscured by fixating on how it can be exploited. In this way, a thing's “usefulness” eclipses one's understanding and appreciation of the thing itself. This creates a peculiar moral predicament. As Heidegger puts it, “so long as we represent technology as a [mere] instrument, we remain held fast in the will to master it.” (17)

This insight into technology is related to a concept proposed by Marshal McLuhan. He argued that, as humanity progresses in technology, the modes of communication (i.e. media) change with it. Because our knowledge of the world is vastly dependent on communication, a change of media creates a change in how we approach and understand the world. Simply put, we perceive the world through media; so as media change, so changes the world (or so it seems). We can extrapolate from this idea another moral insight: As we use technology, we are forced to compete with it, in a sense. Our exploitation of creation is, in a word, reflexive: As we impose our own purposes on the world, we become increasingly confined by those same purposes, even in the manner in which we think about the world. For example, in a society where automobile travel is prevalent, distance is measured in minutes and everything between one's location and his destination is irrelevant. The auto-driver does not have a clear concept of space or direction; he is only concerned with duration and obstacles.

Considering this drastic effect technology has on our minds, it is easy to see what Baudrillard meant by “hyper-reality.” Modern man is generally not concerned with reality as such, but only the reality that is available to him; the sphere of action and information in which he lives. Whether the sun has risen is completely irrelevant to him; He rises at six o'clock am, Eastern Standard Time. He knows it is six o'clock because his computer screen has told him so. To him, the day has begun, solar and sidereal events be damned.

We now see the link between modernity's technological marvels and its moral distortions. Man has become so skilled at manipulating creation that he no longer comprehends creation, and without this comprehension, he no longer has a reason to manipulate it. Man's continued manipulation of creation is apparently driven by his unabashed desire alone, but this desire is not by any means “free”: It is informed by the world as he experiences it and this world is none other than the one shaped by his very manipulation. Of course this is not the result of inescapable material causes, but of imprudence and greed. We should have been asking ourselves at every avenue whether we are accomplishing the Thomistic ideal of art-perfecting-nature. Instead we have rather the inverse, the violent imposition of nature-becoming-art, or so it seems. Absurd!

Indeed every misapplication of technology both reveals a misunderstanding of nature and further obscures it. For instance, Heidegger asserts that a fixation on the use of something strengthens the will to master it; and we see the worst of this in making use of other human beings. One of the perennial criticisms of Capitalism is the exploitation of workers and, even in a society that condemns chattel slavery, we see a prevailing conflict of interests between disparate classes of people; most notably between those who use people and exert dominance over them, and those who are used and dominated. But on both sides of the class-conflict, whether they are aware of it or not, the working class looks to the owning class as conduits for “job-creation” or a “tax-base” and the owning class look to the working class as employees, consumers, and voters. Another example can be seen in the corruption of medicine: Doctors willingly kill and mame according to the whims of their patients. The integrity of the body is often seen not as a sign of good health, but as an obstacle to its exploitation, in an overt form of hedonism prevalent among those who objectify even themselves. One's body is seen as a tool to accompish some degree of pleasure or as a vehicle, rather than as a part of oneself, to be perfected and preserved. Even in the use of contraceptives, one is in conflict with her own body, demanding service in the form of pleasure but denying the outcome which her body is striving for.

The remedy to this state of affairs is not necessarily Ludditic. We must simply strive to be aware of the purpose of our labor. We must ensure that the technology we employ assists labor in its goal of serving us, rather than allow ourselves to become the tools that serve labor. This entails breaking out of the “hyper-reality” which we have created and imposed on ourselves. And when we are once again conscious of our nature and our purpose, we must be willing to do what is necessary to prevent the very work of our hands from becoming our masters.

Labor and the Human Person

Labor is not without reason and purpose. It is what St. Thomas Aquinas calls a human act. It requires conscious deliberation and is therefore a moral action. We do not labor unthinkingly, but with the intention of achieving a clear purpose: The laborer plans and makes predictions, designs and builds, troubleshoots and solves problems; in short, labor requires intelligence. This purpose, of course, is necessity. We must eat and sleep, we must stay reasonably warm and dry, we must guard against injury and disease, etc. Labor is first and foremost what man does to achieve these ends, which are the necessary prerequisites for life. In short, man labors because he has a body.

Because labor requires intelligence and is primarily for the sake of his material body, it is a peculiarly human activity; That is, he who labors is human. Furthermore, because the level of intelligence and particular intellectual gifts vary from person to person, a great deal of one's personality is manifested in his labor. Not only does each particular person approach his tasks according to his particular gifts and temperament, but the intrinsic personality of labor can be observed even in the mastery of particular crafts and disciplines: The greater the perfection of a given work, the greater its style and uniqueness. Labor is therefore not only peculiarly human, but peculiarly personal.

Unfortunately, modern labor is not only marked by a detachment from creation, but a detachment from humanity and from the human person. The modern norm has each person primarily pursue not a specific task or trade for the sake of a specific necessity, but a career (whatever it may be) for the sake of currency (the exchange commodity). This shift in labor's purpose has been adequately expounded elsewhere, but at present it is enough to note the divorce between labor and its purpose. Whether one is a pipe-fitter, a carpenter, an insurance adjuster, or a corporate accountant, the primary purpose of his labor is to make money; for without money, his material needs cannot be met. This detachment of course is only partial, as there is still a relation, albeit obscure, between his labor and his material needs. Beyond the mere fulfillment of these needs, however, there is a further obscurity of modern labor: As money is the reward of labor, so is money the means by which persons procure their material needs from others. As labor is vitally important for man's life and involves not only his relation to the world but to other persons, so has money not only become the bridge between labor and material needs, but between persons as well. The farmer need not know the persons for whom he grows his corn, and the person who buys his corn is incidental to the amount for which he buys it.

