LABOR


Labor. How to define a general concept whose essence involves a plunge into infinite particulars. Labor loses itself.

Philosophical, theological abstractions find their redemption in this pivotal concept that surrenders itself, renounces self, in what comes to hand.

The idea of the nature of God is fleshed out in Genesis from the very beginning by the story of the six days' labor of creation and the seventh day of rest. The Biblical author (J, Q, whoever she was) lost herself in the story and God emerged out of chaos—building, making, fitting together, pleasing himself like an artist, craftsman, laborer.

The writers of "hexaemeral literature" (theological meditations on the Genesis six-day construction project)—Basil, Ambrose, Augustine and others—created a charming form—part philosophy, part folk tale—which sketches out an early ecological vision: animals, plants and mankind in relationships of mutuality, based on an economy of divine wisdom and foresight. The idea that Biblical religion merely gave Western culture a license to dominate and subdue nature is an ideological cliche.

LA—BOR. The word has Roman seriousness, latinate dignity, in comparison with "work" or "job" (with their whiff of humdrum tedium). Labor is work dignified, work come to consciousness, responsible work. Around the alpha and omega of those vowels, labor goes from lift to balance to rest.

Labor and rest. They go together, more substantially perhaps than labor and capital. The day of rest was remembered in the Day of Jubilee, a yearlong recognition of the mutuality of labor, celebrated in ancient Israel every 50 years, at which time (at least on paper) servants were redeemed and slaves set free.

God the artist rests when the work is done. The people rest on the day of Jubilee—when labor relations are balanced, fitted together, justified.

God's technology—her creative tool—was the Word. All the requirements of labor—concentration, self-renunciation (the obverse of concentration), and effort—were fused in the software of the divine Word. While the world struggles in the birthpangs and stress of physical effort, the image of God suspiciously resembles that of a poet or writer —resting on the seventh day of the imagination, coalescing creation out of chaos with the technology of a few well-chosen sentences...

But Man's technology—mortal Man, frightened Man, blind Man, sinful Man—is bent to an earth of greed and domination rather than lifted to the Jubilee of serene creativity. Technology is not just labor-saving, it is also labor-distorting, labor-undoing. Proud Man plays with his software, shifts his investments, floats his capital, manipulates his symbols—right up to the apocalyptic market crash, the year 2000 computer glitch, the fall of babbling Babylon...

The authors of the hexaemeral literature were engaged in a cultural and intellectual laboring with concepts—defining for themselves the order of their world. We all do this. And I remember the labor of particulars involved when the community organizers of the late 1970s vanished into the neighborhoods of the poor and the unemployed —those VISTA volunteers and others who disappeared even more completely with the advent of the 1980s and the Reagan era (which utterly opposed any community empowerment that might challenge Reaganism's ideological vision).

These are debatable particulars, and the work of community organization is limited by partisan and strategic considerations, as is the way with politics. But "freedom" is a concept which runs even deeper than "democracy"—and in the Biblical vision, freedom has always been connected with labor in the celebration of Jubilee—just as human labor is connected with the divine labor of love which is the cosmos. These unities—abstract and philosophical though they may be—are grounded in the plunge of labor into concrete particulars —and as such they underwrite human hopes—both earthly and transcendental.

Henry Gould