Our Loss of Vocation

I recently agreed to give a talk about professional ethics, or rather more generally, the intersection of spirituality and work, at my church. I was to be the representative of the legal profession. A doctor, teacher, and a financial advisor also had been scheduled to give similar talks.

As I reflected upon the topic, I must admit I began to feel a little queasy. Perhaps this was because of the way the topic had been approached by some born-again evangelicals I have come across. You know the type. I’m sure I’m not the only one who finally caved in to a persistent co-worker’s lunch invitation and ended up at a “Christian” gathering, standing in a Holiday Inn buffet line with an excessively chipper group of salesman. In my case, after the obligatory prayer or three, I was treated to an address from a newly-minted PhD from Rice University who had been enlisted to explain how mainstream academia had been snookered by Darwin. Subsequently, I was surprised to read that even though the Northeast

“has the lowest church attendance of any region in the country, the Boston-based Marketplace Network is one of the first and most influential groups in the movement to bring Christ to a cubicle near you. The group’s thesis is simple: Jesus was a carpenter, his disciples fisherman and a tax collector; they clearly had some experience with the working life. Between them, they built the biggest corporation in the ancient world. So why not use the Bible as a manual for business success? In the eyes of these true believers, asking ‘What would Jesus do at work?’ is the best way to bring ethics back to the boardroom.”

The point was made by Michael Blanding in a June, 2005 piece in Boston Magazine. And as Blanding noted, the parking lots outside of Marketplace Network events typically are “crammed with Lexuses and Mercedeses,” and at one such event he spied “Boston anchorwoman turned minister Liz Walker . . . Brad Warner – the former head of Bank America’s small business division – as well as the former chief operating officer of the New England Patriots, several Harvard professors, and the former head of Raytheon.”

Yet, as depressing as all this may be, after some more reflection I concluded that my unease with the topic stemmed less from its association with a personally distasteful brand of evangelical Christianity than from the subtle feelings of guilt which accompanied my dawning recognition that I had never given the subject much serious thought and had absolutely no idea how to approach the topic, especially with an audience of non-lawyers, i.e., I couldn’t do the usual and avoid the topic by focusing on legal arcania.

As I prepared for that little talk I was to give at my church I came upon an article - The Meaning of Vocation, by A.J. Conyers, published in 2004 by The Center for Christian Ethics at Baylor University - which discussed what Christians have historically meant by the term “vocation,” which is rooted in the Latin vocati, meaning a “call,” a “summons,” or “invitation.” The Greek word is klesis, the root of our words “cleric” and “ecclestical.”

Professor Conyers noted that Dietrich Bonhoeffer – a German Lutheran pastor and theologian who participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler, among other things, before he was hung by the Nazis - made the point that after the Protestant Reformation the notion of “vocation” had come to have a secular as well as a sacred meaning. In fact, Bonhoeffer thought it had become too secular in meaning. As he saw it, the New Testament sense of vocation was “never a sanctioning of worldly institutions as such; its ‘yes’ to them always includes at the same time an extremely emphatic ‘no,’ an extremely sharp protest against the world.”

Professor Conyers made several points about the traditional meaning of vocation which present a striking contrast to my state of mind when choosing a career. First, he noted that vocation traditionally implied a call from an agent outside of the one who is subject to the call, and he went on to describe the various types of external calls recited in the Bible – from Abraham, to Moses, to Isaiah to the baptism of Jesus, etc…

Compare this notion of an external call to what one learns or intuits about vocation at many liberal arts colleges. At Columbia College, for instance, they were always telling us how great we were. I remember during Freshman orientation sitting in the very impressive rotunda of Low Library as some dean or famous alumnus explained that I should look to my left and right and then quoted some specific odds that one of the people I had just looked at would end up making a significant contribution to the country - as an author, or a senator or some such thing. By the way, I have no idea where he got those odds or what he meant by “significant contribution” and the guy sitting next to me looked like he was going to end up in jail (and I was not sitting next to Barack Obama, who graduated three years after me). The point is they were always doing that sort of self-congratulatory thing. I guess if you were destined to be a master of the universe you were more than qualified to decide on a career without benefit of some external "call."

Professor Conyers put the point in historical context when he noted that “the specific way the Enlightenment used reason was as a replacement for the idea of vocation. One could make reasoned choices. The true locus of personal decisions was to be found in the individual who ‘thinks for himself,’ as Kant would put it, and who declines to depend upon the guidance of another.’ While vocation contradicts the will of the person being called, reason is the instrument by which the modern person thought his will could be enforced.”

Second, Professor Conyers noted that the summons of a true vocation is often against the will of the one who is called into service and typically involves a path of extreme hardship. This is precisely the opposite of what my generation’s parents told their kids, either explicitly or more often, implicitly. The American Dream was and is in one sense all about avoiding hardship. The immigrant experience hard-wired into our culture is in this respect bourgeois to the core. We sacrifice now so our children can eat bon bons later, not be crucified or persecuted, or even have too much credit card debt for that matter.

