The Home is Not a Hotel

How Recovering the Home Economy Trains Us to be Makers, not Takers

We are fortunate enough to have another guest post today. Today’s essay is written by our new friend Josh Pauling. In his Substack profile, Josh describes himself as a “Vicar, theologian, classical educator, furniture-maker.” He recently co-authored a book with Robin Phillips called “Are We All Cyborgs Now?” The book covers much of the ground that we cover here at the Savage Collective. You can read more about his book in a recent interview at Front Porch Republic.

For many Americans today, the home functions as little more than a hotel. It’s a place where a group of individuals sleep (or, increasingly, just one individual), only to spend their real lives elsewhere. This is, historically speaking, a novelty. For most of human history, one’s economic, social, and educational life centered on home and local community. Human agency was expressed and human capacities were developed in the context of the household.

But if the home functions as just a hotel, one of the massive questions we face is where—and how—human agency and capacities which constitute human flourishing can develop when our globalized economy trains us to be consumers, not creators. Or, to put it more bluntly, when we are trained to be takers, not makers. When production moves out of the home we are formed into further passivity. And so too, does dependency and fragility increase as numerous layers of economic exchange and complexity accumulate beyond our control and comprehension. In such an environment, each individual is treated not as a person of eternal worth who is connected to other persons in relations of mutual love and service, but as an isolated productivity unit of economic worth who is connected to the larger economic system through impersonal and transactional modes of exchange.

All of this is to say that we have a huge problem on our hands—and it matters to all of us. To raise these issues is not a nostalgic cry for the past, nor is it a form of performative homesteading. We are all affected by this, and we must face the fact that our current lifestyle arrangements aren’t very conducive to developing human agency and capacity.

Edward Hopper, Western Motel, 1957

Historical Perspective
British economist Frances Cairncross captured the weirdness of modern economic arrangements in her 1997 remarks: “In half a century’s time, it may well seem extraordinary that millions of people once trooped from one building (their home) to another (their office) each morning, only to reverse the procedure each evening...Commuting wastes time and building capacity. One building—the home—often stands empty all day; another—the office—usually stands empty all night. All this may strike our grandchildren as bizarre.”[1] Seven decades earlier, Max Weber similarly detected the revolutionary changes taking place during industrialization, noting that “the consequences which accompanied the introduction of the modern factory are extraordinarily far-reaching,” especially insofar as they centralized “the employment of the worker in a place which was separate both from the dwelling of the consumer and from his own.”[2]

As industrialization and specialization increasingly shifted the locus of economic production from home to factory, children experienced a parallel expansion of schooling—modeled after the factory no-less.[3] Consequently, the natural lessons of self-sufficiency, household thrift, the efficient production of goods, preservation of foods, and skills of maintenance that once flowed quite naturally from hearth and home were disappearing.

All of this contributed to the parallel professionalization of household management and domestic duties in hopes of “giving women opportunities outside the home while simultaneously uplifting the value of ‘women’s work’ in society.”^[4] Early proponents formed the American Home Economics Association in 1908, and worked to apply “scientific principles to domestic topics—good nutrition, pure foods, proper clothing, physical fitness, sanitation, and efficient practices that would allow women more time for pursuits other than cooking and cleaning.”^[5] The hope was that such home efficiencies might give more time for education and liberate women from housework. Thus was born Home-Ec Class.

Despite its original popularity with progressives, by the 1960s Home-Ec was a feminist pariah and “most high schools and colleges stopped requiring and in many cases offering the classes.”^[6] Home-Ec survived the feminist attacks in some quarters where it was already co-ed, and in other quarters by adopting a co-ed model taught in conjunction with Shop Class, another dying art. 21^st century budgetary strains, the push for computer literacy, and the ascendancy of standardized testing further eliminated such non-academic courses from the curriculum for most students across the country.

With life-skills training outsourced from family to school during the process of industrialization, and the subsequent elimination of such courses from the school curriculum in recent decades, many Americans don’t have the faintest idea of how to bake a cake, or fix a faucet.

For many families, it was the experience of COVID-19 restrictions that sparked a reconsideration of the significant trade-offs that are made when so much of what could be normal household economic activity is outsourced in order to maintain a career-centered life. Sheltering in place forced us to slow down and ask questions about work-life balance, the fragility of supply chains, and much more. And for some, it opened new possibilities for what a simple, fruitful home might look like. Some of the first steps we can take to make the home more than a hotel again is to reclaim the kitchen and the shop.

Home-Ec Lessons: Food and Family

A great place to start is by following Wendell Berry’s advice in resisting what he calls “industrial eating.” Berry writes in his essay “The Pleasures of Eating,” that “the food industrialists have...persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it.” Being an industrial eater, Berry contends, can contribute to “a kind of cultural amnesia that is misleading and dangerous” (146-147). Berry’s recommendations are still timely:

1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it….You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life.

2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of ‘quality control’: you will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. (150)

The arts of kitchen and household, as Berry calls them, are not demeaning tasks of drudgery, but are deeply satisfying and meaningful crafts.

Shop Class Lessons: Maintenance and Meaning

At-home tasks that require both physical and mental work are returning to prominence for their essential importance, physical meaning, and financial sense. Matthew Crawford, in his notable Shopclass as Soulcraft writes:

What ordinary people once made, they buy; and what they once fixed for themselves, they replace entirely or hire an expert to repair, whose expert fix often involves installing a pre-made replacement part. So perhaps the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. (2)

Such manual competence is just the type of thing our children and all of us need, as it builds resiliency, skills, and confidence. In addition to the economic value and contentment found in making and maintaining physical things, Crawford also keenly notes how such manual engagement with material reality keeps us properly oriented towards the world as embodied creatures. In classic Crawford style, he writes:

The satisfactions of manifesting oneself concretely in the world through manual competence have been known to make a man quiet and easy. They seem to relieve him of the felt need to offer chattering interpretations of himself to vindicate his worth. He can simply point: the building stands, the car now runs, the lights are on. (15)

Crawford further connects such human agency and capacities to our flourishing: “man’s interactions with his world through his hands… [by] building things, fixing things, and routinely tending to things, [is] an element of human flourishing” (63-64).

