Our understanding of work profoundly shapes our understanding of value: what is worth doing and what is worth owning. Our ‘relationship with the earth’ and hence an awareness of our eco footprint as a first step to living more in harmony with the constraints the planet imposes on us is closely related to our understanding of the concept of work because much of that is how we are to ‘use the world’.

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There are various strands of history which feed into our Modern Western view of work. In Greek and Roman culture those who had leisure took a low view of work. This disdain of work was not so much the activities undertaken in work; but that they were nor freely chosen. This was coupled with a praise of leisure as the expression of a free, human existence.

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The Jewish and Christian traditions have an acceptance of work as a calling from, and a blessing by, God that is itself a source of human fulfilment. However this idea developed in an unhelpful direction in the first millennium. Following Aristotle, Augustine and then Aquinas distinguished between:

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Active Life – which covered almost every kind of work, including studying, preaching, and teaching; it was connected to needs of the human body shared with animals.

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Contemplative Life which was meditation upon God and his truth, oriented to the eternal, life that was truly free.

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While both lives were seen as having their place, the life of contemplation was considered simply better than the life of action. This sort of distinction formed the basic pattern of medieval Christianity. It resulted in a view that the true Christian calling was a priestly or monastic one. The terms ‘calling’ and ‘vocation’ came to be used to refer only to such pursuits. A calling was something different from everyday work.

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This changed significantly at the reformation in the 16th Century. Almost without exception the Reformers rejected the view that the Contemplative Life was the more truly Christian life. They taught that work as well as leisure and contemplation was a good gift of God. They maintained that all forms of work were of equal worth in the sight of God. This was one of the heresy charges for which William Tyndale was executed:

“there is no work better than another to please God; to pour water, to wash dishes, to be a cobbler, or an apostle, all is one; to wash dishes and to preach is all one, as touching the deed, to please God.”

Luther taught that God in his providence had put each person in their place in society to do the work of that place. Adam had work he was commanded to do: plant the garden, cultivate and look after it. There is therefore nothing which does not become spiritual when it is done in the Word of God and faith.

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As capitalism and a market economy developed this stress on work and calling continued; but in the process it became detached again from its Judeau-Christian roots to focused on production and money. Benjamin Franklin's declaration that "time is money” captured the heart of this attitude. “Real” work was work that was paid; unpaid activity was therefore downgraded in value. What women did in the home was no longer work: work became the province of men. The economists accepted and promoted this categorization, and proceeded to define work as a disutility that was done only for external reward. With the development of capitalism work devoted to the production of commodities has become the central activity of human life.

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In the 21st century we have multiple layers of issues related to work and our understanding of it. An increasing number of people are deeply alienated from their work because it is essentially meaningless beyond the money it generates in order that they can buy consumer goods and leisure activities. It is essential to avoid nostalgia here. There is nothing romantic about the work my grandparents did in the mills of Manchester in the Edwardian era when they first left school. This work involved long hours in dangerous conditions for not much pay. But at the same time as avoiding rose tinted spectacles it is also essential not to throw out babies with bath water. My grandparents had something in their gruelling mill work that a huge percentage of workers today lack: they knew exactly what they were doing. They worked in a mill in the textile industry. They would see raw cotton arrive – and woven cloth leave. They would know that the clothes they say people wearing were in some small way down to them. They knew that in some very tiny – but tangible way – they were contributing to the largest empire the world had ever known. They were embedded in a community – ie people who knew each other face to face over many generations – of people who all worked in the same mills and industries. The finance and service sector in this period and earlier could see itself as serving those who were clearly making things which were tangible and were ultimately the foundation of the economy.

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As we contrast that with today and the example of a niece who works in the city. It would not surprise me if it was discovered (it may already be known by those who work in this field) that the software she writes to read financial reports super quick when they are published in order then make a super quick response in the financial markets is potentially part of a long chain of such computer interactions which eventually circles back to itself. The amount of contact with what I would want to call reality appears to be rather tenuous.

