Doing Good and Doing Well

A recent piece by the New York Times' conservative columnist, David Brooks, caught my attention while I was working 12-hour shifts in a chemical plant. He posits that our society, like British society 100 years ago, is transition from an industrious one to a more "genteel" one, concerned with the finer things in life but not with making money. Along the way he highlights the opinions of Corelli Barnett (cited in the provocative and thoughtful The Post-American World) and our own first lady, Michelle Obama. In her own words:

“We left corporate America, which is a lot of what we’re asking young people to do,” she tells the women. “Don’t go into corporate America. You know, become teachers. Work for the community. Be social workers. Be a nurse. Those are the careers that we need, and we’re encouraging our young people to do that. But if you make that choice, as we did, to move out of the money-making industry into the helping industry, then your salaries respond.” Faced with that reality, she adds, “many of our bright stars are going into corporate law or hedge-fund management.”

There's no doubt that good teachers are essential to thriving society, and the same is true for community developers (though the contribution of community organizers is more questionable). But there is a tremendous folly here. It's not the derision towards business and industry, the dismissal of the value contributed by those who actually make things, or the arrogance of a multimillionaire who proclaims that she chose to "move out of the money-making industry": all of that could be expected from the Obamas. What is truly shocking about the First Lady's quote is that it represents an immense ignorance of the American tradition.

As British historian Paul Johnson observes at the outset of A History of the American People, the two great ambitions of Americans have always been "to do good and to do well." These twin drives arose out of the Reformation and arrived on our shores with the Puritans. Their descendants in New England lived out the same values. The top two occupations of leaders in the Abolitionist movement were pastor (no surprise) and... entrepreneur.

There is, in fact, a fascinating tension here that forms one of the central narratives of American history. What happens when doing good and doing well collide? Once again, slavery is a case in point: Southern landowners did well (though not as well as we imagine), not only because of slavery, but because Eli Whitney (of Connecticut) invented the cotton gin, thus making their product profitable. What happens when profit and reform collide? Can you always get rich by changing the world? During the 1990s tech boom, companies often recruited skilled engineers by claiming that their work would "change the world." There's no doubt that many technical innovations have - but have they truly changed it for the better? Or, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?"

The First Lady, who like her husband is supposedly intellectual, could have explored this tension. She could have urged her audience not only to teach, but to take a stronger set of ethics and moral leadership into the corporate world. After the greed and stupidity of the last few years, the arena of the marketplace is as in need of change as any segment of society. Instead she relied on stale "us vs. them" political talking points. Perhaps it is too much to expect First Ladies to write their own speeches, but could she at least not plagiarize hers from a teacher's union?

But Brooks assumes the First Lady's erroneous dichotomy and perpetuates it in his own musings. He takes it for granted that there is an inherent conflict. Perhaps my own experience is unique, but growing up in Kansas it was not uncommon to see the same families produce teachers and missionaries as well as engineers and executives. In my experience in the evangelical world, across multiple states and a few foreign countries, I encountered world-changers, ambitious achievers, and sensitive aesthetes with regularity. We had our inevitable conflicts but we were brothers and sisters. We never imagined that we were at war with each other.

The solution is not to accept this false dichotomy, but to toss it out in favor of something far older. One of the themes of the Reformation was the view of all work as spiritual valid and a form of service to God. In the Middle Ages, "secular" work as often denigrated in favor of "spiritual" work such as serving in the church. Mrs. Obama is essentially advocating a Medieval approach to vocation - except that teachers, social workers, and government employees have now replaced priests, monks, and nuns as the "sacred" workers. In contrast, the Reformers viewed Christ as Lord of all areas of human endeavor. When Martin Luther advocated for the "priesthood of all believers," he didn't mean that everyone should be a pastor; he meant the mechanic was a priest in his shop, the banker in his office, and the mother in her home. All vocations were to be pursued with a religious devotion, "working unto the Lord and not [merely] for men." I believe it was primarily this emphasis (and not agony over predestination) that led to the "Protestant work ethic."

But articulating a comprehensive Biblical worldview might be too much for the Obamas, or even for our "genteel" society. In an age where most states run lotteries and "Desperate Housewives" earns top ratings, calling for a return to the Protestant work ethic and the Christian-inspired sense of vocation may be setting the bar too high. The First Lady, and Mr. Brooks, could start by simply encouraging their listeners to be more American.