Some years ago, while delayed at an airport, I sat near a man in a jumpsuit washing the huge plate glass windows that opened onto the tarmac. I watched as he soaped a section of window and wiped the soap away, moving his squeegee in an elaborate pattern that extinguished every trace of soapy water. He worked across the window with the grace of a ballet dancer, leaving the glass clear, spotless, and shining behind him.

When I lived in a religious community (Madonna House in Combermere, Ontario), one of the tasks I loved most was cleaning the large metal counter called “the scraping table.” Dirty pots and pans were left on the table to be scrubbed. Those washing the dishes would stand at the counter and “scrape” the dishes, scrubbing off the bits of food to prepare them to be washed and rinsed without wrecking the dishwater.

To clean the soapy water and food from the scraping table after dishes were done required a technique. The technique had a few simple instructions; following them could take years to perfect. One spread soapy water over the table and carefully squeegeed it off, working from one end to the other. Done right, the table would shine as if it had been newly forged and polished. Done imperfectly, it would be dull or—worse—be striped with streaks of soap.

I would be hard-pressed to explain the intensity of my desire to clean the scraping table until it gleamed like a jewel. Yet I am sure that the airport window-washer understood it well. If an old friend or relative worked as a window washer at the airport, we might view them with a touch of pity—it is lowly work by our lights. Yet it would be hard to maintain an attitude of pity while watching the man dance across the terminal, leaving perfection in his wake. The meaning of his work was evident, to him and to me.

• • •

The Catholic tradition, following the suggestions of Plato and Aristotle, distinguishes work from leisure. Work is “servile”—it is a mere means to an end. The end of ends is leisure, where human beings act for the sake of acting and live for the sake of living. Leisure matters in and of itself. Human flourishing is structured by leisured activity. Work without leisure is scarcely a human life at all.

What exactly is menial or servile work? One might think it is any action that is a means to an end. For instance, my job at a gas station is a means to an end—I wouldn’t work there if it weren’t for the money. Alternately, I might think of an action that one might want only conditionally. In this case, my (say) feeding the homeless is only conditionally valuable—if homelessness were abolished, the work would be pointless. On this account, exercise is servile, as is housecleaning, including the lovely tasks of washing windows or wiping tables. So too would be the various forms of service: helping, healing, comforting, teaching. The only truly free activities would be totally self-contained: thought thinking itself, or at least the human intellect gazing upon God in his essence.

Something seems to be wrong with the traditional argument of work and leisure. I say this as someone whose career, such as it is, rests on that argument, or a version of it. It seems not able to explain the joy of small practical tasks, or the rich meaning of a life spent in service.

• • •

The earliest version of the distinction between work and leisure appears in Plato’s Theaetetus. Socrates praises the life of the philosopher, who always has enough time to consider things as they are. Socrates says:

It does not matter to such men if they talk for a day or a year, if only they may hit on that which is.

He contrasts this man with a “man of the law courts”, who lives in slavery by contrast with the philosopher’s freedom:

But the other, the man of the law courts, is always in a hurry when he is talking; he has to speak with one eye on the clock. Besides, he can’t make his speeches on any subject he likes; he has his adversary standing over him, armed with compulsory powers and the sworn statement, which is read out point by point as he proceeds, and must be kept to by the speaker.

The “lawyer”—let’s call him—shows his lack of freedom in two ways. First, he is in a hurry—he is a sort of slave to the clock. Second, he cannot say whatever he wants. He is bound both by the procedure—described here as a point-by-point response to the accusation—and, as Socrates goes onto say, by the judge or jury to whom his words must be pleasing. The judge or jury is his “master.”

The talk is always about a fellow-slave, and is addressed to a master, who sits there holding some suit or other in his hand. And the struggle is never a matter of indifference; it always directly concerns the speaker, and sometimes life itself is at stake. Such conditions make him keen and highly strung, skilled in flattering the master and working his way into his favor; but cause his soul to become small and warped.¹

On the account in the Theaetetus, the slavery of menial work has to do with meeting the standards set by other human beings rather than by one’s own desire for the truth. Servility in this case is not metaphorical: there is a literal master who the lawyer serves, the judge or jury whom he must please.

One might wonder whether a condition of responsiveness to the judgement of another is always servile. Consider teaching and learning. Is the student servile, bound by necessity to please his teacher? We see mere teacher-pleasing as well as mere student-pleasing as ways in which the educational endeavor might fail. Education is neither flattery nor entertainment.

It matters, in the end, who benefits from the practice, as well as the nature and quality of the benefit. Teaching done well is for the sake of the student, with an eye to the student eventually developing for himself his own version of the teacher’s habits of mind. In this respect, teaching resembles parenting—it is a replacement process. Socrates’ lawyer, by contrast, must please for the sake of his success, victory in court, his fee, and such success costs him his freedom, his human flourishing. Such a lawyer does not operate under the guise of justice, but something far less than that.
Teaching is not always done well. Ten years ago I gave up one form of academic life for another, leaving a career as a research academic in a public university for the life of a teacher in a liberal arts college. Both lives were in some sense the life of the mind. But in the former case, the students needed my class to graduate; they were not motivated to absorb the skills I might be able to pass on to them. Regardless, the classes were much too large for any such passing-on to take place, apart from the few students who sought it out. Both teacher and student had incentives to please one another; neither had the incentive to seek any real good from teaching or learning.

By contrast, liberal arts is characterized by a heavy load of other-directed teaching work, helping students to think through challenging material, in small groups or one-on-one. I have incentives to seek the student’s good, and moreover, I have the resources to do it. In some sense, both types of teaching are instrumental, yet it took a major conversion for me to choose the latter over the former. That is because, in our depraved and corrupted society, the latter type of work is far less prestigious and the pay substantially lower.