In addition to obscuring these relationships, the immediate purpose of money is quantification. Money is only useful insofar as it is countable. Whatever is exchanged for money likewise becomes quantifiable. No longer does a man expect the just reward of his labor to be precisely what he has wrought. Rather, he is compensated, while he is immediately divorced from the product of his work. Monetized labor is only useful insofar as it is countable. And so, as the laborer has been detached from his work, which is rendered replaceable, the laborer is rendered replaceable. Labor is no longer imbued with personality because labor is no longer personal.

What is, therefore, a quintessentially human activity has become absurd, because it has become inhuman.

Labor and Leisure

In his famous work, Leisure; the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper diagnoses the modern decline of culture, noting that we find ourselves in pursuit of labor for its own sake. That is, modern man tends to see labor as his highest calling. Of all things, production is the measure of man. This can hardly be considered hyperbole today, when “successful” signifies “having made a lot of money” and a man's “worth” is expressed in an exact dollar amount. When someone asks, “what do you do,” the expected answer involves the principle means by which you secure an income. The “big guy,” as opposed to the “little guy,” is the one who has much more money; especially one who controls the economic viability of the little guy. And “the man” is the one who controls and seeks to control, sometimes insidiously but usually overtly, every aspect of your life; “to keep you down” by employment, taxation, or inflation. We seem to find ourselves in a world in which material wealth is the only value to speak of.

There is a reason that leisure (and with it, culture) is still on the decline today. Pieper seems to point to a competition between leisure and labor. Leisure, as he explained, is not entertainment or “free time.” It takes work, and is the activity that gives content to culture. Michelangelo, Mozart, and Shakespeare all produced an immense amount of work. Yet they are remembered not for how much wealth they had, but for how much they contributed to culture. They were concerned with leisure-work. This is distinct from labor, which is how we put food in our mouths, keep a roof over our heads, stay dry, etc. Labor is necessary for survival, but leisure-work is no less difficult or important. In fact, leisure-work is more important than labor, because survival is small, temporary, and mean, but leisure aims at eternity. Leisure, he says, is nothing less than man's affirmation of creation; his echo of God's own evaluation on the first Sabbath, saying, “it is very good.” Leisure involves a kind of instinct toward the divine, and we find its utmost expression in the worship of God.

Though distinct, the difference between leisure and labor is not absolute. A man's labor is a response to the world as he sees it. He needs to eat and he needs to keep his family warm, safe, and dry. How one fulfills these needs depends entirely on his surroundings: Does he live on an island, on a plain, in a jungle? Is it hot, cold, or seasonal? What kinds of animals can he eat? What kinds of animals would eat him? A desert nomad might know all about herding, but nothing of fishing. A man in Russia will fear winter, while a man in the Amazon will fear leopards. As man's labor is a response to his environment and shapes the way he understands the world, so is his leisure shaped by this experience. It is no puzzle that the pagan mythology of Scandinavia is desperate and warlike, while the mythology of ancient Egypt is fair and optimistic.

It is therefore apparent that there can never be a simple competition between leisure and labor. Labor is done not for survival alone (for that would be a hopeless paradox) but for the sake of leisure, and leisure is informed by labor. A drastic change in leisure, then, is probably the result of a change in labor. As labor changes, so changes leisure, and thus culture. And this is the key to understanding why labor in the modern era seems to upstage and even replace the pursuit of leisure altogether. Modern labor has nothing to do with a man's location or environment. It is often monotonous, unseasonable, impersonal, isolating, dull, and almost completely divorced from all other aspects of his life, save that of the shared measure and master of his activity which is the arbitrary quantification of his time and effort – money. Factories in Russia look strikingly similar to factories in Germany. Offices in the Unites States are indistinguishable from offices in Brazil. If a man can drive a taxi in Saudi Arabia, he can drive a taxi in London. Not only does labor become more homogeneous across the globe, but the purpose of labor has already been reduced to one totemic fixation – money. Thus the apparent dissolution of culture, relegating all “authentic” tradition to history because it has become absolutely foreign to current life.

But even modern labor, perhaps, still informs “leisure” in a way. Consider that most men today consider “leisure” to be synonymous with “entertainment” or “free time” (i.e. time that is presumably free of obligation – an interesting notion). This is itself a strong indication of the effects of modern labor on what one might call “modern culture.” We have cheapened leisure, assigning it a place beside the sitcom and the chain restaurant. Another indication is that what little culture there is to speak of is more accurately ascribed to the realm of labor and production rather than to that of leisure. For example, one might consider football to be a prime example of American culture, and the watching of football has become a multi-billion dollar industry. I need not speak of the arts (especially music and film) or even the celebration of holidays (most of which are all but lost).

Pieper's insight into leisure is valuable, but the “world of total work” as he called it, is not simply a world of work prized for its own sake above all else. It is a world which has been working like mad to distance itself from creation and therefore from its Creator. We have not merely come to estrange the Sabbath. We have estranged God's entire work.