Integrity at work: Many Americans seek fulfillment by working for material wealth, but only those who find a work worth doing -- and do it well -- gain integrity and true happiness. (First Principles).

There comes a time when only the audacity of a parable and a symbol can make the fact live as a truth. Therefore, to realize the integrity of man in relation to his work, let me dare to fashion a parable to be my symbol.

There was once a man who sought perfection in his work. He had no high-falutin ambition - for him perfection even in something minor was enough, if it enlisted his highest artistry. So he sought to fashion a ring of pure silver in which should be set a stone of pure turquoise, both so selected and blended and fashioned that the eyes that saw it or the finger that wore it should know in that one small ring the blessing of perfected beauty. He knew that the happiness of man does not come when he "kills time" but only when he makes time live. He knew the serene zest of the spirit that is willing to devote a lifetime to a single work, finding in such artistry the goal and the reward, beyond all payment or praise. So he sought over the world for the purest silver and the richest turquoise, forgetting the years and the decades and finding even the centuries brief, until around him the generations had passed and the fashions of the world had grown old and were gone. And when he had found the silver that pleased him , he melted the silver, and purified it, and hammered it, and shaped it, till it seemed like a ring made out of the stuff of the moon. Then he set delicately and yet firmly in it a stone that was blue as a mountain lake amid mountain snows.

And as he worked, he ignored death and transcended life, and so age looked over his shoulder, breathless with delight, and neglected to touch the artist in its absorption with the art. The decades and the centuries, in the mood of Eternity, became a part of the ring. Men who did not seek perfection, but merely pay or praise, completed their little works, and such works and workers faded. Only equal artists and arts - the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, the cathedrals of Chartres and Rouen, the marbles of Michelangelo, the canvases of Rembrandt, the plays of Shakespeare ... and the humble housewife baking bread with love and joy, or the farmer eighty years old planting new orchards over his hills - remained as his co-eternalists. The error of man's follies dissolved like shadows around him, for only beauty is truth, and only truth is beauty. And still the artist of the ring worked on, ageless, timeless, beyond pain or pleasure, failure or success, in the bliss of creation.

And at last he said, "All that I can do is done; the ring is at last a ring!" It was only then that he wondered if there were any finger to wear that to which he has given his love and labor. And he heard a Voice beyond all voices, and he saw a Finger beyond all fingers; and the Voice said, "Set it upon My finger, and I will wear it forever and forever."

That ring is now a new galaxy of suns and planets, shining in beauty upon the Hand of God.

Make a Life - Not a "Living"

This parable suggests, humbly and far off, the integrity of man in relation to his work.

As I said in a previous essay, a man's life turns outward toward his work, and becomes thus the outward incarnation of his essential inward word (logos). That work, no matter how humble it may seem, will give his life quality, value, and meaning -- for it will fulfill his inner destiny -- if it is a form of artistry that projects his inner aptitude into outer accomplishment. Man finds himself, man fulfills himself, in his work; man is happy only as he finds a work worth doing -- and does it well.

In the greatest symbol we have of the beginning of the world and life, Adam is set in a garden, to dress it and to keep it. In that ancient story, the fundamental vision of life is this: Earth is a garden or a workshop or a laboratory or a canvas on which to paint or a page on which to write, and man is the artist of such labor and such artistry. Of course there should be spontaneity and freedom and joy in his work -- the color on the plume, the song on the lips, the aspect of play; but still this free spontaneity centers around a work that is serious, around the intense creation of a pattern that may perfect and incarnate meaning and validity. The integrity of man's life comes when he develops such art to accomplish such work.

The happy man is he who finds a work that he loves and expresses in it his own essential word. Only so does he find integrity. The kind of work will vary with the kind of man. For Corot it will be to surprise and incarnate the magic of Romance hidden like a Dryad amid misty morning trees; for Monet the white-and-gold waterlilies upon the Seine, lilac in the evening; for the artisan of the Toledo blade it will be to fashion a sword worthy for heroes to wear; for Johnny Appleseed it will be to plant apples in a land where before no orchards grew; for the housewife it will be to prepare "many-tasting food," or to make the bed with "the cool kindliness of sheets" that "soon smooth away trouble"; for Washington it will be to free the child of the Republic by the Caesarian operation of war. For the farmer, the businessman, the textile worker, the builder of jets, the architect, the mechanic, it will be to do the practical work of the world, bearing Earth upon his shoulders like Atlas, the good giant. For any true workman, the goal will not be the "rewards" of "success" but the accomplishment of his art.