And finally, Professor Conyers noted that the danger of ignoring a vocational summons posed a threat not primarily to the individual, but more importantly to the achievement of a greater communal purpose. As he noted, the biblical concern with the call of God was always bound up in the needs of the community rather than the individual.

Novelist Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead, among others, wrote an essay a decade ago suggesting that we have been the victims of a profound cultural shift and have literally sold our souls without knowing it. (The essay was entitled The Way We Work, The Way We Live and was published in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought (Houghton Mifflin 1998). Robinson makes the point that after enacting progressive labor laws to protect the vulnerable we have become slaves to consumerism and all work longer hours than we did 25 years ago. As a result, there is no time for family or for the maintenance of cultural institutions which preserve cultural identity, which historically has been the role of the extended family and organized religion. Robinson claims that the breakdown of the extended family has been especially poignant because:

“the biological family is especially compelling to us because it is, in fact, very arbitrary in its composition. I would never suggest so rude an experiment as calculating the percentage of one's relatives one would actually choose as friends, the percentage of one's relatives who would choose one as their friend. And that is the charm and the genius of the institution. It implies that help and kindness and loyalty are owed where they are perhaps by no means merited. Owed, that is, even to ourselves. It implies that we are in some few circumstances excused from the degrading need to judge others' claims on us, excused from the struggle to keep our thumb off the scales of reciprocity.”

She went on to note that:

“we have theologized our own economic system, transforming it into something rigid and tendentious and therefore always less useful to us [like the Communist systems we have so ardently opposed]. It is an American style, stripped-down, low-church theology, its clergy largely self-ordained, golf-shirted, the sort one would be not at all surprised and only a little alarmed to find on one's doorstep. Its teachings are very, very simple: There really are free and natural markets where the optimum value of things is assigned to them; everyone must compete with everyone; the worthy will prosper and the unworthy fail; those who succeed while others fail will be made deeply and justly happy by this experience, having had no other object in life; each of us is poorer for every cent that is used toward the wealth of all of us; governments are instituted among people chiefly to interfere with the working out of these splendid principles.
This is such a radical obliteration of culture and tradition--let us say, of Jesus and Jefferson--as to awe any Bolshevik, of course. But then contemporary discourse is innocent as a babe unborn of any awareness of culture and tradition, so the achievement is never remarked. It is nearly sublime, a sort of cerebral whiteout.”

Interestingly, although lawyers have written endlessly about professional ethics, hardly any of the literature deals with whether or not the choice of which legal career to pursue is itself subject to ethical scrutiny, or considers the relative powerlessness of many young lawyers (or for that matter, bankers or financial analysts) via a vis their bosses and/or the odious clients of the firms they work for. This myopia is itself the result of professional indoctrination. After three years of learning how to think within a very particular box, we shouldn’t be surprised when our brightest lawyers and financial gurus actually do so. That is why the decision to attend professional school, or later, the career decision that takes one to either Wall Street or to say the public defender’s office, is so significant. A surprising amount of what follows will be beyond your control.

The point was made in a 2001 paper by Professor Andrew M. Perlman of Suffolk University Law School entitled A Career Choice Critique of Legal Ethics Theory. To over-simplify Professor Perlman, although the tobacco industry or the handgun industry or any number or other odious industries is entitled to your zealous advocacy once you are their attorney, is the decision to take them on as a client ethically proper in the first place? And as a practical matter, doesn’t the first year associate at the big firm have to do exactly what he or she is told (within, of course, certain very limited parameters)?

I’m not sure when we lost this more meaningful concept of vocation, or whether it ever was ours to lose in the first place. Today’s consumer culture is in many respects the result of a general loss of meaning and individual autonomy which has been grist for the mill of sociologists since at least the fifties, whether it be David Reisman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny in The Lonely Crowd (Doubleday Anchor 1950) or Rollo May in Man’s Search for Himself (New American Library 1953). No doubt the loss has been gradual but I do not think it would be overstating the case to say that our recent economic disasters - from the savings and loan scandals to the Enron debacle to the current subprime morass - can be traced to this loss. We have seen our brightest minds siphoned off by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Arnold & Porter to do what exactly? And to what end, to show-off their amazingly extravagant lifestyles?

Unfortunately, it will be much easier to stimulate the economy and to regulate the financial sector than it will be to reverse the more serious consequences of the “cerebral whiteout” brought about by the ascendancy of our consumer culture and its thirty-year infatuation with free market fundamentalism (which may give new meaning to President Obama’s recent crack about Nancy Reagan’s White House seances). However, I fear that without addressing these more serious consequences, the effect of any fiscal stimulus or regulatory effort will be fleeting.

Copyright @ 2009 Anthony F. Cottone.