Opinion

On the Subject of Work

A Life-Changing College Class

Mrs. Kate Sickler, Voice's Advisor

May 22, 2024

On the first day of my senior year of college, a professor of mine opened up class with the question, “Why do we think we’re better than people who work at McDonalds?” And my mind went completely silent for a moment and then went very loud.

See, how could I not think I was better than some bozo working at McDonalds? I was a senior double majoring in Chemical Engineering and Public Policy at CMU – a way I could introduce myself and people would be impressed with my presumed intelligence and scholarly ambition. I was proud, thinking I had earned people’s impressed noises, their comments of “you must be really smart” and “you’ll be able to write your own paycheck with that diploma.” In high school, my friends and I would make the classic judgments of our peers who didn’t go to impressive universities, “they’ll be asking us ‘do you want fries with that?’ someday” or “they’ll end up at Walmart like the rest of the IUP kids.” Or while at CMU, those of us in the “harder” majors would make fun by calling the humanities college H&SS, “H and Less Stress.” These moments flashed through my mind in quick succession.

See, the thing is, I thought I wasn’t the kind of person who considers myself better than other people. However, after my flashback reel of moments of judging fast-food workers and state school students, I realized I did consider myself better, simply because I was going to a fancy-pants school and studying a fancy-pants major. I realized I bought into society’s belief that being smart and going to an impressive school and getting an impressive job to make a lot of money is what makes me a respectable person, and if other people don’t achieve this, it is their fault and they don’t deserve respect. And it looks unhinged, written out like that, but these concepts were planted in my brain by society and media and my peers and my teachers and simply everyone, and I never questioned it. Dr. Scott Sandage’s question forced me to criticize my biases. Despite growing up in a blue collar household which sometimes struggled to put food on the table, I had internalized this classist rhetoric, and I was absolutely smacked in the face with my hypocrisy. If I was going to continue to think of myself as a good person who respected others, I was going to have to unlearn this shameful bias I discovered in myself.

There isn’t a week that goes by without me thinking about the lessons I took from the course – the most important of which is that in a just society, all work would dignify the person with just wages, hours, and actions. From jobs society considers unimpressive, like grocers or trash collectors or yes, even McDonald’s workers, to those society does consider impressive, like financial investors, engineers, or doctors, all labor is worthy of respect simply because a person is part of the larger collective and performs tasks beneficial to society.

I leave you with the second essay I wrote for the course, analyzing Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, and Max Weber’s The Protestant Work Ethic. It contains the discovery that changed the rest of my life; a vocation is not a call to do, but is a call to be. The important part is not necessarily what job someone has, but how they behave while doing it: a person’s actions and beliefs are the truest test of respectability.

Note: This essay talks about my Roman Catholic faith, and is not intended to be an endorsement of religion or beliefs on behalf of Winchester Thurston.