Much of the unhappiness of man today comes because he has lost this essential characteristic of man the artist and artisan -- "the joy of the working." Man speaks often of a "high standard of living" -- but seldom (if ever) of a high standard of life. He works to heap up abundance and affluence, as if that were the real essence of work in itself; but men play with that abundance too often as pampered poodles play with their kibbles, and do not dance to the music of the spheres where the morning stars sang together in the morning of the world. Today our difficulty is that many men make a living -- but few men make a life.

The greatest answer, indeed, to the contemporary Titans who would storm Heaven and lay waste the world -- to the nihilists of "revolution" -- to the traitors who betray and the Communists who enslave -- is to restore to man the truth of vision and the essence of action. The renaissance of man, which is the only hope for man and for the destiny that God has set in his heart, is to renew in him the sense of integrity in his work.

The Artistry of Action

To the Hebrews, and to the Christians, God is the potentia Qua, the power at the origin of all things, who says of creation Let it be, and it is. God is the Master of all Good Workmen, for He is Himself the Master Workman, the Creator, the Poet (i.e., "the Maker," as the Greek meaning is) of the Poem of Creation.

The great anonymous Hebrew seer told us that God looked upon His work and saw that it was good, which is the finest word in all the world about the joy of the artist in his work.

Especially to the good Hebrew and to the genuine Christian, creation is a thing of high seriousness, that extends through time and into that right-angle to time which we call Eternity. Ideas have consequences; actions have consequences. These consequences abide and endure; they follow us through this life and beyond this life; our works, for good or evil, abide and stand and follow us forever. Our works, therefore, are of major meaning. They are a part of our metaphysical being, our essential I AM.

In the great eras of the West, in the rise of the Dark Ages into the Ages of Light, in the splendid pageantry of the Middle Ages, in the Renaissance, in the creation of the architecture of the cathedrals and in the art of Leonardo and Michelangelo, in the Divine Comedy of Dante, the Don Quixote of Cervantes, the plays of Shakespeare, in the daring suppositions of the science that rereads the logic God first set in Nature, in the voyage of Columbus and the audacity of the Conquistadors and the Cavaliers and the Pilgrims, we see the West seeking the lightnings -- or the sunlight -- of great deeds. Western man, while he was vital and real, loved to create and to build, to find his inward integrity by fulfilling his destiny in outward action.

As long as man found his fulfillment in the artistry of action he could safely enjoy the acquisitions that came from action, for he was constantly renewing creation as the peach tree or the wheat field renews the harvest with every year and season in the fruitful poem of seedtime and harvest. Today we are more concerned with affluence -- the richness of the product, the wealth that is the consequence of work -- than with achievement, which is artistry in creation. A sad sign of the decadence of Western man is his satisfaction with, and emphasis on, the "high standard of living" that capitalism provides, as if that were the real justification of capitalism. The distinction between capitalism and Communism does not lie only, or even chiefly, in the higher economic standard of living that capitalism provides. Of course that higher standard of living exists; of course that higher standard of living is an excellent thing. Professor John Kenneth Galbraith attacks "affluence" as something wrong, which should be dra ined off from private enjoyment into public use (this is collectivism), but I do not agree with him. The affluence that capitalism provides is excellent; we should be proud of it, and private man should enjoy it in private ways!

But capitalism itself is decadent and in peril if it ever emphasizes affluence as an end and not as the casual result of something vaster and more vital: The artistry of work. The affluence of our production will not long continue if we stress product and not production, if we emphasize the good things poured Out of the cornucopia, and not the good workman who joys to pour those things into the cornucopia.

The emphasis today, in capitalism when it decays, is on "60,000,000 jobs" -- and not on man's delight in his work. "Jobs," in themselves, may mean little; does man do those jobs with integrity, does he create with joy, does he love his work and find his work a destiny? We think that men can be happy, and that "the Great Society" will come, if we make every man an economic king by subsidies and unearned affluence, with no realization that a man must be a king in a work that he loves to do and in a creation that gives him a sense of pride and mastery. And then we wonder that men are unhappy, and restless, and that they say: "Give me more -- but ask me to do less!"

