The value of work; woke laptops; and 2 book series to buy
The Value of Working with Your Hands
After having heard the book cited countless times over the last several years, I recently read Shop Class as Soul Craft. As expected, I loved it and agreed with Matthew Crawford’s* broad philosophical claims that our humanity - our creatureliness - is bound up in the ability and opportunity to experience work with our own hands. [Note: there are a few objectionable words and he doesn’t operate from a Christian worldview, but don’t be scared of that. This is a book worth reading and pondering in our anti-human age.]
Five years ago I taught a class to college students on Dorothy L. Sayers, a 20th century British author and intellectual and friend of C.S. Lewis. One of the themes we discussed was the way in which she valued the person-hood of man through work. [In fact, she linked work to the Trinity, but that is another essay for another day.] Sayers expressed concern about maintaining the creative dignity of man in factory settings. Men and women laboring over their fields and homes suddenly transported into urban factories were faced with a bit of an identity crisis. How can the worker see his work, and correspondingly himself, in the same way when he is no longer an artisan but rather one of hundreds cogs in an assembly line? Ms. Sayers had no particular solutions for the existential crisis posed by the shift to manufacturing for vast swaths of the British population - but she urged employers to think about the humans working for them not as machines but as incarnational beings.
How much more is this question valid for today - when we have robotic toys designed to teach children how to cope with the world (here is just one example) and Artificial Intelligence that is hailed at every turn as the only way civilization will continue to advance. Generally speaking, I ignore (and mock) such claims and boldly claim that Ms. Sayers would have as well. We don’t need robotic toys to teach emotional intelligence - that’s what mothers are for. And we don’t need artificial intelligence nearly as much as we need virtuous humans with intelligence (and wisdom).
Back to Shop Class as Soulcraft, here are some of my favorite quotes:
“[Modern society] views human beings as inferior versions of computers.”
“Family bonds give way to social security, which in turn gives way to individual retirement accounts.”
“An instrument is arduous to master and limited in its range, whereas the stereo is undemanding and makes every sort of music instantly available, granting us a kind of musical autonomy.”
“[Living well in this life] means seeking out the cracks where individual agency and the love of knowledge can be realized today, in one’s own life.”
*I enjoyed Shop Class as Soul Craft so much that I promptly bought The World Beyond Your Head by the same author, and quickly realized I am lacking the IQ points to follow his more deeply philosophical works.
Why does it matter?
So why read a book about a philosophy of work? The practical takeaways abound, I promise, especially as it relates to raising children. First off, work is inherently valuable (and spiritual) because it’s a pre-fall ordinance. God told Adam to take dominion over the garden before The Fall, as my children have had emblazoned into their brains since birth. Thus, human work isn’t a result of sin. Work will be part of our life in the new heavens and new earth, in some way that we can’t fully envision yet. Because it’s bound up into our very creatureliness, it’s something to be nurtured from the youngest ages and ought to extend to the oldest ages. Children should be given chores as soon as they can walk; ours began folding washcloths when they were 1, and emptying the dishwasher bottom rack when they could stand and hold a plate. Vacuuming with a hand-held vacuum came not long after, followed by dusting - and of course every toddler delights in stacking books and piling blocks and carrying piles to new, helpful spots. Just jump right in and make up chores for toddlers and preschoolers — they love being told they are contributing to the family; it’s low-hanging fruit and helps lay the foundation for the years ahead when it’s not quite as exciting to go organize the shoe cabinet. If I get a sigh when asking someone to cover someone else’s household chores, my immediate response is generally: “listen, I don’t like a good chunk of the work I have to do every day. But liking it is not the point. I do it anyway because it’s my work and that’s what God tells me to do.” I want adult children who will stick with the hard (and good) things simply because they don’t know any other way of living.
Burrs work hard! is one of our many family mottos. But it’s not just the value of work - it’s also the creative aspect of it that matters for their human flourishing, or we’ll fall right into the assembly line anti-human trap that Sayers wrote about. For our family, prioritizing the outdoors, handiwork, and imaginative play (rather than video games and TV) meant that children readily could occupy themselves without me being forced into the role of Activities Mom; it also meant they could go to Costco with me and stand in line without losing their minds. We’ve also chosen to prioritize the craft of high-level music. There are countless avenues by which to pursue the creative arts which, in my view, ought to be baked into every home in some way; our primary one for the past several years has been music, but your family’s doesn’t have to be. That said, learning the slow, laborious, focused, disciplined efforts of mastering an instrument (or instruments) will build a kind of child who can stick with the slow, laborious, focused discipline required in almost every other important area of adult life. Delayed gratification is built right into the bones of music, but the glorious flip side is that music creates culture and shapes hearts like nothing else.
One more note: even if you’ve given up resisting the demands of the digital/virtual age we live in, deep down you know there is nothing so satisfying as baking your own bread, having the ability to build something out of scrap wood, being able to sew something without frustration, painting the bedroom with your own hands, building the brick mailbox by yourself, harvesting the eggs from your own chickens, decorating your own dining room table with flowers from your own garden, and on and on. The fruit of our hands can be vast, wide, and deeply satisfying; don’t let the zeitgeist of 2022 convince you otherwise.
Woke Laptops
My oldest child is 17 and we have made it this far without needing a phone or a personal computer (because, after all, they’re tools and not toys)….but finally the straw broke the camel’s back and a laptop was needed. She has so much writing to do each week - for her humanities tutorial and her own personal writing projects - such that her own solo device became a fait accompli. So, we recently bought an inexpensive HP laptop. After getting her set up on Word, she began writing a short story and decided to use spell check…and discovered there are several grammar checkpoints as well - including for the category of Inclusivity. It immediately flagged her use of the word “Mrs.” and suggested that she use something else so as not to discriminate or offend. Now she and her siblings are taking great delight in typing in as many objectionable* words as possible in order to find out what Word will flag (which will no doubt land our family in Woke Prison).
*Yes, in 2022, objectionable words are not the ones I used in my youth as a way to buck the system. They are instead things like Mrs., Mr., boy, and girl.
Two Book Series to Buy Today
My three oldest children all adore the novels of Jennifer A. Nielsen: this series was all the rage in our house for months.
For the last couple years, my husband has been reading aloud the various horse books by Marguerite Henry to our 9-year-old for their one-one-one daddy-daughter read-aloud time. I highly recommend dedicating an entire shelf on your bookcase to Marguerite Henry. She is an author you can trust with your child’s imagination, and I can’t give any higher praise than that.
Until next time,
Allison