The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 6 Pleasure in Work

 

 This is the sixth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the final one of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the other two you can read the first one it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of pleasure in work...

 

To say that work is good for us sounds worryingly like a right-wing newspaper’s headline and as though it should be followed by ‘and so is national service and the cane’, but in actual fact it is true, albeit for very different reasons than they might like to think. Inevitably many newspapers like to focus on the discipline it instils in our lives, the structure and order, which prevents society from falling apart from too much ‘free time’, the income (no matter how meagre) that means the state can be convinced that it does not have to provide support and the ability for each of us to ‘make something of ourselves’, as though a person doesn’t have innate worth whatever their position or talents.

All this is heavy baggage, to the point where I am almost scared to repeat again that work is good for us, or at least could be. We need to reclaim work from the right and draw on the positive aspects allowing us to show what work should and could be. Morris states that ‘it is of the nature of men, when he is not diseased, to take pleasure in his work under certain conditions.’ Work, when allowed to be undertaken in the right way, under the right conditions and within a community, can be a source of great satisfaction and even joy. It is an outlet for our innate desire for creativity and provides the ability for us to make a contribution to the welfare of ourselves, our families and our communities.

However, this is very different to the jobs that most of us do on a day-to-day basis, whose usual sole aim is make money for the company that employs us, often working under unsatisfactory conditions.  Morris, in a wonderful piece of hyperbole, is categorical in his belief that work like this is a such an affront to our humanity that ‘…it would be better for the community and for the worker if the latter were to fold his hands and refuse to work, and either die or let us pack him off to the workhouse or prison – which you will.’

This notion that our work should be pleasurable is so countercultural that to speak of it seem as though we are not grounded in the real world and instead hopeful of some fairy-tale land. It is an accepted truism of modern life that work for the most part is a chore, and we celebrate the heroic worker who each day rises to do battle in the name of commerce. Busyness is the great virtue. Ask someone how work is and watch as their face takes on the expression of great hardship as they tell you just how and why their work life is so busy. And no doubt it is true, but we celebrate this as virtue and something to be proud of, until the breaking point comes anyway. Try telling someone you are not busy and that work is pretty relaxed when they next ask and watch their reaction. Work has to equal suffering and noble is the worker who does not shirk.

But why shouldn’t work be pleasurable? What is stopping it? Morris suggests that actually true labour, as required by nature, is inherently pleasurable and satisfying and that anything less than that is distortion and corruption by those benefiting from our labour. To seek a new way of working is only to try and find the natural balance that nature provides.

 Morris talks of the ‘ornamental part of life’ and it is easy to restrict our thinking to design or patterns or even craft, when actually I think he is trying to express something much broader; no less than the richness of life. It would be a richer experience to make a jumper than to purchase one, for all the reasons we have explored. To care about the materials and their source, to think about the design, to actually spend and invest time in making it, is all part of the ornament of life or to put it in fashionable language part of an authentic life. To engage with others in learning and sourcing or making materials, is part of the ornament of authentic communities. It is the rejection of the utilitarian, which argues with it’s own logic called economics, which says that it is easier and cheaper to buy one made using labour and materials sourced from abroad, utilising the differences in expectations or tolerances of living conditions.

An ornamental life is one where we live with fewer, but much more beautiful things, endued with genuine creativity and love. In a moving passage Morris tells us that we can judge the conditions under which something was made by it’s ‘mark of pleasure’ and that to return that to our work will shine through as a ‘gift to the world’ in the things we produce. This is the great gift of craft and perhaps it’s defining mark.

"Now the origin of this art was the necessity that the workman felt for variety in his work, and though the beauty produced by this desire was a great gift to the world, yet the obtaining variety and pleasure in work by the workman was a matter of more importance still, for it stamped all labour with the impress of pleasure."

 I think for me one of the most exciting things about Morris’ critique of society and our treatment of the environment is it’s ultimate positivity, which contrasts strongly with much of the current discussion, characterised (particularly by those opposed) in terms of what we must ‘give up’. There is no getting around this inconvenient truth, but what Morris says is that actually much of this isn’t as good as we think and that a rebalancing, far from being a negative asceticism, can lead us to a much richer future. It’s this promise, this focus on the positive changes we can make, that makes his writing so attractive and I think contemporary writers and commentators engaging in these issues could learn a lot from that; we have to pull apart the status quo, but we must also present a viable and crucially an attractive alternative. Morris does this and shows that by restructuring our societies we can ensure that everyone has equal share of true wealth:

“Wealth is what Nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of Nature for his reasonable use. The sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it; means of free communication between man and man; works of art, the beauty which man creates when he is most a man, most aspiring and thoughtful - all things which serve the pleasure of people, free, manly, and uncorrupted. This is wealth.”

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 5 Hope of Product

This is the fifth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a short story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on.

This is also the second of three posts exploring the topic of work within the story and we are using William Morris' three requirements of meaningful work; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself. If you missed the first one you can read it by clicking here, otherwise it's on to hope of product...

