A Proposal for a Citadel of the Permanent Things
This Proposal has thus far argued for an alternative vision
of many areas of our life together – the homes we live in, the voluntary
society we create, how we educate people at different stages of life – but the
chief activity of many people has scarcely been covered. I mean, of course,
“remunerative work”. Childrearing is a true remuneration, of course – training
carers for our senescence is a form of pension plan! Education can have a vocational
purpose. But ultimately, every household must find money and resource one way
or the other.
There is virtue in graft. Setting oneself to a task – even a
menial one – is a form of self-cultivation, ordering the soul to detail and
diligence and creation. This is as true for menial tasks, indeed, as for more
elevated ones. Street cleaners actively beautify the world by picking up litter
– can actuaries confidently state that they do better?
Yet employment is so often a degrading, insecure, dislocating
task. Commute for 90 minutes to a job in London where your boss constantly
criticises you; drive an hour to a school for a supply job for months on end,
without any promise of a permanent contract; have key staff removed from the
work you manage with no warning or apology; work in a shop for minimum wage and
ever-increasing demands upon your emotions and ability. The main constituent of
many of our lives is toil, a Sisyphean four or five decades of boulder-pushing.
We normalize this. We say everyone is in the same situation;
perhaps we see few who manage to escape Boulder Pushing PLC, and look on with
either envy or admiration, hoping perhaps to do the same one day. We may go so
far as to read books or listen to podcasts on escaping the ratrace. But most of
us are systemically trapped. If you are in your thirties with kids, and you
provide for them, you can’t just let the boulder roll down the hill whilst you
take a few years out to work out your business plan. Hades pays only he who
pushes.
There has always been toil, ever since the Garden. This is a
fallen and constrained world, and we can only work within the parameters set by
external forces. Yet this does not mean there are not better and worse
situations. This does not mean it is much the same if you are a Sicilian mine
slave in the 1st century AD, or an accountant or builder’s mate in
21st century Britain. Now, the Sicilian slave may, by the
cultivation of virtue and gratitude, be a happier person – but that does not
render his circumstances themselves happier or more noble.
In the slow building of our Citadel, what may we do to
render work more dignifying and purposive? The greatest question – how we as a
culture redeem workers from dry, mechanical role-functionalism where they act
as fungible units, how we invest economic production on the grand scale with
beauty and dignity – can partly only be answered in retrospect, in the far
future, after a long and slow period of organic social coordination. The
answers begin to be found, however, in the little we can attempt ourselves.
We must each build a sort of Workshop, a realm of dignified
labour, which offers a space where transcendent purpose – the creation of
beauty, focus on structure and detail, communication of meaning – can be
followed and nurtured.
There are two contexts in which we may build a little
Workshop of our own, and two species of “product” that Workshop may produce. The
contexts are the “public” and the “private”, for-profit or not; the two species
are solo and collaborative. It must be admitted here that – though income
diversification is wise, because it improves resilience – most of us will be
unable to go into business for ourselves, especially on any labour of love.
Gone are the Roman Cardinals of the Baroque, gone are the eccentric
Marchionesses funding their cicles, gone are the self-educating workers’
circles. We will see their rise again, in some new form – the gyres of history
are inevitable, if sometimes delayed – but in this era, we must accept that we
are largely limited to the realm of leisure, or the small-scale “pocket money”
sidework.
Well, a thriving business would be valuable, and a business
of virtue beautifies the public square, but our little projects now lay
foundations for those greater edifices in the future. There is great value to hard
work and beauty filling our leisure, or constituting our moonlit employment. So
what might we do?
Alone, we are free to pursue our inclinations. We may have
little enough space – perhaps a room desk, or a cold garage bench, or even just
our beat-up old laptop – but a world cam be constructed therein. Set the light
just so – start the ambient mix, drown out the noise from the house – imagine yourself
stepping across the threshold of some medieval guild workshop where fine
tapestries were woven, before being sent to kings; or imagine yourself
corresponding with the eccentric pioneer-protectors of the Permanent Things,
writing to Aelred or Federigo de Montefeltro or Eliot or that redoubtable old
bush stump Les Murray. In this insignificant private Workshop, you surrender
yourself to the stream of history and do insignificant works – all to a great
significant purpose.
