Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

This glut of cheap labor was the characteristic state of things in England and Europe until the postwar period — and it is increasingly important among Americans now. That is why we sometimes see such anomalies as employment and unemployment rising at the same time. The two-tier economy we are developing, with accelerating inequality between those who are trained or educated and those who are not, reflects the scarcity relative to demand of skilled labor. If schemes to educate more of our workforce are carried out successfully, the increased availability of skilled labor will lower its value, and the erosion of the prosperity of those who work will simply become more widespread.

It is because the family as we have known it in this country over the last three-quarters of a century was the goal and product of reform that a radiance of idealization hung over it, and that it was so long and so confidently invoked as a common value, as a thing deserving and also requiring political and economic protection. This has had many important consequences for policy and law. Yet for some reason we are convinced at the moment that the ways of our economy should be identical with the laws of the market, and therefore we depart resolutely from norms and customs that controlled economic behavior among us through our long history of increasing prosperity. No one is more persuaded of the rightness of this course than those who claim to especially cherish the family.

Take for example the weekend, or that more venerable institution, the Sabbath. Moses forbade that servants, even foreigners, should work on the seventh day. If their wage was subsistence, as it is usually fair to assume in premodern societies, then his prohibition had the immediate practical effect of securing for them seven days’ pay for six days’ work. He raised the value of their labor by limiting access to it. In all its latter-day forms the Sabbath has had this effect.

Now those among us whose prosperity is eroding fastest are very likely to be at work on Sunday, because they cannot afford not to work when they have the chance, and because they cannot risk losing a job so many others would be happy to take. Absent legal or contractual or religious or customary constraints, workers without benefits or job security or income that is at least stable relative to the economy have no way of withholding their labor. Now all those constraints are gone, in the name of liberalization, I suppose. I do not recall hearing a single murmur about the effect of such changes on the family, though it is always easy to find journalistic wisdom to the effect that parents should spend more time with their children. The last great Sabbatarian institution is the school system — even the Postal Service makes deliveries on Sunday — so the quondam day of rest is now a special burden for families with young children or children who need supervision.

Of course the shops must be open on Sundays and at night because the rate of adult employment is so high and the working day is so long that people need to be able to buy things whenever they can find the time. I would suggest that such voracious demands on people’s lives, felt most mercilessly by the hardest pressed, for example the employed single parent, are inimical to the family, and to many other things of value, for example the physical and mental health of such parents, though these are utterly crucial to the well-being of millions of children, and therefore of extraordinary importance to the society as a whole.

Clearly a calculation could be made in economic terms of the cost to the society of this cheapening of labor. It is no great mystery that statistics associate social problems with single-parent families. And social problems, crime for example, are an enormous expense, an enormous drag on the economy. We are conditioned to think that the issue for single mothers, say, is work or welfare. In fact the issue is decent working hours and reasonable pay. These are important people, holding the world together for children who in many instances have been half abandoned. It is grotesque that their lives should be made impossible because of some unexamined fealty to economic principles that are, if we would pause to consider, impoverishing to us all in many ways, some of them extremely straightforward.

To consider again the weekend. It is often remarked, in an odd spirit of censoriousness, that American culture was never a melting pot. We are given to know that it was wrong to have aspired to such an ideal, and wrong to have fallen short of it. There seems to me to be little evidence that the ideal ever was aspired to, at least in the sense in which critics understand the phrase. Since religion is central to most special identities within the larger national culture, religious tolerance has been the great guarantor of the survival of the variety of cultures. It was characteristic of European countries for centuries to try to enforce religious uniformity on just these grounds. If earlier generations in America chose not to follow this example, presumably they knew and accepted the consequence of departing from it, that assimilation would have important limits. This strikes me as a happy arrangement, all in all.

Now there is great anxiety about the survival and recognition of these cultures of origin. I suggest that this sense of loss, which reflects, it seems, novel and unwelcome assimilation, is another consequence of the disruption of the family I have been describing. Civic life is expected to be ethnically neutral, and at the same time to acknowledge our multitude of ethnicities and identities in such a way as to affirm them, to make their inheritors all equally glad to embrace and sustain them. These are not realistic expectations. One acquires a culture from within the culture — for all purposes, from the family.

And acculturation takes time. I suggest that those groups who feel unvalued are the very groups who are most vulnerable to the effects of the cheapening of labor, least able to control the use of their time. They look for, or are promised, amendment in the correction of images and phrases, in high school multicultural days and inclusive postage stamp issues. Such things can never supply the positive content of any identity.

The crudeness of public institutions in their attempts to respond to these demands is clearly in large part due to the fact that they are wholly unsuited to the work that is asked of them. Obviously they cannot supply the place of church or synagogue. The setting apart of the weekend once sheltered the traditions and institutions that preserved the variety of cultures. French Catholics and Russian Jews and Dutch Protestants could teach morals and values wholly unembarrassed by the fact that the general public might not agree with every emphasis and particular, and therefore they were able to form coherent moral personalities in a way that a diverse and open civic culture cannot and should not even attempt. It seems to me likely that the openness of the civic culture has depended on the fact that these groups and traditions have functioned as teachers of virtue and morality, sustaining by their various lights a general predisposition toward acting well. When the state attempts to instill morality, the attempt seems intrusive and even threatening precisely because that work has traditionally been reserved to family, community, and religion, to the institutions of our diversity, a thing we have cherished historically much better than we do now, for all our talk. Or rather, our talk arises from a nervous awareness that our traditional diversity is eroding away, and we are increasingly left with simple difference, in its most negative and abrasive forms.

I do not think it is nostalgia to suggest that it would be well to reestablish the setting apart of time traditionally devoted to religious observance. If there is any truth in polls, the American public remains overwhelmingly religious, and religion is characteristically expressed in communities of worship. To take part in them requires time. It may be argued that there are higher values, for example the right to buy what one pleases when one pleases, which involves another’s right to spend Saturday or Sunday standing at a cash register or to compel someone else to stand there. If these are the things we truly prefer, there is no more to be said. But the choice is unpoetical and, in its effects, intolerant. When we were primitive capitalists we did much better. Now people in good circumstances have their Saturdays and Sundays if they want them. So observance is an aspect of privilege, though the privileged among us tend to be the least religious. No wonder the churches are dying out.