In the ongoing argument over marriage, the workplace, and the role of the mother in family and home life, it is taken for granted that you enjoy more freedom out of the home than in it. You are supposed to do better work out there, too, and become more fully human, realizing your potential, empowering yourself, and, as it happens (though nobody wants to talk about this side of it), fueling a political economy that makes such work appear to be a personal and financial necessity.

But the reverse is true. The family home is a last flickering outpost of liberty, though it is besieged from without by the school and the workplace and vitiated from within by mass entertainment. Our failure to acknowledge what ought to be a readily observable fact suggests that we are not committed to liberty. Liberty shows up your imperfections and leaves you open to failure at every pass. The routines of an economic functionary, on the other hand, relieve you of the responsibility of choice and resolve your imperfections and failures in the general indistinguishability of work executed en masse. 

Thus, as G. K. Chesterton noted, practical scorn for the home tends to deliver neither freedom nor good work but rather makes functionaries and liars of us all. We say that love, for example, is the greatest of all the virtues and that you cannot be happy unless you love. Then we forget it as soon as the choice presents itself between love and the career track, love and the bank account, love and self-opinion, or love and the cheap thrills people seek to escape from the ennui of being functionaries. In short, in neither work nor play do we know what we are about.

To illustrate: we grant little value to the ordinary arts of human life, because they do not occupy a large stage, and they cannot be standardized or quantified. What is the value of a woman singing to herself as she prepares a supper while her small child is sprawled on the living room floor, drawing pictures on a piece of cardboard from the launderer?

The question makes no sense. It is like asking to place a price on fresh air or to fit a melody into the periodic table of elements. It is like attempting to describe the largeness of someone’s heart by measuring how much blood it pumps. But if the same mother were singing on a stage for pay, and if her child were enrolled in an art class, then our eyes light up because these are things we can understand. Perhaps that child will earn an art scholarship someday! 

So must the ambitious person deaden a little of himself inside. For as we fail to value those ordinary arts, we hasten to value the inartful and the merely routine; not the home, but the gigantic glass tower. We pay respect to the cook at a chain restaurant, whose menu never changes, whose work is bound by recipes he has not invented and from which he is not permitted to depart, but not to that woman in the home, free both to err and to happen upon something good and new. She is free to scorch the roast; he is not. She is free to season the French fries with paprika; if he does it, he will be looking for another job.

At least the cook will have some credentials, you may say, to help him find work elsewhere, while the woman at home has none at all. Surely credentials warrant some respect?

I wonder. Credentialing, in our time, is largely distinct from both knowledge and the play of imagination. Employers will hire a college graduate not for what he or she knows, which is often little enough, and certainly not for any unpredictability in his or her work, but for reliable habits of punctuality and following instructions. Credentials are supposed to guarantee compliance and that there shall be no real mistakes other than those the system imposes upon everyone.

A credential is like a manufacturer’s guarantee: this worker shall perform a certain task in a certain way. It is an infiltration of the factory model into patterns of human thought and action. Anyone who has ever attempted to pierce through the walls upon walls of bureaucratic routine to get a human being to respond to a human problem in a human way will know what I mean. One might as well appeal to a gear or a pulley.

Workplaces are structured and designed so. The best and the worst we can say about them is that they perform a function. Suppose you approach a hospital complex because someone you love is severely ill. Nothing about such a complex is comforting. In fact, we have to repress a swelling of terror or nausea in our stomach as we approach it. The complex is faceless. Instructional placards are posted everywhere: go here for cancer, there for surgery, to the second building on your left for admissions, and so on. 

You hope that the people inside the buildings are not like the buildings they are inside of. Sometimes you will be happily surprised. Often, however, you will be stunned into submission by the bureaucratic routine. Your loved one may see doctor after doctor, nurse after nurse,  but no single person will have taken up her care. She will thus be weighed down by the need to tell the same things to one person after another, hoping that someone in the system will put it all together, though she may never know who the someone will have been.