If capitalism justifies itself only by its "high standard of living," it will not enlist the soul of man; it will not even long preserve its "high standard of living." Capitalism, at its best, seeks risk, adventure, freedom to strive and compete, daring, creation -- and it must make man happy in the work he does, it must give him a true "joy in the working." Other ages did not bring so much affluence; but they did preserve more artistry.

Unfortunately, in our decadence, we often seek the wrong way to achieve the right goal. Our goal should be life at a higher voltage, life "Immense in passion, pulse, and power." Our means to this too often, today, is to seek to get more for doing less; to see in the products of work the meaning of work, or in the profits of work the reason for work. Many of our labor unions, it seems, are mostly concerned with pay day and quitting time; with more reward for less production; with more fringe benefits, more dollars in the pay envelope, more pudding and pie, but less perspiration and no inspiration. The real flaw in industrial capitalism is not that the worker gets too little of the product, but that the worker finds too little fulfillment in the production. He should say: "Let us together, management and labor, somehow find a way of making work more significant, more interesting, more personal, so that once more a workman can find the pride of an artist and artisan, so that once more he may find the joy of fulf illing himself in the product he makes." If he should say this and if (with management) he could bring this about, in the end he would find his production increased and so his share of the product greater. But meanwhile, and more important, he would find again his integrity in the work itself, and so his happiness as a man.

Of course Communism, socialism, and welfare "Liberalism," compound all that is bad in capitalism, making it worse to the nth degree. They add a greater emphasis on the "satisfaction" of economics with less economic product to provide for that "satisfaction"; they bring in (necessarily) the coercion of the State to take the place of the motivation of profit; and they make man unhappier than ever before.

Communism hypocritically promises to make men free, affluent, and happy by collectivizing the farm and nationalizing the industry. But the creative genius of man is stifled and dehydrated and unhappy on the "collective farm," or the Chinese commune, or the State-ruled factory; it registers that rebellion and unhappiness by doing as little work as possible, like a canny mule refusing to pull, so that the collective farm will never feed the population and the nationalized industry will never supply the human need. But the same mulish recalcitrants will do a wonderful work if they are allowed their own little backyards of independence and private property, where they can be "every inch a king" and express their destiny by raising cabbages and tomatoes to their hearts' desire. Collectivism performs a lobotomy upon man, so at best he works like a slave in a coma or a zombie with a hoe. The result is no production to speak of and an apathetic distaste for the artistry of work

So we return to the essential question: The integrity of man in relation to his work. Until that question is answered and that destiny fulfilled -- until we rediscover the ancient and unchanging truth of things and the root of the matter -- we shall perpetuate our present adult delinquency. That is the cause of the decline of the West, of the apathy and unhappiness that lead us to help the West commit suicide.

The Poetry of Life

The best thing about the industrial revolution has been that it increased the affluence of man; the worst thing about the industrial revolution has been that it decreased the artistry of man. A sense of destiny in the individual, a sense of talent and initiative, a sense of craftsmanship that makes one proud -- all this has decreased. Men on the assembly lines of industry too often come to seem to themselves mere utilities and appurtenances and half-conscious dummies, not artisans and craftsmen and masterworkmen. Compare them with a silversmith like Paul Revere or an artisan of furniture like Duncan Phyfe! And men, in the too often blind reaction of their distaste for this, have tried to compensate for it by the wrong solutions -- by falsely calling themselves "wageslaves" and by demanding only less hours and more pay.

Now there is no easy solution. The expanded populations of the world will necessitate mass production if their needs are to be met. Therefore the assembly line will have to continue. The coarsening of work that is inseparable from mass production will have to continue. The lessening of individual significance in mass production will therefore continue. The question, finally, must be raised out of economics and into the spirit; it will be this: How, in the nature of modern production in industry, can man find some spiritual motivation or mood which will give him again a sense of integrity even in the worst phases of modern industry?

There is always going to be some work that has less interest for men than it should. Upton Sinclair, in his sentimental The Jungle, sees this even where it doesn't exist, in the preparing of food and the washing of dishes in the home; and, like all collectivists, he sees the solution in "co-operative" kitchens that will do the cooking for everybody, or "communal" dish-washing machines that will do the job for everybody. How much he and his like miss! The real problem does not lie in dishwashing which can be quite interesting work, where you can cleanse beloved china, "ringed with blue lines, clean-gleaming," or in cooking, which is an art and a love. The real problem lies outside the home. Garbage will have to be removed. Subway trains will have to run in Manhattan. Coal will have to be mined or oil barrelled. Nuts will have to be tightened on bolts. Stenographers will have to take dictation (a much less artistic work than cooking!); checkout girls will be necessary in supermarkets. Such is the way of all fl esh. No automation is going to abolish such work, though it may (I hope) mitigate it. How, then, can we find integrity in such chores of life?