The twin concepts that Morris gives us of hope of product and hope of pleasure in making that product are, for him, closely related; in fact we could say that it is this very closeness that is at the heart of the arts & crafts movement, and which strikes so many of us as so radical even now. Nonetheless in this article I want to try and tease them apart a bit and focus on hope of product, the idea that our daily efforts should result in something meaningful and useful, which helps meet our needs.

What did you make today I wonder? What will you make tomorrow? The answer to these questions might be quite simple; perhaps you made a loaf of bread or a chair, if you’re a baker or chairmaker. If it isn’t bread or furniture, perhaps you made something else useful, a lamp or a book, a film or a bowl. Maybe you did. But I suspect you didn’t.

On the other hand you could be a nurse or doctor and so you made someone better or comforted them. But even this is quite rare.

Instead I wonder if you did what most people do? Make money; not for yourself, but for the person or persons who employ you.

We all know that someone who works in a high street clothing store doesn’t make clothes, instead their job is to sell clothes or, to be more precise, to encourage you to buy clothes from their shop, rather than the one next door. Think about it next time you go into a clothing shop; what does the assistant actually do, other than encourage you to buy, ensure the clothes are on the rack for you to buy and then take your money?

The same is true for Hugo in our story of course. He doesn’t make mobile phones, he may pretend to advise customers based on their needs, but actually his job is to persuade the public that they should buy from his shop rather than the other three down the street and that you should spend as much as you can. His product is profit for a group of people he is unlikely to ever meet.

What a market economy does (even in its most basic form) is replace the link between what you need and what you then produce. So if I needed a bowl, in a non-market, non-exchange society, I have to make one. And of course for most of human history this is how life worked, but slowly over time (long before capitalism) people started to specialise in making certain things, like bowls, and it maybe that they would make them for certain part of the day/week/year and then exchange the bowl for food or other essentials. However, I think it is fair to say that it was a very, very long time before this transformed into a situation where people only made bowls and never made things or grew food to meet their own needs, which of course is where we find ourselves now.

Another crucial difference is that the bowl maker has need of his bowls – nothing leaves his hands that he could not use or own for his own use. Compare this with the current situation where so many workers are producing goods they could never afford to own or have no use of.

 And so we move onto a capitalist system, where the average worker has two products; whatever it is they do or make and the products that they buy to meet their own needs, with the money they are given for their work. This ever increasing disconnect between the two – the genuine needs you have and the tasks you perform on a daily basis – was a concern to Morris and should be a concern for us now.

Morris, in a wonderfully Victorian passage, describes the situation Hugo find’s himself in:

‘…living as they do on wages from those whom they support, [they] cannot get for their use the goods which men naturally desire, but must put up with miserable makeshifts for them…’

Even if we follow this thinking of a market economy and call the product of Hugo’s labour the money he earns with which to buy a jumper, that is only enough to buy one of poor quality. The jumper is entirely constructed from cheap materials (e.g. cotton) and hence quickly becomes misshapen and worn. The stitching is perhaps weak and done in such haste that it did not catch all along the seams. Because it is mass produced it is made to ‘fit’ as many sizes as possible and so hangs a little on him. But the alternative, a properly fitting jumper, of good quality, made over time from excellent materials would be unaffordable to Hugo. And this is exactly the point Morris is making. He continues:

‘…[they] must put up with miserable makeshifts for them, with course food that does not nourish, with rotten rainment [clothing] which does not shelter, with wretched houses which may well make a town-dweller in civilization look back with regret to the tent of nomad tribe, or the cave of the pre-historic savage.’

The language has changed, but sadly the situation Morris describes has not. Our Bangladeshi worker will almost certainly live in substandard housing, that may well make a tent look plush. She may well be clothed in, at best, her traditional clothing made in a sweatshop in her own country or at worse second-hand clothing the west no longer wants, and yet each day she walks to make jumpers she could never afford. Her actual product (the jumper) is poor and her rewards so meagre that her own living (her product) is pitiful.

Her housing is not made from scrap because it is effective at keeping out the weather and elements, it is because it is cheap. It is cheap housing, because that is all she can afford. It is not unheard of for those in developing countries to have to raise a mortgage to afford a few sheets of corrugated iron to use as a roof.

As ever Morris describes it best:

‘But it is a waste of time to try and express in words due contempt of the productions of the much praised cheapness of our epoch. It must be enough to say that this cheapness is necessary to the system of exploiting on which modern manufacture rests. In other words, our society includes a great mass of slaves, who must be fed, clothed, housed and amused as slaves, and that their daily necessity compels them to make slave-wares whose use is the perpetuation of their slavery.’

How often have you bought something, only for it to break, not work or just be horrible to use, or been constrained by money to buy something you know will not last? True quality is such a rare thing in our societies that it is almost impossible to find, and, when we can, the market system makes the time and care it requires unaffordable. This is one of the key problems that craftspeople face; how can their product, which often takes so many hours to produce, ever be affordable to the general population? And so instead we are presented with cheaper imitations to help us make believe that our lives are richer than they are. Some of this we can counter ourselves; buy less and buy quality, make it yourself so that you don’t have to pay for the time it takes and buy second-hand – where quality doesn’t often reflect the price. And we should do these things, but let us be clear that this is tinkering at the edges, our current system cannot allow us all to reverse this system of cheap manufacturing it relies on.

