Flee to the Fields, Part 6: We are men, not minders of machines

 This is the sixth in a series of reflections on Flee to the Fields, the founding papers of the Catholic Land Movement....

(Part 1: Why farming is not a business; Part 2: The case for subsistence farming; Part 3: Subsistence farming as safeguarder of the soil (and of everything else); Part 4: It takes a farm to raise a village; Part 5: The small economy as protector of human dignity; Part 5.2: Additional thoughts on the small economy)

"Man is an organic whole, soul and body, a unity of the rational and animal, and all his actions must conform to this unity. There must be correspondence between what happens on the one plane to what happens on the other. As with the individual so with Society. The nature of man, his function, the reason for his existence, was to love and worship God. Insofar as he confirms to his nature so he will be happy. The means whereby he conforms to his nature is his work. ~ George Maxwell

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As a culture, we have an odd relationship with manual labor. On the one hand, many people will look reverently at an old man's calloused hands, recognizing in them dedication and hard work. Older folks will talk about how things were "back in the old days." Maybe it's because my own generation is aging that some of my friends on social media share memes that picture grizzled old farmers by their tractors and Depression-era grandmothers posing by their winter supply of canned goods.

There is a clearly a nostalgia for "old ways." We instinctively feel that things were different when people actually sweated and developed callouses when they worked. Tough conditions lead to strong work ethic and better character formation. Instinctively we yearn for this in our own children and lament its lack in other people's children. Many of us develop hobbies seem to be an attempt to fill the gap in our own formation. We do a little canning when it'd be easier to buy canned goods from the store, we build a garden shed with our own hands when it'd be easier to purchase it pre-fabricated from the local Lowes.

And yet, we can't imagine actually doing manual labor for a living, at least not if we could be doing something else. As a hobby it's fine, but as a means of earning one's daily bread... that's another matter entirely. Manuel labor is a drudgery, the same repetitive motion over and over. It is physically demanding, wearing dangerously on the body and the joints. It is associated with an hourly wage, with borderline poverty, and with migrant workers who don't have any better options.

Ironically, many of the older folks who talk about how much better people's characters were "back in the day" are the same folks who, through the hard work of their own hands, put their children through college so that they could avoid this kind of menial drudgery. In an earlier post I already wrote about how they enabled the flight to the cities and the construction of the supposed urban utopia where today many people are experiencing feelings of ennui, broken family life, and the very economic instability that the college degree was supposed to be insurance against.

George Maxwell would have it that the problem isn't manual labor itself, but an economic system that transforms hand labor into drudgery. He argues that mechanization robs manual labor of "intellectual satisfaction." Factory work, he writes, is "mainly mechanical and exercises physical dexterity only. Although in many cases an extraordinary quickness of hands is seen, little or no intelligence is called for, and it may be said that they are helpless except at their own job. Work is regarded as an unmixed evil, even a degradation, to be avoided if possible.

Rosemary teases me because sometimes on these long winter evenings I'll watch farming clips on YouTube. But I was really taken the other night by some clips of vegetable harvesting and sorting on a European mega-farm. There were workers whose sole task was to stand at a station for hours and grade the produce. With a dexterous flick of the hand the worker would cast the lower quality product off of the belt, which moved at a steady, inexorable clip.

Since Europe seems to be ahead of the United States with respect to worker rights, it wouldn't surprise me if these assembly line laborers make the equivalent of far more than $15/hour and are able to support their families. They probably can use the bathroom regularly, and they almost certainly get scheduled fifteen-minute breaks every few hours and a half an hour for lunch. These are all small victories of a sort for the modern labor movement. Yet I argue that in the end they are but Pyrrhic victories. In Maxwell's words about factory work, "It is natural that a worker should seek an increase of wages and shorter hours. The character of their labor being such as can give no satisfaction in itself, every effort is made to reduce the amount of it."

In other words, the focus of the modern labor movement -- labor unions, laws to improve working conditions, even the recent push to raise the minimum wage to $15/hour -- all fail to address the real problem of our modern modus vivendi: the very nature of industrial, mechanized labor. To be clear, I'm not talking just about assembly lines in factories and migrant workers bent over rows of crops and harvesting in the same position for hours on end. I'm making the argument that many white collar office jobs are just as demeaning, just as undignified: making the same sales pitch with the same fakey smile and same lilt of the voice hour after hour, entering data into the same formulaic boxes in form after form. It's all repetition and drudgery; it all exercises one small set of muscles, whether they be mental muscles or bodily ones. If anything, in fact, the white collar work is far worse because it fully occupies the mind with drudgery while trapping the body in idleness.

Maxwell's essay in Flee to the Fields actually concerns not so much farming as the restoration of the crafts. He argues that while vastly more quantity of product -- furniture, clothing, etc. -- can be churned more efficiently and more cheaply in a factory setting, the practice is robbing us of our humanity. Is it worth it? he asks. Labor is the way that we give glory to God. When labor does not employ the whole man -- body and soul -- man is robbed of his means to live as man. So he copes by doing the bare minimum of the soul-less work that he needs to in order to eat and keep himself clothed. But he dissipates the rest of his virility in distractions.

In this context, supposed work-life balance is born. We keep our grasp on sanity -- barely -- by being able to turn off the work phone and concentrating on what "really matters." In the best of situations this is family life, volunteer work, and a healthy set of hobbies that allow a man some fulcrum in which to exercise his true creative energies. In the worst instances it's man-caves, sports obsessions, and Netflix binges. While we may think that work-life balance is normal, I'd argue that it's more like living off of an oxygen tank in a roomful of noxious air when one could instead open the door and step outside to breathe fully and deeply.

Not everybody is called to be a small-time farmer. But I am truly grateful for this way of life that frees me to love and worship God through the work of my hands. The drudgeries of hoeing, weeding, and harvesting are normal human drudgeries, and to avoid them is to fail to discipline and subdue the body. These drudgeries are repetitive, but the changes in weather and the cycling of the seasons are gifts from God that keep the drudgery in check. I may work hard to hoe a field of squash for a few days straight. But then it rains and becomes too wet, and I'm free to change things up by choosing another task. I may work an eighteen hour day cleaning produce after receiving a purchase order during harvest season. But then the frosts of fall put an end to produce, and I can concentrate on putting away wood to keep us warn through the winter.

Now, here in the winter months I am freer to reflect on what worked last season and what didn't, and I spend time resolving to tweak things and try different methods. I'm always reading and learning something new, and I'm free to experiment and implement because I'm working my own land under my own rules and at my own pace. My only time clock is provided by God in the hours of sunlight for work and the hours of darkness that he grants for rest. My only pressing obligation is the responsibility that I've freely taken on to provide for a wife and to work collaboratively with her to nurture, raise, and educate our children.

Within this context, working with our hands is good for us. Our instinctive respect for the callouses on an old man's hands is evidence enough that this is true. Yet our revulsion at manual labor is also an understandable reaction within the context of our industrialized modern society, because such labor fails to employ the whole man. Instead it becomes a robber of man's dignity, for we are men, not minders of machines.