I say flatly that only a religious meaning in life will make us happy and integral in some of the world's work. An old inscription, surely Christian, reads: "Lift the stone, or cleave the wood, and I am there." A knowledge that for the organic life of the world certain unpleasant work must be done, and a consecration to that work for the good of man and the glory of God, will alone bring integrity into some of the world's drudgery.

A workman who feels in his work a divine meaning can do any work that is sound in nature and necessary for the organic good of the world, and find his integrity in the work.

But today the men who most insist on the industrial process to provide affluence are often spiritual nihilists who do all they can to scorn or wreck and destroy any religious conception of life. How, then, can they compensate for the bleak unhappiness of man in mere industrialism, in the assembly line, in production without individual artistry? How will they get the affluence, if men are no longer happy in their work and ask ever more of the product with ever less production? Where will they get the products to pour out in subsidies if men no longer have interest in doing the work that alone can provide the subsidies? If there is no spiritual meaning, and if the work has to be done willy-nilly, the only possible answer will be the answer the Communists give: brute compulsion, the goon squad and the bayonet, slave labor and the concentration camp, the omnipotent State, the world of 1984.

Always, till the end of the world, the only way of making some of the world's work a thing of quality, value, and meaning, will be the religious sense: "Lift the stone, and cleave the wood, and! am there."

There is a second answer, akin to the first - for it also is spiritual. It is the answer that poetry, philosophy, art in the individual soul, can give. Spinoza made his daily bread by grinding lenses, and did that work faithfully and well; then, having made his living by a lesser work, he made a life by a greater work -- by fashioning a majestic philosophy. Thus man can live his life on dual levels -- and if workmen use their leisure, which they are right in seeking, for something significant in itself -- writing poetry, painting pictures, raising roses, fashioning bird houses and feeders to bring birds to their yards, having a vegetable garden, building a library of their own, learning a foreign language, fighting Communism, etc., etc., they may find integrity because they both make a living and a life. It is best if your vocation is your avocation too; but if that cannot be, do your vocation well so that you may be free to develop your avocation richly.

In North Thompson, Connecticut, we trade at a store excellently run by a man and his wife, who do both the planning and the work, a store which is eminently successful. Mrs. Pauline Godzik, the wife, is a most efficient member of the partnership. But she has also discovered in herself that "one talent which tis death to hide." She has within her the destiny to paint, and she developed in herself that destiny to a degree of splendid accomplishment. The walls of the store have become the walls of an art gallery, hung with scores of paintings that she has fashioned with love and skill in the intervals of a busy life. If I know anything about art -- and it is one of my major studies and interests -- she is an artist of worth and distinction. She will not sell her paintings, though she has been offered high prices, because she loves them. This avocation of hers has not hurt her vocation, but helped it; her vocation has not interfered with her avocation, but helped it. And she has found more meaning in life, more h appiness in living, more fulfillment of destiny, than most people I know. But, even in a lesser degree, many others could find her way to make not only a living but also a life.

When one thinks of all the nihilists, the "rebels" who run amok after illusions, the rioters and rapers who let loose the grudge and hate in their own sick false narrow hearts, one pities them for their sterile waste of energy. One wishes he could say to them: "Produce, produce, if it be only a carved peach stone!" One wonders how, in this life, they will find a way to enter joyously into the life to come; one wonders how even the Master of All Good Workmen can put them to work anew, when they have said "no" to work and to life itself.

If there is work which no vital man should do, and in which no sensible man can be happy, then let such men be creative rebels! I cannot myself believe that the proliferating bureaucrats under the "Liberal" Establishment -- the tax collectors, the snoopers, the wheels within wheels -- can ever be happy in their nonsense "work." And I'd like to hear them all say: "Better perish than make a 'living' by losing a life! I'll scratch a subsistence living out of five stony-lonesome acres, I'll wash cars or run a filling-station, I'll raise earthworms, I'll make little brass cannons and sell them, but I won't be a well-paid functionary in the Circumlocution Office." If they only would so speak, as men should, the "Liberal" Establishment would end like the soap-bubble it is -- pricked by the pin of integrity.