Planned obsolescence has become a much more widely understood term since Annie Leonard’s excellent ‘Story of Stuff’ (if you haven’t watched it do), but it’s true that in a consumer society, that works by citizens buying new products constantly, the idea of something of quality, that lasts, is against the very principle of the system. And so in short, things have to brake, have to be cheaply made, so that you buy new ones. This is also the reason for constant innovation, as it brings new products to the market – replacing those before. Considered refinement of quality and reliability is much lower down the pecking order than “new!”.

Let us come back to our story and just review where we are. Our Bangladeshi woman’s hope of product is extremely poor, whether we are talking about the poorly made jumper she could not afford, and which she has no emotional attachment to or the meagre shelter, food and clothing she can afford with the money she makes from working at the factory.

Hugo, of course, doesn’t actually make anything, his product is simply profit for his ultimate employers; his ultimate personal product is the jumper that will last one year, which he has no input into the making of and which he has very little emotional attachment to.

And what of Mary? Well her product is very different to the others, because she is able to meet her own needs, through her own effort and skills. The end product is one of excellent quality, fitted to her size and shape, of her own design and suited to her needs. Because of this she has an emotional tie and investment in it, which enriches her experience of owning and wearing it.

Morris isn’t saying (and neither am I) that each of us should be capable of making everything and meeting our every need. In fact Morris berates the fact that he has to learn so many crafts, a situation he blames on the way society is constructed. And this leads us nicely into the next blog post, hope of pleasure in the work itself, because we need to reconnect our work with the needs we are trying to meet and create a society where people can develop their skills to create beautiful products, of real quality, for their communities own needs.

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 4 Work & Rest

This is the fourth of my posts looking in more depth at The Foolishness of Craft, a story that explores the impact of global production and suggests a more local, sustainable alternative. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Out of the blog posts I am doing on The Foolishness of Craft I think these next three are the ones I have been looking forward to the most. They give me a chance to delve into and share some of the work of William Morris, whose great understanding of social and environmental issues should be more widely known. Like Morris, I feel that the nature of what work is, and should be, is the great lynch pin that holds together an understanding of how we might organise ourselves, putting sustainability of both people and planet first and yet provide for our needs in a fulfilling and enriching way.

John Drinkwater, writing as early as 1912, said of Morris that he understood that anyone who is ‘overworked, or employed all the while in degrading work… cannot be [themselves]’ and that Morris’ philosophy is that ‘in bringing back joy to their daily work… [we could put our] feet on the first step towards… true dignity and pride of life.’

Perhaps William Morris’ key writing on the subject of work is in ‘Useful Work versus Useless Toil’, a speech first given in 1884. He opens with a paragraph that even today strikes one as being true. He says: 

“It is assumed by most people nowadays that all work is useful …and that all work is desirable. Most people, well-to-do or not, believe that, even when a man is doing work which appears to be useless, he is earning his livelihood by it - he is "employed," as the phrase goes; and most of those who are well-to-do cheer on the happy worker with congratulations and praises, if he is only "industrious" enough and deprives himself of all pleasure…” 

Compare this with Iain Duncan-Smith, the British Secretary of State for Work & Pensions, writing in early 2012 and defending a system that required young people to work for multinational companies, for no pay, in order to receive their meagre job seekers allowance. 

“We find a commentating elite which seems determined to belittle and downgrade any opportunity for young people that doesn’t fit their pre-conceived notion of a ‘worthwhile job’… I doubt that I am the only person who thinks that supermarket shelf stackers add more value to our society than many of these ‘job snobs’… they should learn to value work and not sneer at it… [I] passionately believe that work in all shapes and forms can be valuable” 

The article is helpfully illustrated with an image of Terry Leahy, former CEO of Tesco, stating (misleadingly) that he started out cleaning the supermarket floors.

Mr Duncan-Smith, for pretty obvious reasons, is seeking -  like Morris’ “well-to-do” – to bolster a sense of phoney respect for those who stack shelves in Tesco shops. But is really what we want people to be doing? Is it really snobbery to suggest that each of us has it within us to use our genuine skills, talents and enthusiasms to make a worthwhile contribution to society? You only need shelf stackers if you have large shops and big businesses. A small deli or local shop doesn’t employ a shelf stacker. The owner puts the food on the shelf, often doing so to make it attractive. But that is only one part of their role, they have to know what local people like, have to understand food and, in the best shops, when food is in season and what works well together. We need food. We need somewhere to go and get our food and we need someone who knows about it. But society doesn’t need shelf stackers – only big businesses do. It is this transformation, usually through small scale, local, production and distribution that creates work that is meaningful and fulfilling, away from the divisions of labour.

The same attitude often prevails with regard to work in so called developing nations; I have lost count of the number of times I have raised questions regarding working conditions in certain countries, only to be told that they are lucky to have jobs and that the alternative for them is a life on the streets. And yet surely in the C21st after 6 million years of human development, 2.5 million years of using tools, 140,000 years of long distance trade and 5,000 years of writing, we can come up with a better system of organising ourselves than one where the only two alternatives for so many is poverty or slavery.

