Shadow Work

Following on last week's kerfuffle over the Note on Financial Reform from the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, I thought this piece by Craig Lambert from Sunday's New York Times points toward a way of thinking about the economy in the spirit of Rerum Novarum and the other major social encyclicals:

To be sure, shadow work has its benefits. Bagging one’s own groceries or pumping one’s own gas can save time. Shadow work can increase autonomy and enlarge our repertoire of skills and knowledge. Research on the “Ikea effect,” named for the Swedish furniture manufacturer whose products often require home assembly, indicates that customers value a product more highly when they play a role in constructing it.

Still, doctors routinely observe that one of the most common complaints today is fatigue; a 2007 study pegged its prevalence in the American work force at 38 percent. This should not be surprising. Much of this fatigue may result from the steady, surreptitious accumulation of shadow work in modern life. People are simply doing a huge number of tasks that were once done for them by others.

Doing things for one another is, in fact, an essential characteristic of a human community. Various mundane jobs were once spread around among us, and performing such small services for one another was even an aspect of civility. Those days are over. The robots are in charge now, pushing a thousand routine tasks onto each of our backs.

Perhaps the Church's contribution to debates over the economy shouldn't be so much to give conventional answers and provide authoritative arguments for politicians from the right or left but instead to urge a fundamental rethinking about the hollowing out of our economic life. The concern about the demands and fatigue of shadow work seems promising in that regard, and not surprisingly so--Lambert borrows the concept of "shadow work" from Ivan Illich, the wildly eccentric former Catholic priest and quasi-hero of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age.