[This letter is part of the Little Letter Republic, a project whose purpose is to build community in St. Louis and beyond.]

Dear CeltAtom,

You are curious about how to solve two problems. 1) What types of careers people should be encouraged towards and 2) How “ambitious” one’s career goals should be?

In the interest of first offering a more wholesome approach to the discussion, I think a discussion about “ambition” should come first. There is a perception around here that I am a super “ambitious” person. And from a certain perspective that is fair to say, but that is not how I frame the experience of my activities to myself. We could argue about Christian humility versus ambition, but I think this is a category mistake. We have talents, skills, insights that, having been freely given to us, ought to be freely and fearlessly used. If we begin by saying, how can I best use my current abilities and build my current strengths, then we have the right intention. When we are alert to opportunities to use these strengths, it is not ambition. It is looking for ways to conform ourselves to the Animating Spirit. Providence opens doors to us, and we have to choose whether to walk through them.

My friend Joe passed through St. Louis from Philadelphia last month. He was moving to Phoenix. And he told me the story of how he came into this job. He went down to a Benedictine Monastery in New Mexico for a week to pray and discern and seek peace after the current job he took turned out to be a disaster. He thought he was great at organizing and would be able to run this department despite the management issues. Instead, his boss gaslighted him, refused to delegate, and couldn’t be negotiated with. At the monastery, he and a monk repaired some broken down vehicles, the monk told him he should go to Phoenix and look for a job there. After his monastic stay, he drove a couple hours to Phoenix and applied for a few jobs, found a perfect fit for what he needed to develop himself more, and took it. It wasn’t a question of ambition, but of teachableness i,e, docility, the humility to drink the water offered.

I asked him the same question. Does he worry about ambition getting in the way of discernment? He said absolutely not. “Preparing oneself to do greater things is not pride; it’s preparation. God orders your path. If you try to force things to happen on your own, it is disaster.”

So, when I think about career and intellectual life. I think about moving along my current trajectory and making sure I grow the skills I can, so that I can put them to good use. By “good use,” I don’t mean career use either. Some things I do out an impulse of delight or exploration or familial duty, and those things are good use too.

One the one hand, “Be not anxious for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink…” On the other hand, “There were ten virgins, five foolish, five wise…”. So be prepared to do what you are called to do, and you are called to do the great good you can see yourself doing. Does it help to be caught up in the question of whether some activity is “elite” or “ambitious” or not? These are socialized ways of thinking which are cover for the twin vices of vainglory or sloth.

If we try to do a great good thing and fail, we have still done right and should be willing to try again. If we are successful, it is not us that were successful, but rather things outside our control came together.

I find it intriguing that you both liked the advice in the two 80k articles but were repulsed by the conclusions they drew for what careers are appropriate. “This is a recruiting front for the California rationalists.” It seems to me that you agree with the principles of the two articles but find the general 80k implementation biased. You characterize this bias as being towards 1) expanding civilizational capacity and 2) elite concerns, as opposed to maintaining society and caring about local issues.

I think you are right that there are some important biases to notice here. Ryan Miller at University of Geneva recently wrote an article called “80,000 Hours for the Common Good: A Thomistic Appraisal of Effective Altruism.” In that article he cautioned that EA while it wants to be open to non-utilitarian ethical systems is also committed to a state-of-affairs analysis of ethics. But one can’t have both at the same time, he argues. And thus a Thomistic version of Effective Altruism will have divergent priorities from 80k. While I think that is basically true, I think the difference can be overstated, and what matters to me is the practical version of the question. In other words, what does a Thomistic Effective Altruism look like? Because as of right now, it’s only EA that’s systematically taking data and consequences seriously when thinking about career advice.

If we largely agree with the principles laid out in those articles, then we should still implement them.

But what are the practical implications for what careers people should be encouraged towards? You want to divide careers into two camps maintainer-careers and extender-careers. Let me offer a different framework, one that is more dynamic.

Skills get plugged into roles. Roles get plugged into industries. A person can move into the same role at a different industry, or a different role in the same industry. You do this throughout your career looking for the best good you can do. This process both maintains and extends civilization, and even if we get a few more people willing to switch jobs and think in this way, then will have a society where more people are flourishing. Different industries provide different value as do different roles, but it’s up to individuals to try and figure out where the value is and where their talents lie.

But, of course, people need guidance and culture to help inform them about what is valuable. The BLS tells you that words ending in “engineering” are valuable to society in the sense that they are well financially remunerated. However, the truth about most jobs that pay well is that everything is management. Technical skills get you hired, managerial skills get you promoted (or allow you to start something new). By intentionally trying to do good with one’s career, one is taking responsibility for his own life. Ben Franklin’s Junto or Leather Apron Club fulfilled this purpose in his Philadelphia. I think education (broadly conceived) must prepare people for freedom – and that means responsibility.