But let me stop there, because perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself, a little steamed up, a little too political – there is time for that – but for now let us just reject this notion that any job is a good job, and instead recognise that with more thought the tasks that we spend the greater part of our waking hours performing can bring real satisfaction and worth to our lives.

So with that in mind let’s return to our tale.

Morris is clear that work should have three elements in order for it to be ‘useful work’; hope of rest, hope of product and hope of pleasure in the work itself and that these be in ‘some abundance’. In the rest of this blog post we are going to explore the ‘hope of rest’ and in further posts the other two.

Even the wonderfully romantic Morris might suggest that I have painted an overly rose tinted picture of Mary sitting in her garden knitting the jumper, as though she had not a care in the world. In his article he says that “whatever pleasure there is in some work, there is certainly some pain in all work, the beast-like pain of stirring up our slumbering energies to action”, which is a lovely image and one I suspect most of us can relate to. He continues ‘we must feel while we are working that the time will come when we shall not have to work’.

I firmly believe that such relaxed and enjoyable work as Mary’s knitting is possible and viable, but if she were forced to knit for long periods of time and not allowed a break what joy could there be in it? It is surely the freedom to pick up and put down (within the confines of what nature requires – e.g. the warmth of the jumper), that allows it to be pleasurable. Mary, of course, represents the ideal, free from contractual commitments to do as she wishes, but what of Hugo? There is still the hope of rest, once the shop closes he can stop and relax. But not until then – he has agreed when and where his work shall be undertaken and is kept strictly to that, with serious repercussions if he didn’t. Here rest does not necessarily come when it is needed, it comes when it is allocated; when it suits the employer. Within many jobs (mainly public sector) there is a genuine need to ensure continuous staff presence (e.g. fire service, hospitals etc), but it is hard to suggest that all work needs to be like this, where rules are set to suit the commercial interests of companies.

Morris goes further; rest is not enough. It is the quality of that rest that is also crucial. 

"The rest, when it comes, must be long enough to allow us to enjoy it; it must be longer than is merely necessary for us to recover the strength we have expended in working, and it must be animal rest also in this, that it must not be disturbed by anxiety, else we shall not be able to enjoy it. "

 I do not think that there is enough stimulation or interest in Hugo’s job for him to give it much thought when he has left for the night and we can be assured that his rest is indeed uninterrupted by work stress. But what of his boss? The constant phone calls from his area manager, demanding to know why sales for that quarter are down and informing him that his shop is now the lowest ranking in the county. This personalisation of his shop’s performance leads to a great deal of stress; which fails to simply vanish when the key is turned at night. There is rest, but this is not an anxiety free rest; it’s hard to switch off, tough to let go. Relationships at home strained by still speaking and acting as though in the shop. Course work brought back and studied in front of the TV; a pass needed to ‘get on’, if only those damn sales figures would improve. The next morning comes and he doesn’t feel much better than he did the night before – but still, it will be the weekend soon.

This is the modern malaise of the middle classes and Morris, in one of his more reflective moments, would perhaps recognise some of this in himself. But really this passage was aimed at the mass working classes toiling away in factories in slave like conditions. The last 130 years have moved these factories, but not capitalism’s need for cheap labour or it’s disregard for the conditions of its workers. Our Bangladeshi garment worker knows no rest. She has no hope of rest. What precious little time she spends away from the factory is either spent walking to and from work, looking after her family or sleeping. She cannot choose to work or when not to; she has to work every moment she can to feed her family and her set hours can be extended at a moments notice. Sleeping on the factory floor is no rest. How far removed her life seems to Mary’s or even Hugo’s.

Even this first condition, which Morris sets, casts into sharp relief the differences under which work takes place and we need to be radical in demanding true freedom and hope of rest; simply replacing the garment workers extreme lack of rest with Hugo’s boss’ middle class anxiety is not enough (even if it is an improvement). Morris, without using the word, is proclaiming that rest is a basic human right, a basic human need and a society that cannot provide it does not take seriously the sustainability of it’s people and needs urgent reform or revolution.

In the next blog post I’ll be exploring Morris’ second condition, that of ‘hope of product’ and we’ll see just how each of the characters in tale fares (although there are no prizes for guessing beforehand…)

King Matthias in Gömör by János Garay (1812-53)

Doing a little research on William Morris' A King's Lesson, which I posted last week, I came across this interesting article by Éva Péteri discussing the historical sources used by Morris. I won't repeat everything she wrote, please do go and read the article if you are interested, but she demonstrates that there are enough similarities between Morris' story and a poem by Hungarian János Garay entitled King Matthias in Gömör to suggest he had access to it, despite the fact that it wasn't translated into English at the time he wrote A King's Lesson and that Morris spoke only a little German - a language it had been published in. The tale is apparently a well known one in Hungary and this poem is simply the most popular mid-nineteenth century rendition of it. Despite this it is still very hard to find in English and so I thought I would publish it here.

 King Matthias in Gömör 

Every one loved King Matthias, when his charger he rode

To victory in all our battles and our enemies bestrode:

In peace his strength made him the velvet couch despise,

He came and went, for his people's good, listening to our cries,

Through Transdanubia, through all our mighty land,

Through the counties of Tisza he waved his judge's wand,

And none who fell before his knees and cried their grief

Went from his court with less than justice and relief.

