Religion
Must My Job Be the Primary Source of My Identity?
What question do college students most dread? Perhaps the one they get most often: "So, what are you going to do after you graduate?" Relatives have an irksome way of raising this question repeatedly. Adults of all ages are fre- quently subject to similar, abrupt interrogations about what they do to earn a living. Indeed, social observers have long noticed that in the United States people typically open a conversation with strangers by asking them what they do, a question that seems especially discomfiting to those who are un- employed or working at a job that they do not especially enjoy or respect.
These everyday queries are worth pondering, since they are not com- mon everywhere. People in other countries find it offensive to be asked straight away what they do to earn a living, rather like the way we might feel if people began a conversation with us by asking how much money we make. And even in this country, some people invite others to identify them- selves by asking different questions. What tribe are you from? Tell me about your family, about your place of birth, or about how you came to be where you are now. In other words, there are many other ways in which people here and elsewhere can and do begin to become acquainted with one an- other.
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Q UES TI ONS • ,. Mus t My Job Be rhe Prima ry Source of My Ident ity?
. b ut our actu al or prospective jobs sometimes agi-Why do quesuons a o . . f de
un comfortable by them, 1s this only becau se we are rate us] I we are ma . unsure.about the answer or unhappy with th e one we must give? We would
b bl b embarrassed or irked by quesllons about where we plan to pro a y not e setcl e down eventually or about what kind of car we plan to buy, even if we were not clear about the answers. Many of us are, however, rankled by ques- tions about ou r occupations because we really do believe that the answers to them reveal something vitally important about who we are . Some of us are uncomfo rtabl e about being so quickly self-revealing, whereas others o f us are quite eager to respond because we are proud of what we do and p roud as well of wh at we beli eve this indicates about our overall character and s tand- ing in the world. In this country, for better or for worse, our sense of w ho we are and our sen se of what we do for a living or plan to do for a living are deeply boun d up ,vith one another.
If we think that human beings have always thought of their work as th e most important thing about them , we would be mistaken, however. Such an exalted view of work is itself th e result of complex social and economic pro- cesses that have been most pronounced in Western, capitalist countries over the last three or four hundred years. Professor Gilbert Meilaender, in an an- thology that he edited on the subject of work, showed that many people throughout history have regarded paid employment as merely "necessary for leisure," not as a primary source offulfillment and identity. Many others have regarded their work as, at best, "dignifi ed but irksome. " And for the majority of people around the globe, making a living has involved and still does mvolve work that is "ugly, crippling, and dangerous. " These historical and social realities have ofte n escaped American s who have tended to ele- vate paid employment to a pos ition of premier importance both for individ- uals and for the society as a whole.
The follO\vi ng readings should help us think about why paid employ- ment has become for ·11 · f U 5 • . . , m, 10ns o .. C1t1 2ens, so vitally, even centrally, im- port ant to their se nse of who they are:
• a selection from a b k k . • an essa . 00 on wo r and liberal democracy (Muirhead)
y arguing that we live in ord er ro work (Sayers) • two poems that I b h ·
ce e rare t e importa nce of work (Frost and Piercy).
Readings that fo llow im med iate! af . "What are some oth Y ter these will address the question,
h er so urces of idenft '" Th . . w ether our jobs really h Id b I Y- ey mv1te us to wonder important alternative sos ou thso ce ntral to our identities by proposing
urces o uman mea ning and signifi cance:
QU ES TIO NS ,. Mu st My Job Be rh e Primary Source of My Identity?
, a short story by H. G. Wells • a discussion of Sabbath by Abraham Heschel • two oems by William Wordsworth on nature .
p by Gilbert Meilaender on tensions between vocation and • an essay friendship .
The first two readings help us to see th at having the right kind of job has been of real concern both to those who care about what makes for a healthy Jemocracy and to those who care about what makes for faithful Christian living. From the earliest years of American history, pohttcal hfe was closely tied to economic life. The right to vote, for exa_mple ,_was for a long time restricted to adult , male property owners. This hm1tat1on of the franchise was bas ed upon th e seemingly unshakeable conv1c1_10n ch_at, m or- der to make wise political decisions, one had to be economically indepen- dent, not overly beholden to others for economic security. Holding prop erty not only gave a man a stake in society; it also gave him a measure of free- dom from the demands of others who might use their economic power over him to dictate his political preferences . Economic, social, and political iden- tities were closely linked together in many ways, leading some historians to maintain that economic equality is a precondition for political equality.
The central importance of work in human life is as deeply embedded within Christian and Jewish stories of the beginnings of humankind as it is within secular accounts of the origins and social conditions of democracy. Dorothy Sayers argues that in and through our work we should be express- ing our nature as beings who were created in the image of God. And Sayers is by no means the only religious thinker who suggests that "in the begin- ning" human beings were made to labor and that their labor gave dignity, meaning, and purpose to their lives . Sayers goes farther than most religious thinkers , however, when she insists that we live in order to work. For exam- ple, Abraham Heschel, the great Jewish writer whose work is also excerpted in this chapter, agrees that God intended that we should labor, but he insists that we were finally made for rest , not fo r work.