Essay for Capitalism and Individualism in American Culture

Taught by Professor Scott Sandage at Carnegie Mellon University, Fall 2014

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam

Max Weber, a German sociologist, defines vocation as a calling to work. Weber claims that the uniqueness of American capitalism is born out of a desire to be blessed materially by God as a sign of heavenly promise. Weber states in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, “As long as it is carried out in a legal manner, the acquisition of money in the modern economic order is the result and manifestation of competence and proficiency in a vocational calling.” Here, Weber is defines vocation as a job to earn money. However, according to the Roman Catholic Church, a vocation should be defined as much more than a job, and even more than the simple translation of “a calling.” A vocation is letting it be done unto us according to God’s word, and aligning our lives to the life of Christ. This is much more grand than the call to make money.
In looser terms, vocations should be defined as a call to be, rather than a call to do. Henry David Thoreau wrote about the call to be in his naturalist, transcendentalist autobiography Walden. In living out this vocation, and not the calling to do, Thoreau proposed an alternative to the capitalism originally shaped by the protestant idea of vocational calling. In Walden, Thoreau writes about the calling to be – how to define oneself by his or her own actions and not being defined by the work one does.
Thoreau asserts that society doesn’t distinguish between vocation and identity. He argues that people work beyond the rational value of work: “Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches to-day to save nine to-morrow” (Walden, 70). By ascribing more worth to work than the end result of work, people unify their personal worth with their work. But this leads to not fully living: “We know not where we are. Beside, we are sound asleep nearly half our time. Yet we esteem ourselves wise, and have an established order on the surface” (Walden, 246).
It is also clear throughout Walden that Thoreau believes that this “established order” has caused people to give up identifying any other way. “ … It appears as if men had deliberately chosen the common mode of living because they preferred it to any other. Yet they honestly think there is no choice left” (Walden, 10). Thoreau is clearly saying that identifying through work has become such a mainstay in American society that it appears there is no alternative. But, Thoreau thinks there is an alternative – what the Catholic Church would call living out one’s true vocation, even if Thoreau does not specifically call it such.
It is clear that Thoreau’s definition of vocation is not to obtain material wealth, which is a main component of Weber’s vocation argument. He spends a great deal of Walden writing about “simplicity, simplicity, simplicity” and removing material ‘needs’ from one’s life (Walden, 69). Thoreau states this, “Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul” (Walden, 245). Here, he is directly opposing the protestant definition of vocation. Thoreau is saying material wealth is not a sign of heavenly promise – so there is no duty to fulfill one’s vocation in that manner.
“For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ‘glorify God and enjoy him forever.’ (Walden, 69)” Here, Thoreau is quoting the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church. His purpose is to point out that society believes working is how God intended us to interact with Him and his world, but he proposes that this belief may actually the Devil calling us to what is not truly holy. In the first chapter of the first book of Peter, it is written, “…but, as he who called you is holy, be holy yourselves in every aspect of your conduct, for it is written, ‘Be holy because I am holy.’” The call to holiness isn’t merely found in working, but in every moment of one’s life. I think Thoreau captured this idea Walden, even if he doesn’t call it holiness.
The idea of constant holiness is found when Thoreau writes about spending the day doing more than working. “To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour” (Walden, 68). This quote is very similar to paragraph 2502 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God…” Both of these quoted passages refer to living out a vocation as an art form, as an identity. Both passages call man to something greater than mindless conformity to capitalism – they call them to be artists. In this passage, Thoreau states that man must make his own life and “endeavor to be what he was made” (Walden, pg 242). In the Catholic Church, that nearly is the exact definition of a vocation – being what you were made to be, in everything you do.
Thoreau is clearly searching for the true calling of man. In the concluding chapter of Walden, he writes, “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth” (Walden, pg. 246). He appears to have grasped the true vocation of man. The Roman Catholic Church defined humanity’s vocation, as quoted from paragraph 1877 in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father’s only Son. This vocation takes a personal form since each of us is called to enter into the divine beatitude; it also concerns the human community as a whole.” In Walden, Thoreau does not seek God’s promises in material goods. Instead, he finds God in himself and in his daily activities. In doing this, he rejects the capitalist society that couples identity and work. Thoreau finds his own identity, seemingly following the Church’s definition of vocation.

Citations:

Catholic Church. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 2nd ed., Our Sunday Visitor, 2000.

Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Routledge, 2001.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, or, Life in the woods. ed by Bowman, James Cloyd [Chicago, New York, Scott, Foresman and company, 1917] Pdf. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/17029241/>.

This essay encapsulates a turning point in my life. As a senior in college, I intended my life to be very different from what it is now. This essay details my discovery that I didn’t have to live on autopilot, cruise controlling through society’s race. This class challenged me to change how I thought about economic systems and the experience of others in these systems. It challenged me to be self-critical of my internalized biases and change my actions to align with my beliefs. It challenged me to examine how I show up in my community. It did everything a humanities course should do: it challenged me to be more human.

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