The Complicity of Jobs

I recently discovered Orion magazine, and while I haven’t yet gotten my hands on a print copy, they’re one of these delightful publications that is extraordinarily generous with their online content. I found them by a link to Wendell Berry’s The Idea of a Local Economy, and anyone who would put a Wendell Berry article online must be kin to Fezziwig.

Since I’ve only perused the current March/April 2007 issue, I can’t give any opinion about the publication as a whole, but I was enormously impressed with a couple articles in this issue. The first, Stalking the Vegetannual, by Barbara Kingsolver, is a wry call to the whole local food thing, as well as an introduction for benighted moderns as to how vegetables actually grow. (Potatoes, for instance, really do have stems and flowers.) By explaining the life cycle of a vegetable, from seed to going to seed, she makes eating local in-season produce seem rather an obvious choice. While praising folks like the Slow Food people for making fresh local food a matter for fun rather than a fight, she’s willing to get into the nitty-gritty of why we ought to choose such delectables over, say, organic peas shipped from China. She passes on the term locavore for those awkward situations when a host needs to be mollified with a sect, such as vegetarian or kosher, rather than an idea. Ideas are offensive, sects are sacred. Said with the proper tone, locavore might even sound like a medical condition.

Really, the only amusing little pest in this garden of wit is the quaint idea that one casualty of our disconnect from nature is an unwillingness to believe in evolution. Historically, at least, it seems the other way round. Despite Darwin’s own expert acquaintance with the natural world, evolution has only become widely popular as larger and larger portions of the populace have been imprisoned in factories, offices, and schools. In my own life, evolution was dealt the mortal blow by the fatal combination of working on a farm and fooling with my computer. Leaving aside any questions of faith, I simply cannot watch a tiny tomato seed transform into a seedling, burst into bloom, and finally hang heavy with bulbous fruits, things of a bizarre beauty that are not only delicous but packed with more tomato seeds—and then listen to evolutionists with a straight face. Varietes, I grant you; our ancestors were master breeders. But they started with tomatoes. No matter who crafted those original plants, the very idea of them happening by a series of fortuitous accidents is even less tenable than that of the famous monkey secretaries typing out, say, a functioning operating system. You needn’t spend too much time tinkering with your computer before you realize that you rest on tier upon tier of extraordinarily intelligent design, swarms of unknown intelligences in a gargantuan symphony of silent cooperation. If you can’t even conceive of your favorite program happening by accident, it seems a wee bit rash to try the theory on the biosphere.

Anyhow, the length of that criticism is disproportionate to my enjoyment of the whole article. But good as it is, it didn’t prepare me for The Idols of Environmentalism, by Curtis White. Listen to this:

The problem for even the best-intentioned environmental activism is that it imagines that it can confront a problem external to itself. Confront the bulldozers. Confront the chainsaws. Confront Monsanto. Fight the power. What the environmental movement is not very good at is acknowledging that something in the very fabric of our daily life is deeply anti-nature as well as anti-human. It inhabits not just bad-guy CEOs at Monsanto and Weyerhaeuser but nearly every working American, environmentalists included.

Wow. He goes further. By limiting ourselves to scientific language, scientific reasons to save the planet, we destroy the concept of reverence for nature. White explicitly hearkens back to religious traditions, Christian dogma, even Thomas Aquinas, finding there a reverence for what is that’s missing today as much from the Sierra Club as from Silicon Valley. So what can we do? Wrong question. What are we doing?

We cannot march forth, confront, and definitively defeat the Monsantos of the world, especially not with science (which, it should go without saying, Monsanto has plenty of). We can, however, look at ourselves and see all of the ways that we conspire against what we imagine to be our own most urgent interests. Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs.

Did you hear that? I added that emphasis, but let’s do it again just in case.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called the visible God: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out. It creates a hole in our sense of ourselves and of this country, and it leaves us with few alternatives but to try to fill that hole with money and the things money buys. We are not free to dismiss money because we fear that we’d disappear, we’d be nothing at all without it. Money is, in the words of Buddhist writer David Loy, the flight from emptiness that makes life empty.

Rather than fumble to add to that, or air my minor caveats, I’ll let you go read the whole article. In the next issue, he’s going to describe an environmentalism built around changing the nature of work. I hope that gets online too.