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At some point of course at least some of this data on the computers of the big finance houses does actually ‘touch reality’ ie it is rooted in something tangible like potatoes, copper ore, a car; but a huge amount of the current UK economy appears to hover somewhere well above this layer of the solid and real.

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A huge amount of current work and our economy appears to be based essentially on supporting itself. Simply keeping going the group of people living in a particular area: education, healthcare, retail sector, hairdressers, plumbers, legal and financial services etc. Obviously some of this is tangible: the food sold in Tescos, the boilers fitted by a plumber and the equipment used by the hairdresser are all very tangible and are the result of industry, manufacturing and agriculture. However in 21st century Britain this tangible element is only around 25% of the entire UK economy. The finance and service sector now, in contrast with the Edwardian equivalent discussed earlier, appears to be largely serving and financing itself. This looks worryingly like pulling oneself up by ones own boot straps.

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There is almost certainly a strong correlation between the satisfaction we gain from work and the immediacy and understandability of it. You plant a seed, tend the crop, eat the result: the family lives. You chop down trees, cut them into sections, build a house, use the offcuts of furniture or fuel: the family is sheltered, warm and can cook. This is working the world at its most primal. It is what is built into us at a genetic level as Homo Sapiens – and traces back to pre sapiens hominids who have been making and building for millions of years. The further we move from this the more alienation there is likely to be.

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At some point during the late 20th century much technology moved to a point where manufacture consists essentially of assembly of ‘black boxes’ the function of which is known; but not how that function is achieved. Today only a small minority of highly skilled experts are able to understand the component parts of our technology.

When I was a boy my mother, who had been a wireless operator in WW2 could open the radio or TV and persuade the valves to function again so it would work. I had a Philips Electrical Engineer set for Christmas and played around a bit with it. I later built a fuzz box for my guitar by buying a book with projects in and then buying the component parts. It worked!! I could look at the innards of my mid sixties Vox AC30 guitar amp and see the components and I knew that if I bothered to do the work I could have a reasonable understanding of what was going on. I was never stimulated by electronics so never took if further. But in the seventies even the electronics where accessible to the skilled amateur.

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Those days are long gone. Repair of electronic / digital equipment now is very specialist. Gone are the days of being able to clearly see the individual components on a circuit board. Open up an iPhone – if you can even manage that – and the chances of understanding anything you see inside is close to zero.

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My 2009 Moto Guzzi 750 has, in my opinion, atrocious fuel consumption and performance. However to tweak this to give the required improvements requires remapping the ECU – not re-jetting the carbs or adjusting the timing by moving the back plate carrying the points. The latter was well within the capability of the competent home mechanic: the former requires specialist knowledge and I have so far been unable to track down someone to do it for me.

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We are now in a position where we own and use equipment which we have no real chance of understanding. We live in a world of ‘black boxes’ which we hope will keep working as our lives increasingly depend on them. When they do cease to function, there is usually little realistic option but buy a replacement. This generates huge amounts of waste which is very difficult to reuse in any way; and huge amounts of alienation in the population who are controlled by technology they have no way of understanding.

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A recovery of a thoroughly biblical understanding of work is a route to a greater sense of well being in the population and also a far more sustainable way of using the resources of the earth. A return to the idea of the fundamental value of work, whether paid or not, the idea of calling, that we are using our God given abilities in the service of others to the glory of God; an awareness that we called to work the garden – but also to care for the garden as we do so. In practical terms this would mean a much greater emphasis on making things of quality, building to last, building with the expectation of repair and returning to the period up to say 2000 when much of our technology could be repaired by the competent home DIYer. This would impact enormously on our economy. To shift production from China to UK and to build to last would require significant rethinking on prices and wages. It will be turning a supertanker. But the difficulty of the task should not stop us making the first steps in that direction.

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Massive changes in many aspects of life in UK will be required to function effectively in a Covid-19 world. This is therefore an ideal time to put these ideas into the mix as that new direction is worked out.