Credentials weigh everything down. Everyone has them, and thus everyone must have a credentialed hand in the work, with much delay, redundancy, vagueness, and expense. In such a place, bodily machines are mended, and I will readily confess that bodily machines need mending. But it is a bit of a stretch to say that people are healed, when people as such are hardly addressed at all.

Now, if I may be permitted a foray into imaginative art, suppose you are someone whose soul is sicker than the body of a patient in a hospital—not that your body is sound, either, because you are hungry and filthy from walking many lonely miles and your clothes are in rags. You are David Copperfield, having run away from the bottling shop in London, approaching the home of your aunt, Betsey Trotwood, whom you have never seen in your life. Her house is perched on a hill overlooking the town of Dover, and it is pretty and neat, and your aunt, a vigorous old lady, is out planting flowers along the walkway while a stout and cheerful man with the visage of a child is looking out at you from the window, winking. 

Aunt Betsey is not to be taken lightly, as the boy couriers find out whenever they cross her front property, causing the old lady to rush out of the house with a broom, crying to her maidservant, “Janet! Donkeys!” Nor is she altogether moved to pity by how you look, at least not at your first attempt to appeal to her. But everything about the house and about the one-of-a-kind Aunt Betsey suggests humanity, with all the eccentric errors and wayward virtues that beset humanity or make it wonderful. It would be wrong to say that Aunt Betsey—or indeed any woman whose heart is in the home she makes for those she loves—needs credentials to take care of David or the fantastic man-child, Mr. Dick. The credentials would only obstruct her. If you are bound to a program, you cannot do what she does. No house is made into a home by a programmatic process.

The home is a flight of fancy that the workplace can never be. Because he has a home, because Aunt Betsey has made the home, Mr. Dick, a bit addled in the brain, can write his massive “Memorial.” He can get stuck again and again at the beheading of Charles I, and when he can make no more progress with it, he is free to stitch up the sheets of paper into the form of a kite, and can fly it with David atop the windy cliffs. He has no program of production to obey or of ambition to pursue. Mr. Dick is a comic version of what David himself will become when he begins to write stories for magazines. The home and Dr. Strong’s school in Canterbury—which is more like a home than like a bottling factory for human souls or a mending factory for human bodies—will nourish the boy’s imagination so that he, too, will fly narrative kites when half the world is cleaning bottles and the other half is filling them with ink.

Advisedly do I allude to the work of Charles Dickens, because, like Chesterton after him, he saw that the child must be at the center of any truly human culture. We might paraphrase Scripture by saying, “Unless you become as little children, you may forget about heaven, for we shall not even have earth as your domain.”

It is just because the child cannot be made to fit into a slot that we above all people most desperately need to have him near us, in a world that is good for him, wherein he may play at liberty and thus nourish as with an inexhaustible spring of memory and imagination the work he may do when he grows up. He needs the home, and we need him. To pretend that his urge to play may be satisfied within the walls of a child asylum is to treat him as a dog in a kennel that needs to be walked, or as a machine that needs regular oiling. 

I am not saying that the people who run day care centers are bad. I rather think they are usually very good. It is the institution that is bad. It is not hard to see why this is so. All we need to do is consider the liberty of a child within a home and not just a house.

Suppose you are a child, living in the house from which I am writing these words, but the year is 1950. You wake up on a day exactly like this one. What do you do?

If you are so unlucky as to be six years old, there may be school, but if it’s summer, or if the day is on the weekend, you are free. Your liberty is all the greater because television has not yet begun to bind you to your living room at set times to watch certain shows and to be appealed to by commercials crafted by people whose statistical work is to treat masses of human beings as stuff to be nudged or prodded, a certain percentage of them at a certain cost for a certain profit.

You would be relatively free of the nudges and prods. Other than the Little League, there would be no sports organizations to determine where you must be at a certain time and what you must do. So you are out the door, and the world in its immense human and natural variety is before you.

