Weddings and Wrong Choices

by Ragan Sutterfield

I was recently at a wedding that was, as weddings often are, the reunion of old friends. Afterwards, a few of these friends and I got around to discussing our feelings about the marriage. The conversation was, surprisingly, one of concern–concern for the choices our friend was making and for the kind of life that he was moving toward. That life was domestic and simple. Having decided against earlier plans for graduate school, he had decided to work instead as a house-framer, an occupation he had come to love over several summers of work. He and his wife were to live on two acres in a rural community and hoped to create a good home economy which produced some of its own food. Moreover, both were open to the possibility of children in their marriage–meaning that they were not interested in the expense and effort required to technologically exclude them.

Four Soils by Jim Janknegt

I could not have been happier at the choices the new couple were making. I felt that they were better suited to rural living than to life in the academy, and I felt that at its base it was a good life, one concerned with justice and responsibility toward neighbors. Yet I was the only one among my companions who felt this way. The rest feared that the couple was making a mistake; that the groom was throwing away his talent and intelligence, not to mention his “education.” Such criticisms are examples of a quiet and pervasive prejudice that animates our age and economy–a prejudice that legitimizes our economy of violence and keep us ultimately from an economy of Good.

The first result of this prejudice among my friends was their aversion to family. They could not understand why someone would so entangle themselves. It was not that they were against marriage. They could understand the idea of marrying some loved one. What they could not understand was the idea of marrying and allowing oneself to be “tied down” with children.

Children, undoubtedly, often keep one from doing what one may want to do. With children, travel is limited and more complex. Schedules become more regular and less spontaneous. Time and attention must be concentrated on activities outside of our list of wants and goals. Children interrupt the ideal modern marriage in which both partners want the same things and share the same goals. In short, children inevitably break the modern ideal of shared selfishness.

That the groom’s critics were implicitly aware of these facts was obvious. What is no longer so obvious is the assumption that selfishness is a vice. On the contrary, advertisers have done a good job of turning it into a near virtue, a momentary good against our otherwise complete altruism: “Do something good for yourself today, you deserve it.” Yet if any ethic is to have success it must begin with the understanding that there are people other than oneself; this is the first step that must precede the real ethic of treating others as oneself.

Children not only offer a break from narcissism but are also instructors in care. It is commonplace for people who once lived risky lives to change when they have children. By excluding children from both married and societal life, our culture has indefinitely prolonged our ability to act irresponsibly in the pursuit of our desires. Children make one think not only of the future, but also give a sense of purpose beyond personal goals. A culture that welcomed children would be less destructive to both the social and natural worlds simply because the focus would be turned, even slightly, from our selfishness. Children remind us of our dependence and thus of our own responsibility to those who came before us and those who come after us. The young and old demand our care, and the disabled require it. And for each demand our personal freedom is limited. The dependent “tie us down,” they “trap us.” And ever since Rousseau the temptation of liberalism has been to leave the epileptic in the street–to remove the limit and forget about it. If we cannot completely remove a limit (as in abortion) then we give it to an institution that can absorb it (as in childcare). The result is an unbounded person, free to move from place to place and buy without limit on abstract credit. And while limits will eventually impose themselves on us, we continue to view them as “problems” that must be mitigated rather than the very possibility of community.

Of further concern to the groom’s critics was the fact that it appeared his education would be wasted; that it would not be put “to use.” But in what sense can education be used? Is it not the same as saying that love should be used or hope should be used? Education can be used no more than the sun can be “used” by a plant in its growth. The sun is a natural and integral part of the flourishing of a plant. It is not “used” to grow a plant–it is not imaginable that a plant could flourish without it. It is the same with human flourishing. Education is as essential as the sun. It may be formal or it may be informal, either way it is essential. Education is not money; a commodity that can be exchanged in the market place. Education is an integral part of life–it is an aspect of being human. To demand that education be used is on par with demanding that people be used, and that demand is not uncommon in our age.