And last he came to Gömör and held a royal feast,

As is the Magyar custom, from ancient times at least.

Ten thousand toasts were drunk both serious and gay,

The golden wine of Tokay flowed as night was turned to day.

"God damn the bloody Turk, bring Germans to defeat,

May Christ our Saviour lay all Czechs beneath our Champion's feet!"

The warrior toasts were drunk. At last the country's wealth

Was coupled with the cries, "Our good King Matthias' health!"

Alas, when at the end the nobles could drink no more

And when, in silly drunkenness, they fell upon the floor,

One toast they had forgot, "To those who press the wine,

The toiling peasant daylong bending o'er the vine."

"Gentlemen," King Matthias smiled, liking the idea of a joke,

"The workers have toiled all day beneath a heavy yoke

That we might royally feast. 'Tis time we gave them rest.

They shall sit down in our places and drink of the very best."

The king rose from the table, like the sun in midday sky,

"Up, follow me," he cried, "or I'll know the reason why."

The besotted nobles staggered up to fall in with his command,

"Come," he roared laughing, "we go to conquer the land!"

The sun stood still in wonder, wide-eyed the peasants stare

As their mighty king, their Champion, combed out his golden hair,

And wonder more than wonder, no longer the sword and shield

His conquering arm began the humble spade to wield.

But their wonder changed to laughter, when the courtiers they saw,

Full of soft living, the spade making their hands raw.

And while the weak nobles sweated, with anguish filled,

Their Champion, Matthias, more than an acre had tilled.

Oh, the cries that rose from the little men, the sky was rent,

"Release us, O Majesty, from this hard punishment.

None of us fear the sword but, alas, O King, we're afraid

Of this mighty instrument we cannot wield — the peasant's spade."

In the end Kind Matthias relented. Using his spade,

Which he drew from the shining furrow his work had made,

As a royal sceptre, his words and his mien severe,

"Listen, O you fat courtlings, listen to me and hear

This lesson: You now have learned half dead with toil,

That your soft living is founded on this clumpish soil,

That they, who till it and make it yield its crop,

Work till their muscles scream and until they drop.

So, back in your banqueting halls, by riches beset,

Remember my words. When you toast you will not forget

To lift your glasses to lift your hearts and minds

To the vine-dressers, cowherds, the shepherds, and hinds."

In Gömör, thus did King Matthias enhance his noble joke,

Laying upon his people the lightest of heavy yokes,

And so increased their love for him, no sweat was too severe,

That even today they love him, and his mighty name revere. 

By János Garay (1812-53) and translated by James Turner

Source: Makkai, Á (Ed.) (1996) In Quest of the Miracle Stag: The Poetry of Hungary, University of Illnois Press

A King's Lesson by William Morris

It is told of Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary--the Alfred the Great of his time and people--that he once heard (once ONLY?) that some (only SOME, my lad?) of his peasants were over- worked and under-fed. So he sent for his Council, and bade come thereto also some of the mayors of the good towns, and some of the lords of land and their bailiffs, and asked them of the truth thereof; and in diverse ways they all told one and the same tale, how the peasant carles were stout and well able to work and had enough and to spare of meat and drink, seeing that they were but churls; and how if they worked not at the least as hard as they did, it would be ill for them and ill for their lords; for that the more the churl hath the more he asketh; and that when he knoweth wealth, he knoweth the lack of it also, as it fared with our first parents in the Garden of God. The King sat and said but little while they spake, but he misdoubted them that they were liars. So the Council brake up with nothing done; but the King took the matter to heart, being, as kings go, a just man, besides being more valiant than they mostly were, even in the old feudal time. So within two or three days, says the tale, he called together such lords and councillors as he deemed fittest, and bade busk them for a ride; and when they were ready he and they set out, over rough and smooth, decked out in all the glory of attire which was the wont of those days. Thus they rode till they came to some village or thorpe of the peasant folk, and through it to the vineyards where men were working on the sunny southern slopes that went up from the river: my tale does not say whether that were Theiss, or Donau, or what river. Well, I judge it was late spring or early summer, and the vines but just beginning to show their grapes; for the vintage is late in those lands, and some of the grapes are not gathered till the first frosts have touched them, whereby the wine made from them is the stronger and sweeter. Anyhow there were the peasants, men and women, boys and young maidens, toiling and swinking; some hoeing between the vine-rows, some bearing baskets of dung up the steep slopes, some in one way, some in another, labouring for the fruit they should never eat, and the wine they should never drink. Thereto turned the King and got off his horse and began to climb up the stony ridges of the vineyard, and his lords in like manner followed him, wondering in their hearts what was toward; but to the one who was following next after him he turned about and said with a smile, "Yea, lords, this is a new game we are playing to- day, and a new knowledge will come from it." And the lord smiled, but somewhat sourly. 