Breaking the Cycle

This all sounds great on paper, but is hard to accomplish in real life. Part of the problem is that to one degree or another, we all are caught in a vicious cycle, which goes something like this: To function in society requires money as a medium of exchange, which requires us to work. And many forms of work require us to be away from home, which in turn prevents us from developing household skills. Which causes us to spend money to have things done for us, which then means we have to spend more hours working to pay for it all, which means we further lose out on developing the home economy.

Breaking this cycle is an uphill battle in our current milieu, as economic and cultural forces lure us towards atomization, individuation, and consumerism. But we can counteract this rootless and mechanistic existence by taking small but intentional steps. We should not think of it as an all-or-nothing proposition, but as a slow process of developing new skills and capacities that offer a different way of life that blossoms over time. It might start with trying to make a few meals from scratch, which might lead to eating seasonally or dabbling in gardening. It might start with doing a basic home repair yourself, which might lead to changing your own oil or making a piece of furniture. Starting with small things builds momentum and confidence and increase one’s sense of personal agency, resiliency, and versatility. With each new venture and skill learned, you position yourself for larger future endeavors.

Reclaiming the home as more than a hotel is one part of a larger puzzle for reclaiming human flourishing and agency in a world where we seem to be no more than cogs in a machine (for more on the technological side of this issue, see the new book I co-authored with Robin Phillips entitled Are We All Cyborgs Now? Reclaiming Our Humanity from the Machine.)

Our humanely scaled efforts to develop a robust family economy help get us outside the machine, enabling family members, communities, and societies to thrive. The glimpses of home-centered productivity, ingenuity and restful pleasure hidden along the edges of our society reveal the power inherent in the family structure, and in humanity’s creative nature. Cameron LeBlanc notes, “some of these skills are undergoing an organic comeback among young people.” He explains:

Etsy is full of items, from needlepoint to wooden furniture, made by hand by tech-savvy young people. Knitting is increasingly popular among the younger set that populates Ravelry, the online knitting community with 8 million members. And the Right to Repair movement, which advocates against laws preventing consumers from fixing their own electronics, is gaining momentum. A generation largely separated from manual labor seems to be coming around, slowly but surely. The tip of the spear? Food. Farm-to-table cooking, home brewing, backyard smokers, sous vide, and Bourdain-style gustatory adventures are all popular. ...And these things require skills — the sort that used to be taught in classes largely populated by women. Today, men and women are both getting excited.

Perhaps even more relevant to the family and home economy themes of this essay, LeBlanc suggests,

Learning these skills requires adults to focus on their hands, put down their devices, and step away from the striving endemic to their generation. Learning these skills also provides parents of young children, who may be learning with them, to pass down some knowledge they may have not received as children.

Whether it starts with learning to use a cordless drill or planting a garden, or if the garage already overflows with vintage tools or there’s already an acre under the plow, there is something profoundly satisfying and richly human in working with your hands. Such work of building and creating offers much needed opportunities to treasure the original community of family and the physicality and humanness of embodied work—all the while increasing one’s adeptness in the wider world as mechanical know-how and maintenance skills transfer to other fields. The home is the original classroom for such things; a place where physical and mental activity, where work and rest, all meet—much like in that primordial Garden, which was a place of work and rest, beauty and brawn, mind and matter.

We must break free from the consumeristic approach to life and home. So much of modern politics and culture simply wants to make us consumers. Resist it. Break it. Throw sand in its gears. Be a maker, not a taker. And perhaps we find here echoes of Wendell Berry’s advice from a 2013 speech: “We…must think again of reverence, humility, affection, familiarity, neighborliness, cooperation, thrift, appropriateness, local loyalty. These terms return us to the best of our heritage. They bring us home” (64). The family is potent and generative—not only biologically, but economically and socially too. Developing the household arts and useful trades within the context of a simple family-centered home economy has generations of proof, and still can be recovered for the good of individuals and for the good of society. Individuals will find themselves rightly restored in the proper ordering of the family, and society will benefit from families thriving and functioning rightly again.

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[1] As quoted in Joel Mokyr, “The Rise and Fall of the Factory System: Technology, Firms, and Households Since the Industrial Revolution,” Carnegie-Rochester Conference Series on Public Policy 55 (2001): 1.

[2] As quoted in Mokyr, “The Rise and Fall of the Factory System,” 1.

[3] For more on the downsides of the factory model of schooling and possible alternatives, see my forthcoming book Education’s End: Its Undoing Explained, Its Hope Reclaimed.

^[4] Tove Danovich, “Despite A Revamped Focus On Real-Life Skills, ‘Home-Ec’ Classes Fade Away,” NPR, June 14, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/06/14/618329461/despite-a-revamped-focus-on-real-life-skills-home-ec-classes-fade-away .

^[5] Science History Institute, “Ellen H. Swallow Richards,” April, 30, 2020. https://www.sciencehistory.org/historical-profile/ellen-h-swallow-richards .

^[6] Rebecca Traister, “Feminists Killed Home-Ec. Now They Should Bring It Back--For Boys and Girls,” New Republic, May 28, 2014, https://newrepublic.com/article/117876/feminists-should-embrace-home-economics .