As a side note: this is also how an ideal polity works, people need to be able to both direct affairs and be directed for a democratic republic to function. Essential to freedom is responsibility.

There are more ideas to explore in this space. I’m out of steam for today.

Looking forward to more,

When I enrolled at Wabash College, the faculty had just voted on retiring the Cultures and Traditions course, a two semester sophomore seminar on the great texts of ancient and modern history. Such a course was meant, I presume, to serve as an introduction to at least some of the foundational texts of civilization. Arranged mostly chronologically the texts would be an introduction to some of the big ideas of humanity. But intellectual balkanization took the day, and the course was replaced with a freshman second semester course called Enduring Questions.

With all due apologies to the chief architect behind the course, Dean of the College Gary Philips, who, despite being an excellent professor for my section, fathered this disaster. EQ was a smorgasbord, The product of many kooky cooks in one claustrophobic kitchen. Some of the items on the menu were not even food. It was as though a gaggle of drunk undergrads were appointed to the curriculum committee on a Saturday night and immediately proclaimed, “For dinner we will be having strawberry gravy over Hot Wheels cars with a side of Papa John’s Red Pepper Flakes. As an aperitif, gentlemen, indulge yourself with this fine wine from an origami sippy-cup.” The course consisted of all the greats, that is, one sexist page from Aristotle, a bit of a book on freedom by an educational philosopher, In Defense of Dolphins arguing for the personhood of these ocean tricksters, a good Black experience novel, several movies (Bladerunner, Orlando, City of God), some holocaust literature, and The Power and the Glory. Despite, Gary’s heroic attempts to create a single thread holding this course together, the entire college suffered severe intellectual indigestion.

My soured relationship with Gary (would it weren’t so! He and I really should have been friends, but I spent half my college career trying to overthrow the administration, i.e. Gary and the President) met its ultimate end at an EQ course section reunion dinner three years later during senior year. As we circled around each other in conversation, looking to slide the rhetorical stiletto into each other, another student committed a terrible and crass faux pas. He ended our soft barbs with a cannon blast, a direct insult on the Dean. How could he not know to whom he was speaking? Could a senior have really been so ignorant that he did not know that Gary designed the EQ course? Did he not realize we were at that moment eating delicious vegetarian cuisine in our host’s vegetarian Victorian home? Maybe it was the light sparring that Gary and I engaged in that egged this student on? Or yet perhaps a desire to be noticed for having formed a wise and considered opinion after years of liberal arts reflection? Whatever the cause, heavenly compulsion or earthen desire, he managed to cruelly insult our host. Silence would have been golden, but instead: “Do you all remember In Defense of Dolphins?” he asked. Then continued, “Yeah, that was a really stupid book. I didn’t get it. Why did we have to read that?” So shocked was I, that I had to look at Gary and give him the reassuring I-swear-I-didn’t-put-him-up-to-saying-that.-He’s-obviously-just-really-sincere-and-heedless-of-the-fights-that-have-been-going-on-the-last-three-years look.

In any case, a course which lacks coherence will neither be absorbed nor respected by the student years hence. And that is the lesson of EQ: courses are better when are topical, coherent, and lead somewhere.

It is possible to error in the other direction, but I hesitate to even bring it up, since our schools are so far away from making this error. Nonetheless, for the sake of symmetry problem do arise when one only reads the great seminal texts. My mentor in bibliophilia Mike Martel, a Thomas Aquinas College graduate, and the most nurturing text lover I have ever met, always advocates for reading the texts themselves before the scholarship. But in our back and forth for seven years, we have moved closer to one another in the proportion of scholarship to primary texts on should read.

I have been meditating a lot recently on “Context is what is scarce.” The amazing and ironic thing about this statement is that it is extremely low context and yet offers a gateway into a whole view of reality. Consider this passage from Bernard Lonergan’s Insight:

A single book may be written from a moving viewpoint, and then it will contain, not a single set of coherent statements, but a sequence of related sets of coherent statements. Moreover, as is clear, a book designed to aid a development must be written from a moving viewpoint. It cannot begin by presupposing that a reader can assimilate at a stroke what can be attained only at the term of a prolonged and arduous effort. On the contrary, it must begin from a minimal viewpoint and a minimal context; it will exploit that minimum to raise a further question that enlarges the viewpoint and the context; it will proceed with the enlarged viewpoint and context only as long as is necessary to raise still deeper issues that again transform the basis and the terms of reference of the inquiry; and clearly, this device can be repeated not merely once or twice but as often as may be required to reach the universal viewpoint and the completely concrete context that embraces every aspect of reality.

Introduction

He gets the context issue. Of course, this doesn’t only apply to books, but to networks of people. Networks create context. Movement along the network to subcategories or adjacent networks creates new insights out of new context, and importantly the person retains an ability to engage with the old context, while inculturating himself to a broader view.

Build your adjacent context and they will come.