As for the peasants, great was their fear of those gay and golden lords. I judge that they did not know the King, since it was little likely that any one of them had seen his face; and they knew of him but as the Great Father, the mighty warrior who kept the Turk from harrying their thorpe. Though, forsooth, little matter was it to any man there whether Turk or Magyar was their over-lord, since to one master or another they had to pay the due tale of labouring days in the year, and hard was the livelihood that they earned for themselves on the days when they worked for themselves and their wives and children.

Well, belike they knew not the King; but amidst those rich lords they saw and knew their own lord, and of him they were sore afraid. But nought it availed them to flee away from those strong men and strong horses--they who had been toiling from before the rising of the sun, and now it wanted little more than an hour of noon: besides, with the King and lords was a guard of crossbowmen, who were left the other side of the vineyard wall,--keen-eyed Italians of the mountains, straight shooters of the bolt. So the poor folk fled not; nay they made as if all this were none of their business, and went on with their work. For indeed each man said to himself, "If I be the one that is not slain, to-morrow I shall lack bread if I do not work my hardest to-day; and maybe I shall be headman if some of these be slain and I live."

Now comes the King amongst them and says: "Good fellows, which of you is the headman?"

Spake a man, sturdy and sunburnt, well on in years and grizzled: "I am the headman, lord."

"Give me thy hoe, then," says the King; "for now shall I order this matter myself, since these lords desire a new game, and are fain to work under me at vine-dressing. But do thou stand by me and set me right if I order them wrong: but the rest of you go play!"

The carle knew not what to think, and let the King stand with his hand stretched out, while he looked askance at his own lord and baron, who wagged his head at him grimly as one who says, "Do it, dog!"

Then the carle lets the hoe come into the King's hand; and the King falls to, and orders his lords for vine-dressing, to each his due share of the work: and whiles the carle said yea and whiles nay to his ordering. And then ye should have seen velvet cloaks cast off, and mantles of fine Flemish scarlet go to the dusty earth; as the lords and knights busked them to the work.

So they buckled to; and to most of them it seemed good game to play at vine-dressing. But one there was who, when his scarlet cloak was off, stood up in a doublet of glorious Persian web of gold and silk, such as men make not now, worth a hundred florins the Bremen ell. Unto him the King with no smile on his face gave the job of toing and froing up and down the hill with the biggest and the frailest dung-basket that there was; and thereat the silken lord screwed up a grin, that was sport to see, and all the lords laughed; and as he turned away he said, yet so that none heard him, "Do I serve this son's son of a whore that he should bid me carry dung?" For you must know that the King's father, John Hunyad, one of the great warriors of the world, the Hammer of the Turks, was not gotten in wedlock, though he were a king's son.

Well, they sped the work bravely for a while, and loud was the laughter as the hoes smote the earth and the flint stones tinkled and the cloud of dust rose up; the brocaded dung-bearer went up and down, cursing and swearing by the White God and the Black; and one would say to another, "See ye how gentle blood outgoes churls' blood, even when the gentle does the churl's work: these lazy loons smote but one stroke to our three." But the King, who worked no worse than any, laughed not at all; and meanwhile the poor folk stood by, not daring to speak a word one to the other; for they were still sore afraid, not now of being slain on the spot, but this rather was in their hearts: "These great and strong lords and knights have come to see what work a man may do without dying: if we are to have yet more days added to our year's tale of lords' labour, then are we lost without remedy." And their hearts sank within them.

So sped the work; and the sun rose yet higher in the heavens, and it was noon and more. And now there was no more laughter among those toiling lords, and the strokes of the hoe and mattock came far slower, while the dung-bearer sat down at the bottom of the hill and looked out on the river; but the King yet worked on doggedly, so for shame the other lords yet kept at it. Till at last the next man to the King let his hoe drop with a clatter, and swore a great oath. Now he was a strong black-bearded man in the prime of life, a valiant captain of that famous Black Band that had so often rent the Turkish array; and the King loved him for his sturdy valour; so he says to him, "Is aught wrong, Captain?"

"Nay, lord," says he, "ask the headman carle yonder what ails us."

"Headman," says the King, "what ails these strong knights? Have I ordered them wrongly?"

"Nay, but shirking ails them, lord," says he, "for they are weary; and no wonder, for they have been playing hard, and are of gentle blood."

"Is that so, lord," says the King, "that ye are weary already?"

Then the rest hung their heads and said nought, all save that captain of war; and he said, being a bold man and no liar: "King, I see what thou wouldst be at; thou hast brought us here to preach us a sermon from that Plato of thine; and to say sooth, so that I may swink no more, and go eat my dinner, now preach thy worst! Nay, if thou wilt be priest I will be thy deacon. Wilt thou that I ask this labouring carle a thing or two?"

"Yea," said the King. And there came, as it were, a cloud of thought over his face.

Then the captain straddled his legs and looked big, and said to the carle: "Good fellow, how long have we been working here?"

"Two hours or thereabout, judging by the sun above us," says he.

"And how much of thy work have we done in that while?" says the captain, and winks his eye at him withal.