• • •

Let’s hypothesize that the difference between servile work like Plato’s lawyer and the beautiful usefulness of the airport window washer has to do with providing a recognizable human good. Clean and beautiful spaces to live and work in, health and well-being, physical fitness, intellectual growth, and justice all count as such goods. Garbage collectors do such work, as well as those entrepreneurs that develop or sell something of real value: lights that flash yellow when a car is in your blind spot, cancer treatments, electric dishwashers, eyeglass repair kits.

My hypothetical definition of work as an activity that serves the human good of course runs afoul of the apparent variations in the human good. In ancient times, temples where infants might be sacrificed to the gods may have seemed to serve the human good; now perhaps they would not, or at any rate, we do not call them “temples.” We make mistakes, individually and collectively, as to our good. Yet basic necessities like food, drink, clothing, and housing seem universal and timeless, as do art, music, study, and worship. We must not let the stochastic and imperfect way we judge the human good be used to justify practices that either serve no recognizable good or that produce recognizable harm.

One of the features of work environments in the contemporary US—and I suspect, in Europe as well if not everywhere—is that recognizable goods are served through highly flawed institutions, to the point where the original function of the institution may seem to be lost. The most dramatic example is the Large Language Model university, where an institution meant to form the young for work and for civic life becomes a living joke, where the teachers use machines to generate content so that students may pretend to absorb it.² In the end, an empty credential or degree is exchanged for cash. An institution designed and built to make our communities function better by passing on essential skills and habits now sucks cash out of the economy in a sort of pyramid scheme.

Speak with workers or professionals regularly and there are other, perhaps less dramatic, malformations of institutions against their mission. In health care, in law and politics, in agriculture or in ministry, institutions can consume their founding good rather than nurturing it. I regularly have conversations with people inclined to a form of service who find that employment in the designated institutions is an exercise in frustration and disillusionment. They cannot find the good they seek through the tasks they are expected to perform.

One way in which my hypothetical definition is useful, then, is to inspire the reform of institutions so that they are aligned with their original missions, the human good or goods such an institution exists to serve.

However, the hypothetical definition also exposes a more timeless and stubborn difficulty. It can hardly escape notice that the most useful types of work, where the human good served is most transparent, have the lowest prestige and the worst working conditions. Consider garbage collecting, cleaning bathrooms, the work of a home health aid, or work in grocery stores or restaurants. Is there any work less prestigious? Yet an investor who does nothing but buy low and sell high, guided by luck and acumen, pulling wealth out of the community to a dimension far out of proportion to what he puts in, is honored, paid well, and given vast amounts of power.

If we were better trained, or trained ourselves, to think from the bottom up about the human good, could we have a hope of reversing this perverse set of incentives, the machinery of so many forms of gross injustice?

• • •

Let’s return to the condition of a contemporary service worker, for instance, a line-cook in a diner. The cook must cook food that pleases the customer and his employer. The two masters may give orders in tension with one another: the employer may want the food made cheaply in a way that is less delicious to the customer. In this respect, the line-cook looks as slavish as Plato’s lawyer.
Yet neither of the line-cook’s masters is necessarily concerned with the objective purpose of cooking, to supply the needs of a hungry human being with an eye to nutrition and pleasure. (In the good order I imagine, both criteria must be satisfied, not one at the expense of the other.) In most cases, in fact, the customer’s good is subordinate to the bottom line, rather than the bottom line being determined by the customer’s good. It can be easier to supply a pleasing appearance, low light, gimmicks, a sense of being in a fashionable place, food that is either prestigious (with high-end obscure ingredients) or pleasing without being nutritious (lobster mac-and-cheese).

I warrant that the line-cook’s own well-being, the sense in which his or her work serves his or her happiness, depends on the concern of whoever governs the restaurant. In those cases where the owner or manager takes a central concern for the good of the eater, the cook will be able to perfect her craft under the guise of another’s good. The customer’s recognition that his own good is satisfied feeds the owner’s bottom line; the cook’s struggle for excellence is under the guise of the same good; all the right things coincide.

• • •

It should be obvious that service work—or any work—aimed at the genuine good for human beings is rare. Corrupt or depraved institutions, aimed at producing appearances of satisfaction for the sake of the maintenance of a given revenue structure, are far more common. It is of course possible within such an institution to work with one’s own solitary eye on the human good. So the fast-food worker who treats his customers with care; the exploited adjunct who takes time with her students; the hidden hotel custodian who leaves a carpet spotless.

The general depravity and corruption of our institutions obscures the original notion of servile work. High-prestige work, unlike service work, is often extremely empty: it is busywork, box-checking, or fulfilling imaginary roles in imaginary projects. The management consultant may find a way to help a client in truth, but the incentives all lie in the direction of pretending to help by moving arbitrarily chosen metrics. Such work, like the work of Plato’s lawyer, is purely instrumental, or even worse, devoted to fantasy pleasures, enchantment by words like “compliance”, “effectiveness” or “efficiency” and by the charms of high pay and high status.

• • •

I began with the distinction between work and leisure, and ended up distinguishing two kinds of work, hollow work and real work, aimed at a human good. I suspect that if we lived in a world of real work, leisure would seem less important. The human goods have a luminosity that inspires us to perfect our work, knowing that its perfection is part of its benefit. Such a vision of work makes the end of leisure more visible—after all, the beauty of such work, and the splendor of a developing and developed human being, are worthy of contemplation in their own right.