The poet Robert Frost agrees with Sayers in worrying over whether working primarily for pay does not demean the intrinsic meaning and plea- sure that labor might give to a human life. For the speaker in Frost's poem , working in order to live and living in order to w ork are in tension with one another. The relationship between jobs within a capitalist economy with its "cash nexus" and the place of work within the order th at God intended for hum ankind would seem to be in tension, not in harmony. By contra st, the other poet in th e first group of readings , Marge Piercy, stresses the "useful-
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- Q UES TIONS • 2. Must My Job Be th e Primary Source of My Identity'
ness· of work , a theme that was dear to the heart of such pillars of Ameri- can de mocracy as Benjamin Franklin , whose v~ry deflni~i~n of a life th at mattered was a life of labor that was useful to his fellow ctt1zens and to his coun try.
The great difficulty with all of the views that celebrate work and work- ing men and women , regardless of how different these views may be from one another. was perhaps best summed up in the opening sentence of a chapte r from James Galvin's novel Th e Meadow. "In the Depression a lot of people lost their lives." Galvin wrote, "if your life is what you do." Galvin was right. Unemployment during the Depression brought not only poverty; it also brought despair and suicide. If we live in order to work, we may die if we have no work. If work is all that matters in life, then a life without work might not matter at all.
The second group of readings in this chapter not only suggest that there is more besides work that matters in life; they suggest as well that what should matter most in human life is not work but something else. To lead a life that matters is to attend to these other things - to rest, to the divine, to nature, and to the love of others. The most alluring yet perplexing reading in this group, the short story by H. G. Wells, dramatizes very forcefully a com- plicated sentiment that has been expressed countless times in fiction and fil m, the sense that what really matters in life lies somewhere other than those working places and pursui ts that claim most of our energies. But is this dreamy, recurrent intuition that an elusive "something" actually matters a great deal to us, so much so that our work and our ordinary life should be ~nd~rstood as un fo rtunate distractions, a life-giving insight or a dangerous 1llus1on' That really is the quest ion behind "The Door in the Wall."
Abraha m Heschel 's work on Sabbath does double duty for our pur- poses. Of all the alternative candidat es to work that have served as the pri- mary so~rce of meaning and identity in people's lives, religion is surely fore- mos t. _ Smee even a small sa mpling of the immense variety of religious experience and convict ion would be impossible to offer here one religious meditation on the subJ·ect f k • If d . ' h
o wor 1tse an its proper place in our lives will ave to suffice Any serious 1· • h· k . h· · re igtous t m er would seek to place our jobs
wit ma larger, often trans d f . . H h I d h· . cen ent, ramework of meaning and significance.
esc e oes t is wuh great eloqu H I I ve ry s •r· I . h . en ce. e a so ocates work within a set of pec1 ic ew1s rn uals and . h
P lay and
I b . prac tices I at are designed to honor to dis-
, o re-create asic spirit I h ' ship between labo d b ua trut s about, for example, the relation-
r an rest etween ·•o k God has done for us. Reade r~ do not ur own wa r " and the work that tion in order to ponder wit h him th h~ve to share Heschel's re ligious tradi-
e diffe rences be twee n labor and to il and
Q U EST IO NS • 1 . Mu st My Job Be the Primary Source of My Identity?
the question of whether our leisure should be seen as a way of strengthening us for more work or our work should be seen, in a life that matters, as a way of sustaining us for and pointing us toward larger purposes. .
Perhaps the greatest secular counterpart to religious truth as a pnmary source of meaning and significance in a human life is natural beauty. Many would say that poets like Wordsworth are high priests of the "religion of na- ture." In our contemporary world, this powerful alternative to work as the source of our identity has assumed many forms, ranging from some parts of the environmental movement to a resurgent interest in "nature films" to the burgeoning outdoor recreational industry. Though some of these activities are highly commercialized, most of them appeal to our sense that nature, properly understood and recalled, connects us to something deep and basic about who we are . In other words, like contemplation of the divine, contem- plation of the natural world might be a surer path to the discovery and even to the constitution of our identities than our daily labors. "Getting and spending," as Wordsworth writes, "we lay waste our powers" of feeling and insight that would lead us to a recovery of who we truly are as human be- ings . Those powers are best restored to us, according to some of our wisest and most eloquent writers, in the recollection of natural beauty.