"Lord," says the carle, grinning a little despite himself, "be not wroth with my word. In the first half-hour ye did five-and- forty minutes' work of ours, and in the next half-hour scant a thirty minutes' work, and the third half-hour a fifteen minutes' work, and in the fourth half-hour two minutes' work." The grin now had faded from his face, but a gleam came into his eyes as he said
 "And now, as I suppose, your day's work is done, and ye will go to your dinner, and eat the sweet and drink the strong; and we shall eat a little rye-bread, and then be working here till after the sun has set and the moon has begun to cast shadows. Now for you, I wot not how ye shall sleep nor where, nor what white body ye shall hold in your arms while the night flits and the stars shine; but for us, while the stars yet shine, shall we be at it again, and bethink ye for what! I know not what game and play ye shall be devising for to-morrow as ye ride back home; but for us when we come back here to-morrow, it shall be as if there had been no yesterday and nothing done therein, and that work of that to-day shall be nought to us also, for we shall win no respite from our toil thereby, and the morrow of to-morrow will all be to begin again once more, and so on and on till no to-morrow abideth us. Therefore, if ye are thinking to lay some new tax or tale upon us, think twice of it, for we may not bear it. And all this I say with the less fear, because I perceive this man here beside me, in the black velvet jerkin and the gold chain on his neck, is the King; nor do I think he will slay me for my word since he hath so many a Turk before him and his mighty sword!"

Then said the captain: "Shall I smite the man, O King? or hath he preached thy sermon for thee?"
"Smite not, for he hath preached it," said the King. "Hearken to the carle's sermon, lords and councillors of mine! Yet when another hath spoken our thought, other thoughts are born therefrom, and now have I another sermon to preach; but I will refrain me as now. Let us down and to our dinner."

So they went, the King and his gentles, and sat down by the river under the rustle of the poplars, and they ate and drank and were merry. And the King bade bear up the broken meats to the vine- dressers, and a good draught of the archer's wine, and to the headman he gave a broad gold piece, and to each man three silver pennies. But when the poor folk had all that under their hands, it was to them as though the kingdom of heaven had come down to earth.

In the cool of the evening home rode the King and his lords. The King was distraught and silent; but at last the captain, who rode beside him, said to him: "Preach me now thine after-sermon, O King!"
"I think thou knowest it already," said the King, "else hadst thou not spoken in such wise to the carle; but tell me what is thy craft and the craft of all these, whereby ye live, as the potter by making pots, and so forth?"

Said the captain: "As the potter lives by making pots, so we live by robbing the poor."
Again said the King: "And my trade?"

Said he, "Thy trade is to be a king of such thieves, yet no worser than the rest."
The King laughed.

"Bear that in mind," said he, "and then shall I tell thee my thought while yonder carle spake. `Carle,' I thought, `were I thou or such as thou, then would I take in my hand a sword or a spear, or were it only a hedge-stake, and bid others do the like, and forth would we go; and since we would be so many, and with nought to lose save a miserable life, we would do battle and prevail, and make an end of the craft of kings and of lords and of usurers, and there should be but one craft in the world, to wit, to work merrily for ourselves and to live merrily thereby.'"

Said the captain: "This then is thy sermon. Who will heed it if thou preach it?"

Said the King: "They who will take the mad king and put him in a king's madhouse, therefore do I forbear to preach it. Yet it SHALL be preached."

"And not heeded," said the captain, "save by those who head and hang the setters forth of new things that are good for the world. Our trade is safe for many an many a generation."

And therewith they came to the King's palace, and they ate and drank and slept and the world went on its ways.

The Foolishness of Craft Explored: Part 1 Needs

 I have been really touched by the response to my last blog post, which was a fictional account of two people’s approach to obtaining a new jumper. It contrasted the impact on the environment, communities and individuals of buying one from a high street chain and making one from local, sustainable materials. If you haven’t read it yet, then it might be best to click here and do so, before reading on. 

Because of this interest I thought I would write a series of blog posts exploring some of the themes that came out of the short story and go deeper into the issues, motives and also solutions that it touched on. I would love this to be a conversation and I do not pretend to have all the answers or even to fully understand all of the questions, but I hope that these offerings will be a springboard for your own reflections. 

Needs 

…imagine it is September here in England; the short nights and slight chill let us know that winter is on its way. Two people decide that they are going to need a new jumper to see them through the winter and keep them warm. 

We all have needs. Your needs maybe different to mine and mine in turn will be different to an older lady or a very young boy, but nonetheless there exists a set of physical and emotional requirements that each living person has. Some of these are what we might call base needs; shelter, food, air and water, the fulfillment of which is essential to life itself, others are what makes that life worth living and include love, intimacy, community, creativity, achievement and a sense of self worth.

In the story Hugo and Mary both need a jumper to fulfill a very basic need, that of warmth. Without sufficient layers in the colder months of the year we would get cold, which leads to discomfort, illness and, in extreme cases, even death. And so we can say that both Hugo and Mary have a very legitimate need.

To fulfill this need almost any jumper would do, so long as it provided some insulation, that would be enough. However, this creates a great problem for clothing retailers; if every jumper essentially does the same job in keeping you warm, why should someone buy your jumper and not the shop next doors? Even if we include an element of design into the mix, there are only so many takes on a classic woolen jumper and if we were to go and buy a man’s navy blue jumper from every clothing shop on the high street and line them all up, I dare say they would look pretty similar (or for a more modern way of doing this, try putting 'Navy Blue Jumper' into Google image search).