Who would have imagined that some great purpose lurked
behind gluing plastic plane models together, or crocheting little hats for your
friends’ babies, or illustrating cards to sell on some tiny scale? Indeed – can
we imagine, briefly, that enchantment and deeper realities lie behind household
chores? This is not really the essay for that point – and yet what an ordering
and enlivening thing is washing dishes and clearing worktops! To defy the
ever-gnawing chaos in the soul and the polis by stacking the dishes neatly in
the oikos is the silently heroic act of the questor for the Permanent Things.
Orwell observed that eccentric little hobbies were the
essence of the English delight in privacy – and it is possible to build a
monastery in the heart through trivial and silly hobbies, committed to
earnestly. As the polystyrene cement drips on to the wing, as the eccentric
recipe goes in to the oven to bake, a sort of Matins is sung: “Yes, I cannot
solve the world’s problems, or even my own – but life is gratitude, and I give
it to God; and today I will build, not destroy.” The atheist does it against
his own will, but the song is all the louder for that!
There is, I suggest, a need to actively set aside space and
time for matters of no economic import, of no easy entertainment value, of no
obvious, immediate social utility – to mend and sand and glue and sew and bake,
to gain skills, to craft and transform rude matter into something better.
This can be shared, too! The private Workshop cultivates the
individual soul in its creative and industrive facets; the shared Workshop,
even (especially?) in hobby situations, models the human community. Is there
anything more hope-inducing, when honestly considered, than a group of peculiar
middle-aged men coming together to build a model railway display? (Especially
if they can somehow get their wives involved!) You despair about the Middle
East; I reply, without a hint of flippancy, that if lonely children can be
accepted into wargames clubs (as I was), or if AmDram types can conquer their
own neuroses and egotisms to create something of real value together, then we
have a sliver of temporal hope. There’ll be no peace this side of the grave,
but if we cooperate on building things together when no outside force compels
us – and if we choose to learn the attendant lessons! – then we may be the kind
of people who can be better neighbours, sharing resources more equitably, living
more sustainably.
How many difficult people – like me, like you – learn social
rules first or best when co-operating on some shared envisioned project?
Schoolrooms of our usual type often perform this task poorly – the lack of
native willingness on the part of many of the children means they may learn
obedience to Teacher or to the loudest child, but rarely joyful mutual
submission. Only when something worthwhile is in view can the truest
expressions of co-operation appear – whether men seeking to survive together
and conquer in battle, or three little children attempting, with faltering
beauty, to sing a hymn together whilst they dance on the grass.
Of course these corporate efforts are flawed, and full of
ego and misunderstanding and small-scale but utter heartbreak. The whole
Creation groans, for now. Yet we want to build a Citadel around which the
roiling mass of post-society might gather, and which might provide shelter to
the rising generations. Perfection is not the objective – civilising means,
virtuous modes, are what we seek. On that basis, voluntary co-operation in
frivolous beauties must be one of the best uses of our time imaginable.
One can imagine how this all might happen, in the
fragmentary Shadow Society we seek to build, flowing out of the Schoolrooms and
ramshackle New Colleges, returning always to the Home. You can see the man in
his shed with his lathe, turning tiny legs for doll-chairs. Next door, sitting
in the garden, the violinist hosts her quartet, and they struggle with some
new, transporting piece. Their friends from church build battlefields from foam
and PVA glue – worlds for little Hanoverians and French to march over, history
entering the present and casting its companionable shadow over proceedings
through a silly shared love. One lady takes up tatting, lacework, with peculiar
tools straight out of a textiles museum display! There are special books; there
are clubs; there are codes. Perhaps someone, somewhere, even makes some
sustenance out of their eccentric waste of time!
The models end up in the bin, and the doll’s chair is
burned. The violin is stolen and broken. The lacework moulders. Everything goes
down to dust – but the products of the Workshops we must build are not built to
last forever; they are built to last, to last long; but they do not steal fire
from the gods. They are built well to proclaim the awful givenness of life,
the deep design we discern behind the clouds of chaos – even if we fear we are
deluded, that chaos is truly all there is! Do children bang pots and pans in a
mock brass band to set posterity to terror? No, they do it for joy, and to
proclaim that friendship and fun and perhaps even nascent harmony exist, and
are worth the effort. The Workshop is where our means of living come from – but
in the Citadel of the Permanent Things, those means of living ought to come
accompanied with gratitude, pleasure, and community. Such Workshops are what we
ought to begin to build now.