In this connection, one should remember the destiny of the good soldier. He certainly makes a meager living and he may make a gory death. But if he is the man he should be, he will feel in the defense of his country, in the war with the perpetrators of darkness at noon, a destiny and a meaning. And that will give him integrity that will make his skill and his courage a quality and a value. He will, even if he dies, live.

There is one more thing to say. In our lives, and not only in our work, the value subsists not in the fact but in the truth, not in the realism but in the romance, not in the prose but in the poetry. What this false and petty age of the "Liberal" Establishment most lacks is the poetry of life. We have forgotten that a "fact" is not -- a truth. The "fact" is that even the best violin is a concatenation of wood and catgut; the truth is that a man named Stradivarius touched it with his genius, and so it is a magical treasure-house of beautiful sound. The "fact" is that Emily Dickinson lived in Amherst, was a member of the species homo sapiens, weighed so many pounds and ounces, and was so many feet and inches tall; the truth is that she wore the sandals of the sun and wrote the greatest poetry of any woman in America. The "fact" is that the farmer raises so many bushels of potatoes or wheat; the truth is that he is a co-worker with the rain and the sun and the loam, and with God who said, "Let there be light." The fallacy of the modern is to enthrone the "fact" and betray the truth.

Vision and Destiny

To find integrity in our work let us cease to look toward the reward and let us look toward the work. Usually in the history of the world those who have done the greatest work have received the least reward: But what of that? They have been the most blessed of men, and from the life beyond the world not one of them would change his destiny. What reward, in "praise or pudding," came to the great anonymous benefactors of man who discovered fire or fashioned the wheel? And in later days and years, think of the master workmen of the world: Remember Browning's question, "What porridge had John Keats?" Cervantes discovered and incarnated the soul of Spain forever in Don Quixote, but he lived and died a poor maimed soldier, a poet ignored or ridiculed by the fashionable of the day. He was falsely sentenced to prison, and at the end he was considered so negligible that he was buried in an unmarked grave that is lost forever. Don John of Austria, "the last knight of Europe," took weapons from the wall and rode to the sea; he hurled the headlong Turk backward at Lepanto; but the politicians feared his brilliance and his genius, and muffled him in the shadows, and let him eat his heart out in inaction till he died forgotten. Giordano Bruno called himself "The awakener of sleeping souls," and went through life like a sword of the sun; but his reward was to be burned in the physical flame that is the parallel of the spiritual flame. General of the Armies Douglas MacArthur won the war in the Pacific, and returned to the lost lands to restore the honor of America, and would have overthrown the fire-ants of China, but the politicians dismissed him from command and relegated his genius to inaction in a time that supremely demanded action. Too often the few great teachers who (in the Greek phrase) "having torches themselves, hand them on to others," seem nothing to the educational hierarchy, and are tossed aside at the very height of their powers. Columbus, the symbol of the discovery of the New World, lived his last years in chai ns, and the rabble cried while he still walked the streets, "Behold the Admiral of Mosquito Land!" The bravest and wisest anti-Communist in America is traduced not only by his enemies, but sometimes by those who should be his friends, and has to stand like a mighty headland buffeted by blind tides. But what of all that? As Kipling's explorer says:

Have I named one single river?

Have I claimed one single acre?

Have I kept one single nugget --

(barring samples)? No, not I!

Because my Price was paid me ten

times over by my Maker.

But you wouldn't understand it.

You go up and occupy.

The integrity of man lies not in the reaping of the harvest -- but in the sowing of the seed. Only in his joyous work does man find his destiny and his being; he does not have to "go up and occupy," his integrity is to "hear the Whisper."

A contemporary "realist" once -- knowing "the price of everything and the value of nothing" -- asked an acorn: "Why grow?" The acorn, being the realist of Eternity, answered: "To incarnate my destiny, and to fulfill my dream, and to realize my artistry in the century-enduring oak that scorns the lightnings and the winds, and lifts its leaves into the sun, and gives the violet and the little rabbit shade."

E. Merrill Root (1895-1973) was once referred to by Robert Frost as "the second best poet in America." He ant ho red 11 volumes of poetry and numerous other works, including America's Steadfast Dream, a compilation of his essays that appeared in American Opinion magazine (a forerunner of THE NEW AMERICAN). The present article (abridged) originally appeared under the title "Integrity" in the May 1966 issue of American Opinion.