What shall you do? The woods beckon, just to roam around in with your dog. A couple of boys are playing cards on a bench outside of the small neighborhood grocery and candy store. Your cousin has set up the croquet wickets and stakes in his front yard, which are perched on a little hill above the street, so that if your ball is “knocked” by an opponent, there’s no telling how far away you’ll end up. A couple of girls have chalked out a hopscotch court. Of course, there is always baseball. And in the nearby playground—really a vacant lot with the burnt-out shell of a small house on it—there are a few dented metal slides and monkey bars, and a few other ways to cut an arm or break an ankle.

And if you can ride a bike, your world opens up like the sea to a sailor. If you have a friend, and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t, you may know what Shakespeare’s king of Bohemia describes as the childhood he enjoyed with his friend, who would become the king of Sicily:

We were, fair Queen,

Two lads that thought there was no more behind

But such a day tomorrow as today,

And to be boy eternal.

That way of life had to be narrowed by school, though nobody in my time thought that school was the most important thing in the world, just as nobody thought that work was, either. At work, you submitted to routine, as at school. When I was a teenager, I worked as an all-purpose extra hand at my uncle’s textile shop: janitor, truck loader and unloader, packer, cloth cutter, whatever was needed that day. The heat was stifling, and the air full of textile dust, most of it synthetic, which got into my pores and made my skin itch. What it did to my lungs, I have no idea, and I don’t care to find out. I could enjoy that work because I knew it was only for the summer, and because one day for me was not the same as the next. But the women at the sewing machines who made more money, and well deserved it, didn’t have that luxury. I
recall that one of them had the job of inverting inside-out cloth belts on a metal spike, several hundred every hour, thousands every day, days upon end. That is what much of work outside the home is like.

And here at last I come to a falsehood so staggering that only the well-trained human being can accept it. It is that, however free the child I have described may be, and however narrowing are certain kinds of work, people who pursue a career can give their imaginations a far wider scope than the child ever knew, so that a little straitening of the child is a small price to pay for the glories of professional work, even if we grant that the child’s life contributes something good for the quality of that work.

Go to those professions themselves, where liberty ought to flourish. A college professor is teaching English composition. He sees the same wearisome mistakes, reads the same canned prose, languishes over the same arid stretches of platitude, class after class, year after year, barely interrupted by any sprig of green wit or watered by any trickle of genuine human feeling. It will not do to say that the students are not taught how to write. The problem is that they are taught how to write, as a trainee at McDonald’s is taught how to cook hamburgers. 

This is the profession I know best. People in other professions tell similar stories: hence the phenomenon called “burnout,” an eerily appropriate mechanical metaphor for human beings treated as badly worked electrical connectors, subject to the same stresses and strains without variety or hope of relief. Look at the faces of commuters on a train. Find a single person who enjoys either the relaxation of human receptivity, or the fascinated concentration of someone taken up by work that delights him. If they were easy to find, you would find conversation easy, too. But a dumb, tense silence prevails on the train. The commuters have conformed themselves to the buildings where they work, brick after brick, industrial ceiling tile after tile, in a monotony that is at once static and spiritually chaotic, as of a sick person in bed, tossing and turning, never getting comfortable and never getting up.

“Nothing is a great work of art,” said John Ruskin, discussing the nature of the Gothic, “for the production of which either rules or models can be given. Exactly so far as architecture works on known rules, and from given models, it is not an art, but a manufacture.” For Ruskin this was not just an aesthetic issue. It strikes to the heart of what it means to be fully human. It is a universal law, he said, “that neither architecture nor any other noble work of man can be good unless it be imperfect,” since 

to banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality. All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.

Ruskin saw as slavery the reduction of human work to the routines demanded by industrial manufacture . That we no longer see it as such is evidence of a failure of the imagination, or its stunting from lack of nourishment from our earliest years. It is the life we prepare children for, the life we build for. We call it “empowerment.” Thus do we lose the knack for describing things in ordinary and honest language. Official dullness sets in.

Well, what may be bad for the world is at least matter for the satirist. For he can point at the world’s swollen head and say, truly, “Nobody’s at home.”