C.S. Lewis on Good Works and Good Work

I recently came across the passage below by CS Lewis in The Joyful Christian (it's a book full of snippets; by clicking on the title of this entry you will be directed to the whole piece) and i found it interesting that he lists cabinetmakers amongst the last bastions of craftsmanship. He even goes into (some) details, when describing 'real honest-to-God work': 'sound structures; seasoned wood, accurately dovetailed, the stresses all calculated; skill and labour successfully used to do what is intended...'

This piece also resonated with me particularly in light of the discussions on a previous post about the religious community's role in environmentalism. Lewis proclaims, 'Let choirs sing well or not at all', reminding us that focussing on the 'real' thing is no excuse for doing things half-assed. Anyway, here is the piece:

'Good Works' in the plural is an expression much more familiar to modern Christendom than 'good work.' Good works are chiefly almsgiving or 'helping' in the parish. They are quite separate from one's 'work.' And good works need not be good work, as anyone can see by inspecting some of the objects made to be sold at bazaars for charitable purposes. This is not according to our example. When our Lord provided a poor wedding party with an extra glass of wine all around, he was doing good works. But also good work; it was a wine really worth drinking. Nor is the neglect of goodness in our 'work,' our job, according to precept. The apostle says everyone must not only work but work to produce what is 'good.'

The idea of Good Work is not quite extinct among us, though it is not, I fear, especially characteristic of religious people. I have found it among cabinetmakers, cobblers, and sailors. It is no use at all trying to impress sailors with a new liner because she is the biggest or costliest ship afloat. They look for what they call her 'lines': they predict how she will behave in a heavy sea. Artists also talk of Good Work; but decreasingly. They begin to prefer words like 'significant,' 'important', 'contemporary,' or 'daring.' These are not, to my mind, good symptoms.

But the great mass of men in all fully industrialised societies are the victims of a situation which almost excludes the idea of Good Work from the outset. 'Built-in obsolescence' becomes an economic necessity. Unless an article is so made that it will go to pieces in a year or two and thus have to be replaced, you will not get a sufficient turnover. A hundred years ago, when a man got married, he had built for him (if he were rich enough) a carriage in which he expected to drive for the rest of his life. He now buys a car which he expects to sell again in two years. Work nowadays must not be good.

For the wearer, zip fasteners have this advantage over buttons: that, while they last, they will save him an infinitesimal amount of time and trouble. For the producer, they have a much more solid merit; they don't remain in working order long. Bad work is the desideratum.

We must avoid taking a glibly moral view of this situation. It is not solely the result of original or actual sin. It has stolen upon us, unforeseen and unintended. The degraded commercialism of our minds is quite as much its result as its cause. Nor can it, in my opinion, be cured by purely moral efforts.

I guess when you think about it, the precedent for Good Works is in the first chapter of Genesis:

וַיַּרְא אֱלֹהִים, כִּי-טוֹב--and God saw that it was good.'

Ricky Gervais expounds on Good Work in Genesis:

Falling Water; Frank Lloyd Wrong?

Today, my parents, my sister, and i went to see Falling Water. It was a remarkable experience. My mother and i had seen a documentary about Frank Lloyd Wright in preparation for the trip (yes, the nerdy apple falls not far from the nerdy tree...). I am happy we did, as the tour was rather superficial. Two things, possibly connected, were not addressed and continue to gnaw at my mind:

1) Mr. Wright had virtually no professional training
2) Mr. Wright was a total d-bag

After reading a few of Simon Winchester's books, it struck me (as i am sure was the intention) that many of the greatest innovations were achievements of people who lacked formal education (Winchester has written two books about the Oxford English Dictionary, The Professor and the Madman, and The Meaning of Everything). James Murray, the son of a Scottish draper was an autodidact who taught himself numerous languages, archaeology, and who was making accurate astronomical predictions before the age of 12, was the primary editor of the OED. In The Map That Changed the World, Winchester tells the shocking story of William Smith, the canal digger who despite bitter class-wars, became the father of modern geology.

Leonardo da Vinci, whose bastard-status prevented him from receiving classical education (which was probably an advantage because it forced him to observe the world rather than be bound to the Greek mindset of conceiving the world according to models) also comes to mind. John Harrison, a carpenter who taught himself clock-making, invented the marine chronometer,(which established longitude), revolutionising navigation in the 18th century. All of these people, including Wright, were laypeople. All of these people worked with their hands.

Wright actually put a premium on manual labour and stressed its relation to one's development as a person or as an artist. In his apprenticeship programme at Taliesen, pupils learnt by doing--and this included working in the fields, preparing meals, and maintaining the property. Wright told his students that it was as important for them to work with their hands, read poetry, cook, and listen to music, as it was to study great architectural works. In a similar way, T. S. Eliot describes the 'heterogeneous ideas' that create the unified experience in the poetry of John Donne:

The ordinary man falls in love, or reads Spinoza, and these two experiences have nothing to do with each other, or with the noise of the typewriter or the smell of cooking; in the mind of the poet these experiences are always forming new wholes.

Like Donne, Wright viewed his craft as a spiritual process, involving the cooperation of the natural with the supernatural. Donne often discusses the rectification of reason, the transformation or elevation of one's natural reason to a higher plane, contingent upon belief in God. In other words, belief in God is basically super-sizing your reason.

Conversely, Wright viewed nature as being rectified by humanity, or what he called organic architecture; 'a reinterpretation of nature’s principles as they had been filtered through the intelligent minds of men and women who could then build forms which are more natural than nature itself'.

Wright bucked the trend of industrial architecture, of modernism with all its machinery, dominating and subduing nature. He instead turned to craft; the spiritual space of a building, the craftsman's hands on the piece, the harmony between humanity and nature. Wright's philosophical commitment to architecture that is generated by its surroundings has made his horizontal planes practically iconic, and can be seen in his treatment of the boulders at Falling Water. Nature is not interrupted, nor is it displaced.

Lovely. It sounds like Wright had much in common with Donne. It also seems that his stint in Japan influenced him with a lot of Eastern thought about our place in nature, and body and mind and harmony stuff. So what's the problem? I guess i'm confused by a guy whose aesthetic is morally grounded but his actions were so scandalous and immoral.

The debate about morality's place in art, or as Benjamin Constant called it, l'art pour l'art (art for art's sake) has been discussed by people such as Baudelaire, Flaubert, Mallarme, Wilde, Ruskin, Whistler, and loads of others. I've rattled them off like they're distant family members, but i've only read them superficially--click here for a more in-depth synopses. A few weeks ago, i attended a conference on early modern English thought, and was blown away by a paper about the impact of Paradise Lost on Kant's moral philosophy. It restored my faith in what initially drew me to literature, and though we (perhaps anachronistically) may disagree with much of what 17th century religious writers have to say, there is little doubt in my mind that they genuinely sought a moral life. As for Wright, i don't want to justify him. And only trite things come to mind about how someone with such a nice philosophy could be a total d-nozzle. Like the greater the person the greater temptations, so i suppose he just gave in to his. But that doesn't quite cut it. Thoughts, anyone? Bueller?