A further problem for a consumer economy is that actually our needs are pretty simple and fairly basic, requiring only a limited number of purchases. Yes, we need clothes. But how many? What would a basic wardrobe, which could comfortably see you through the seasons in your country, look like? You need shelter, but again what could you actually live in? How small a house would it be practical and comfortable to inhabit on a day-to-day basis? Finally food. What would it cost if we ate using fresh local fruit and vegetables, supplemented with small amounts of meat. Whether or not you wish to live like this is not the point, instead we could live in such a simple way and of course a great percentage of the world’s population does, without any choice.

Many of the higher needs we have; love, intimacy, community, creativity, a feeling of self worth, need not cost anything at all and can be achieved without any (or a least a minimal) consumer consumption.

And so capitalism is left with a real problem; here is a system that is built on the consumption of goods and yet the people do not actually need all that much to live, and that which we do need could almost be obtained from anywhere, with one shop often being no better than another. The response from companies is multi-faceted and we’ll explore more of them through the blog posts, but for our purposes here, looking at needs, we can focus on three: 


1)    Their first approach is to expand, through marketing and increasing cultural perception, what constitutes our basic, essential needs. Let’s take the example of food; clearly this is an essential need, but is it essential to be able to freeze food at home so that we can eat it out of season or eat frozen ready meals? Most people would consider a freezer an essential item in the home – I certainly don’t know of one without one, including my own. And yet this is a very modern, western, perception. How long have we had freezers in homes? 60 years? Our Grandparents lived without one and how many households throughout the world still do? And yet I even feel uncomfortable writing this, as though it is some sort of heresy.  But it’s true – freezers are not a need, they may fulfill many pleasant wants (ice-cream, easy meals etc.), but by perceiving them as a need we distort the reality and this can stop us from engaging with the impacts they cause in their manufacture and use, simply because we believe life to be impossible without them.

2)    The second deliberate distortion is using much higher needs to sell us basic needs, so that we confuse the two and cannot see that there is another way of meeting the base need. We touched on this before, with the navy blue jumper. If all navy blue jumpers are pretty much of a muchness, how can a shop get you to buy their jumper? The answer is by appealing to your sense of self or at least who you would wish to be. Fill a shop, magazine, advert with images of beautiful people, all having impossible levels of fun in gorgeous locations; then get them to look down the camera and ask, are you one of us? Finally offer the chance to join this exclusive club for the price of a jumper, the logo on the breast pocket proudly proclaiming your membership – yes, you can think as you walk home, I am one of you. The need for a jumper (for warmth) is almost forgotten; much greater is the need to be accepted, to belong, to feel your own self worth.

None of this is to say that we don’t have a genuine need to feel accepted or to belong to a community or a sense of our own worth; these are vital. But using consumption to meet them is like eating sweets when you are hungry, it’s a lovely burst of sugar that makes you feel as right as rain for about 5 minutes, before you suddenly realize you are hungry again. 

3)    Finally they create needs that we didn’t even know we had. The example of this that makes me laugh the most are those home-wares catalogues. Who knew that we needed a separate machine to make popcorn, waffles, rice, poached eggs, steam veg, open tins (or wine bottles), chop herbs etc. In the story Hugo gently mocks his customers for their phone, so that they realise just how much they need to upgrade and get all the latest features.

All this is an attempt to cloud our perception of what our needs really are, to muddy the waters so that we judge not on the reality, but on a perceived perception of what our needs are. Hugh and Mary need a jumper to keep warm. They should feel comfortable in it and it should look nice on them. By being able to pare it back to this, both of them can make decisions based on this reality, rather than marketing hype or social norm.

I don’t want to touch here on the nature of work, as I want to leave that for another post, but it is interesting to note that Mary, in making her jumper, is actually meeting her own needs for creativity and self-esteem, through it’s creation. It is not that she is only meeting her needs through the ownership of the jumper, but in the actual process of making it. This is a very different to approach to Hugo, for whom only the acquisition and ownership is meeting his needs.  The sad fact is that in this manufactured confusion of needs, many of our genuine needs actually get forgotten or remain unmet; the need for creativity, for a feeling of being able to look after oneself, accomplishment, of being able to live without negatively impacting on others.

It’s not going to be possible to make everything that modern capitalism makes available to us in affluent countries, to do so would take many more lives than we have. We have to accept that a homemade life is going to be one where we do have less and we need to find a sense of contentment with that. We need to start with a careful consideration of what our real needs are, away from the marking hype of the high street, glossy magazines and TV adverts. If all this sounds a little stark, back to the dark ages living, then I apologise because it needn’t be – actually there are great riches to be had from meeting our simple needs in an original and creative way.

The whole story about Hugo and Mary is really about two different ways of meeting a genuine need. A small snap shot of two people making decisions. Because ultimately much of our lives are taken up with meeting our needs and morality is the choices we take in doing so. Much depends on the consideration we are able to give to others in the process, but also the patience and courage to break from the accepted norm.