In “The Idea of a Local Economy”, published in Milkweed Editions‘ The Future of Nature: Writing on a Human Ecology from Orion Magazine, Wendell Berry lists the assumptions that go with the notion that corporations ought to be “free” to buy cheap and sell dear anywhere and any time they please. These include:

13. That the economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.
14. That, therefore, vocation is a dead issue. One does not do the work that one chooses to do because one is called to it by Heaven or by one’s natural or god-given abilities, but does instead the work that is determined and imposed by the economy. Any work is all right as long as one gets paid for it.

This places poets, underground artists of all kinds, and farmers who grow unfashionable tomatoes (for example) in opposition to the primary economic order that we know today. We may do ‘any work’ in order to survive, but it is always in order to fund our vocation, unless of course we are fortunate enough to find that we have a secondary vocation that pays. (It is reasonable to be suspicious of claims of such a vocation– it is unlikely that all poets-turned-professors love teaching– but it is unnecessarily cynical to assume that all such claims must be false.) Fortunately, a true vocation will survive long hours in pursuit of survival, discouraging rejection letters, and everything else. Those teachers of ‘creative writing’ who attempt to dissuade young writers from following their path test this vocation intentionally.

By insisting on our vocations and prioritizing them, we present a threat to the corporate economy. No, a scattering of artists (and tomato farmers) working only as necessary to live will not shake up the system. The threat comes from the power of example. What would happen if everyone found this path?

Fortunately for the corporations, the present-day education system hardly encourages children and adolescents to seek a vocation. Explorations is discouraged and the range of learning opportunities limited. Legislation like No Child Left Behind has seen to that. By demanding a certain level of test-taking ability from all students, they have limited the time and resources that can be spent on the arts, experiential learning, and field trips. The Bellevue School District in western Washington dictates to teachers what they should do every day in class; individual student interests and potential do not come into it. (Though one of the reasons for the current strike there is that the teachers detest this sort curricular micromanagement. One suspects that many of these teachers teach because they believe it is their vocation.) You cannot find a vocation in something you have never experienced.

It is also very difficult to say the least for parents to follow their vocations. In today’s economy, often both parents have to work long hours, even multiple jobs just to keep food on the table. They feel pressured to move into more expensive houses than they would otherwise buy simply in order to find decent schools for their children. To be able to pursue a vocation in such a situation requires either a lack of need for sleep that would impress this lifelong insomniac or else a degree of community or extended family support that is rare.

Defining vocation in terms that approach destiny challenges the corporate-dominated economic order, but only if that definition becomes accepted over the sort that allows ‘vocation’ to become part of the names of colleges that provide technical and other skills desireable primarily for purposes of employability. None of this, however, should be taken as reflecting negatively on those who must or choose to pursue what is today called vocational education, as they are simply trying to survive and maybe make their lives an inch or two better.