“Using” education seems, from the way people talk about it, to have something to do with working in an institution such as the government, or the academy or, perhaps, a corporation. That our friend had decided to put his gifted mind to work in building a good home economy was seen as an abdication of this goal. Society wasn’t getting its expected return on its “investment” in his education. If instead he was putting his intelligence to work helping the Tyrell Corporation make more money or helping the government become a more efficient bureaucracy or in the academy, I think there would have been no complaint. But to willingly commit to becoming a skilled craftsman–one interested in the intricacies of house-framing and in how good or bad buildings, good or bad architecture, might affect a place–was nearly incomprehensible.

That we value the institutional mind over the integrated one is a symptom of our diseased society. In placing our values thus, we go against the ancient traditions that thought of value in terms of necessity. Thus in Confucian thought, farmers were considered to be more important than merchants because they are more basic. A society can do without merchants, but it cannot do without farmers. In the same way Plato, in his dialogue The Laws, gives farming an elevated place that belongs to citizens, while retailing and mercantile work is given over to resident aliens. The opposite is true in our society: resident aliens do most of our agricultural work (which is considered beneath most citizens) while citizens vie for mercantile work. Someone who wants to do the basic work of farming or house-framing is now thought to lack ambition or skill. Such a choice is not “professional” in the sense that it does not submit to the values of the market. I would suggest, however, that we could learn much from an older view of profession which measures work in terms of real value, calling, and contribution, not according to market value.

A true sense of profession is rarely found without community and thus, necessarily, place. My friend’s choice to become a house framer was, I think, motivated largely by the fact that he was already initiated into a placed practice. Over several summers of work with an old order Mennonite house-framing crew, he had become attached to the particular practice of that crew. The crew dressed in plain clothes and worked as a community. In many ways the crew was a guild–a group guided by a common pattern of practice and motivated by a sense of work that was not based on merely abstract value. There was a sense of excellence in the work and a belief that certain virtues could be gained by working well.

The market’s exclusive reliance on utilitarian virtues is, in fact, a de-professionalization of work. The “professional” institutions in which most “educated” people work maintain regularity and functionality not through internalized skill or a “giftedness” of work, but rather through an external policing of standards. Such standards must be maintained because those carrying out the work are interchangeable. They have no obligation to the work, or the place where they are working, and so the institution employing them is left with only external means of controlling service. Continuing with the example of my newly married friend, by working with a crew of framers who were united by a common faith, dress, and values, these external standards were rendered less important. There was a common agreement upon what good house-framing should be, and one’s ability to meet that standard was a reflection of one’s very character (something absent in the mechanized systems of external control). House-framing then was not just a “job,” it was a practice through which virtue could be developed.

But to practice such virtue my friend had to be a part of a particular place and a particular community. House-framing for him was then attached to a certain climate, a certain geography, a certain people, and to some extent, a certain architecture. While the skill of house-framing was transferable to other places, its virtues were to some extent tied to this particular place. What made house-framing a virtuous form of work among the Mennonites was the commitment of the crew members to be there for one another as a crew. That commitment allowed for the development of a guild community. Importantly, such a guild cannot be achieved in a system of interchangeable workers.

By making such an intimate association between work and place my friend was also drawn into belonging to that place in other ways–politically and ecclesially. He joined a church in his community and became involved there. He also became involved in the political concerns of the small community that he had entered through work. Each of these aspects of his life tied easily together because they were all connected through a common landscape, both physical and spiritual.

Yet this community and place are not available without costs, nor are they always sustainable in the face of external pressures. The choices that were available to my friend were largely possible because of his connections to a placed community. Such connections are rare in our day. They can be found only with difficulty, and when they are found they are often in decay. Any life that seeks to maintain ties to a local place outside the confines of “certifying” institutions will be met with much difficulty and perhaps “failure.”

The human soul has a deep desire for permanence, for community, for goodness, and too often we settle for less than these. But the world also weighs heavily upon us; our commitments to a place or community are interrupted by the crude realities of economics, by the difficulty of wading against the current. I do not know if my newly married friend will be able to sustain his chosen life. Perhaps time will prove his critics the wiser. Either way, there is a certain tragedy in the loneliness of his choices: that when he sought a life based on responsibility and goodness, his friends responded with the mantras of a tired world. The discovery of true community may well lie in such loneliness.