Gilbert Meilaender discusses another love, friendship, which, in addi- tion to the love of God or the love of natural beauty, might serve as a power- ful alternative to our jobs as the primary source of our identities. For Meilaender, as for many of those who have written on the subject before him, friendship includes not on ly our close acquaintances but also our life- long partners, in short , all of those people whom we have chosen to love in a reciprocal way. And he sets up his discussion of friendship, its demands, its pleasures, and its rewards, as often being in some tension with the de- mands, pleasures, and rewards of our jobs or vocations. Thus, he suggests, we cannot really come fully to terms with the proper place of friendship in a life that matters without at the same time coming to terms with the proper place of our jobs, especially if we think of those jobs as vocations.
Paid employment, religious practice, love of the natural world , and friendship, all of them to some extent the sources of our identities, are not in life so neatly compartmentalized as they may seem at first in these readings. As we saw in Part I, we may think of our jobs religiously, as vocations. Or, we may choose to work as a forest ranger because of our love of the natura l world. And we may find our jobs, the natural world, or our religious com- munities all the more formative and life-giving for us because we enjoy them in the company of friends. None of the writers in this section would deny the importance of all of these things in a life that matters; indeed, most
Q UES T IONS • 2. Must My Job Be ,he Pri mary Source of My Iden tity?
of their writings cut ac ross several of these diffe rent sources of mea ning an d
identity. This fl uid character of our lives should discourage us from the kind of
thinking and speaking that al most always follows closely upon the discov- ery that there are sometimes several worthy but competing, even conflict- ing, goods set before us. When face d wit h a ra nge of goods that seem impor- tant co a life that matters, most people insist that we must rank them somehow. Thus, one says, -my fa mily comes first; my job second." And an- other says, -you must establish priorities! Then you will be fine." Some reli- gious counsel seems to fo llow a similar pattern . St. Augustine thought, fo r example. that leading a choice-worthy life depended up on the right order- ing of our loves . Size up, prioritize, and solve. This would seem to be the American way of deciding how to lead a life that matters.
Whe n Aug usti ne advocated the right ordering of our loves, however, he did not mean that we should love God fi rst, friend s second, and jobs third . He mean t instead that, in loving God first, we should come to love every- thing else "in God" who is the source and end of all th e other goods in life. Some secular views of the all-encompass ing importance of jobs have the same fo rm. According to these accoun ts, our jobs not only defin e us more than anything else; they make everyth ing else subservient to them. Families support us, fr iends are usefu l to us , and leisure tim e refreshes us so that we can do our jobs well. Whatever we may co me to think about what matters most i~ a .significa nt li fe, we should probably resist the tempt ation to think about it simply as somet hi ng that we place at the top of a list of unrelated goods, ranked in ?rder of importance . We should instead begin to study the ~omplex con~ecuons among the va rious goods in our li ves, including our JObs .. The rea~1~gs below, contrary to any initial imp ress ions that th ey segre- gate Jobs, rehg1on , nat ural beauty, and fri endship, invite us to consider the several rela tionships among them.
d Tte b_lurring of the bounda ri es between the different goods in our lives an t e discovery that it might no t be possible simply to "prioriti ze" them ~ay seem at first to spare us the need fo r diffic ult thinking and difficult c oices. But on second thought d'l ·f , our I emmas might only become more acute i we come to think that II f h how equall . . . a o t ese goods are of a piece or are some-
y important m a hfe tha t matte F h limited choices abo ut h h rs . or one I ing, most of us have our jobs. And as we h ow muc of ~u r time and energy we will devote to
· ave seen we li ve · I h po~tance to our jobs as the so~rces of m cu t.ure t at gives pr'.mary im- claim upon us and seek
1 1 . our idenut y. If we deny this cultural
h O 1ve some othe r w •11 b I e grain." And this may p d'ffi ay, we w1 e doing so "against
rove ' ,cult both prac tically and psychologically,
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QUE STI O NS • 2. Must My Job Be the Primary Source of My Ide ntity?
robbing some of th e goods that we seek of their potential to nourish us. For anot her thing, even if we were to sort out for oursel ves the relative impor- tance of our job, our religious prac tice, our rec reation, and our fri endships, and then be able to live in accordance with our preferences, we might still wo nder whether our life really "mauers" to anyone but ourselves. The nag- ging question of th e relationship between meaning and significance may grow even more perplexing: To whom should a life that matters really matter?
The discovery that what we do fo r a living need not completely deter- mine who we are does not take place in an economic and cultural vacuum . We simply cannot evade for very long the widespread sense that the ques- tion of what it means to lead a li fe that matters should at least begi n with th e question of our livelihoods. Coming to understand why this is so is not th e same thing, however, as co ming to a conviction that it should be. In creasing attentiveness to other sources of identity has led, especially among yo ung adults, to two different projects. One project is the one undertaken in this present chapter, namely an effort to challenge the prevailing ideology of work even as we ac knowledge its power and even to so me ex tent its co- gency. The other proj ect, explored in the next chapter, is th e quest for a "bal- anced life ," for one th at can in som e sense make room for the sources of meaning and identity examined below and for some others as well.