The Theology of Work (Part 7): Working for the Commonweal

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The word “wealth” comes from the Old English word “weal,” a word connected to the word “health.” Originally, the word “weal” referred to “our general well-being,” or the “common good.” These etymological origins are still reflected in the term “the commonweal,” an old fashioned word that connected our individual "wealth" with the floursihing of the "common good."

In his book The Doctrine of Humanity, Australian theologian Charles Sherlock makes a great deal of theological hay out of this semantic field. The word “wealth,” he argues, originally referred to the “commonweal,” that is, the general well-being of the community. Now adays, we understand “wealth” as a privatized source of individual power. Wealth itself may have functioned in this way in the olden days, too, make no mistake, but it is implicit in the terms we used to use to describe “wealth,” that it was understood to be something that exists for the “common good,” the “weal” of the community.

To unpack this idea, consider the way, ideally, “wealthy” individuals in a community contribute to everyone else’s well-being. The rich man who buys an expensive carriage at a fair price, for instance, employs the tradesmen and craftsmen who built it, whose businesses in turn support the work of lumberjacks and coalminers and what have you, and who use their income to purchase bread from the baker and bacon from the butcher, to feed families whose life-together employs teachers, or housekeepers, or nannies, or what have you.

This is a bit of an over-simplified flow-chart, but in broad strokes the picture is clear enough: wealth contributes to the commonweal, because in a healthy community, everyone is interconnected with everyone else, and the judicious use of one’s personal wealth contributes to the well-being of everyone else. I live in the city of Oshawa, home to one of Canada’s historically great philanthropists, R. Samuel McLaughlin, (1871-1972), the founder of the car-manufacturing company that eventually became General Motors Canada. McLaughlin is remembered especially for his prolific works of philanthropy, building libraries and hospitals, funding charities and schools, and generally using his vast wealth in ways that bettered the community he was part of. In Oshawa, McLaughlin is remembered as a man who saw how his personal wealth was connected to the well-being of his community.

Charles Sherlock argues that the modern world has largely lost this view of wealth. We have come to see the way we handle our wealth as an entirely privatized affair, something that affects "me" exclusively, and helps "me" attain my individual goals. We’ve lost a deep sense of how our wealth flows from and also contributes to the “commonweal” of the community we are part of.

I am a theologian not an economist, but my hunch is that Sherlock is right in his assessment. Especially these days, as “internet shopping” steadily replaces the human interaction that used to mediate our acquisition of goods and services, we have little awareness of the ways in which our personal spending is connected to the common well-being of the society. It is becoming more and more common for us to acquire our goods and services without even speaking to a real human being, let alone having some deep intuitive knowledge of how our acquisition of those goods and services deeply affects the lives of other people. This is likely to become even more common in a post-Covid world, as the various online shopping habits we’ve developed during the lockdown continue to “feel normal for us” long after we’re able safely to shop in person again.

As our shopping involves fewer and fewer human interactions, and is mediated increasingly by screens and robots, our sense of the “common weal” is likely to diminish even more.

This social shift has all sorts of implications for how we view our work in the modern world. In the afore-mentioned “olden days,” when wealth was understood to contribute to the “commonweal of society,” the work that generated it was also understood to contribute the general well-being of a society. The butcher’s work mattered, not because it padded his 401k, but because without it the carriage-maker’s family wouldn’t eat, and then carriages wouldn’t get made and the rich man (whose riches, remember, contributed to the general well-being of the community) wouldn’t have anywhere to spend those riches.

Again, this is a gross oversimplification, but the point is, just as our spending is interconnected with everyone else’s, so too is our work. The work of the surgeon is as necessary as the work of the factory worker who made the scalpel (as necessary as the work of the imports manager who arranged for it to be shipped to us from China, or wherever it was made; and the work of the truck driver who drove the shipment to the hospital, and so on).

Work is not a private activity that we do for our own individualized goals and purposes. That may be why we're doing the work (hence the saying, “find a way to monetize what you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life)—but even if we think we’re just doing it for ourselves, work is always embedded in a community, and has an impact, positively or negatively on the commonweal of that community.

At least, it always has been like this in the past. One of the cultural crises we will face in the coming years, as the “post-Covid” economy continues to take shape, and the use of robotic automation in the work world accelerates, will be to retain a deep awareness of the ways in which our work is interconnected with everyone else.

As a blog post in a series on the theology of work, this post has not been especially theological. I’ve not drawn any lines yet between the incarnation of Christ, or the resurrection, or the theology of salvation, that might tie all these points about the commonweal to some deeper theological themes. We could do this, if we wanted to. In Christ’s incarnation, for instance, we discover the truth that our “embodied life” is spiritually interconnected with the “embodied lives” of others. In Christ’s resurrection, again, we hear God’s profound “yes” to this “embodied interconnectedness”; Christ, after all, did not rise as a disembodied ghost but in a gloriously resurrected body. Neither is our salvation a privatized affair; rather, in saving us God makes us one with him and one with each other, united in service to the world.

These are all theological dots that can easily be connected to what has largely been a philosophical discussion of work so far. But in the interests of keeping it concrete, let me simply remind us of the second-greatest commandment of all, the one that comes immediately after the command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength. It’s the command that we must also love our neighbor as ourselves. According to the teaching of our Lord, this second commandment is like that first one, so deeply connected to it that it seems you can’t really do the first without a commitment to the second.

If we saw our work in the world primarily as a way of expressing our obedience to the first commandment (loving God with all we got), by keeping the second (loving our neighbor as ourselves), it would probably profoundly change how we did it, and experienced it. Whether we’re the person in the coffee shop pouring a hot cup of joe for the weary factory worker on his way to his shift, or the person designing software for the computerized till that keeps track of all the cups of coffee she sold, or the manager at said factory, who will make sure that worker gets paid when he arrives—regardless the work—we would come to see it as deeply connected with everyone else. And we’d begin to perform it, as a grace-filled contribution to the commonweal of our community, and even more than that, as an expression of love to all those neighbors of ours whom the Lord has called us to love as we love ourselves.

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