With unnerving regularity, we receive reports from sociologists and scholars about the dangers of our culture’s inordinate engagement with digital media. Nor do we have to rely solely on their studies. Every day we see people who are increasingly unable or unwilling to interact with others face-to-face, who doom-scroll the hours away alone in their bedrooms, or who develop unhealthy images of themselves by constant comparison with others’ online personas. And if we are honest, we will admit we too have been affected, even if we practice self-control.
In response to these realities, some have begun to urge us to “go outside and touch grass.” The sentiment of this rallying-cry is good but lacks depth. However, we can find a more robust articulation of the same idea in the thinking of Booker T. Washington, who was the leading African-American political and educational figure of the turn of the twentieth century. Washington held a deep appreciation for God’s common grace, extended to all through interacting with the material world He has created in manual labor. In our digitally saturated culture, we could benefit greatly from giving attention to Washington’s appeal for regular engagement with the material world as a form of common grace that can teach us to appreciate the true, good, and beautiful.
The Importance of Manual Labor for Pursuing Truth
Due to his experiences interacting with academics, intellectuals, and seminarians, Washington developed deep misgivings about living a life of the mind separated from the body. Textbooks and academic education could bring readers into contact with the truth, but they were less sure sources of information than interacting with the physical world.
Washington consistently emphasized the importance of facts and honesty in his speeches and writing. In his most famous autobiographical work Up from Slavery, Washington stated he had “great faith in the power and influence of facts” and that “holding back a fact” rarely leads to success.[1] He argued that people could see the world rightly and thereby act rightly only if they have a true understanding of the world.
For Washington people most directly access truth through engaging the material world, especially through manual labor. He developed his confidence in manual labor as a means of revealing truth partly through experience. Sometime around 1867, while still a child, Washington worked as a house servant in his hometown of Malden, West Virginia, at the grand home of Lewis and Viola Ruffner. Washington described Viola, a New Hampshire transplant, as “not ashamed to use her hands” and having “a high respect for manual labour, showing actively her appreciation of the dignity of honest work well done.”[2] He recounted that his time working for her, trimming the lawn and carrying out other basic chores, gave him his “first chance to get in touch with the real things of life.”[3] Furthermore, he was convinced that “this visible, tangible contact with nature gave [him] inspirations . . . which could not have come in any other way.”[4] He said that working with his hands engaged his mind in new thoughts and revealed new truths about the world.
Another experience later in Washington’s life demonstrates a similar revelation he derived from labor. Not long after taking the presidency at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1881, Washington determined that he and the students would make their own bricks to build new buildings on campus. The process of making bricks was much harder than Washington had anticipated with many failures and setbacks. Here again, interaction with the material world revealed truth. Washington “had always supposed that brick making was very simple, but [he] soon found out by bitter experience that it required special skill and knowledge, particularly in the burning of the bricks.”[5] As he engaged the world directly, he gained a deeper understanding of the truth of the world.
Nor did Washington believe that manual labor revealed truth only to him. Rather, he was convinced it was also essential for others. While attending Wayland Seminary in Washington D.C. for one year in 1878, he was disturbed by the lack of character and thrift he perceived in the student body and the black community in the area more broadly. In Up from Slavery, after reflecting on this experience, Washington exclaimed that he had many times wished he could “by some power of magic . . . remove the great bulk of these people into the county districts and plant them upon the soil, upon the solid and never deceptive foundation of Mother Nature.”[6] For Washington, the earth and engagement with it through labor was a path to truth because the soil was solid and honest. In fact, the natural order could not be deceptive. Books and ideas could more easily stray into falsehood because they were not so closely tied to the truth of the material world.
The Importance of Manual Labor for Pursuing the Good
Washington became convinced that engaging the material world through labor also serves as a particularly effective means of cultivating a sense of goodness. He wrote that, during his time working for the Ruffners in Malden, as he learned to “reap satisfaction from the works of [his] hands,” his leisure time that had previously been filled with mischief was absorbed by plans for industrious labor.[7]
This early impression in Washington’s life was reinforced by his time at Hampton College where “the student was constantly making the effort through the industries to help himself, and that very effort was of immense value in character building.”[8]For Washington, the effort and time consumed by labor produced a more moral person. The difference in character of the Wayland students as opposed to the Hampton students seemed to underscore this conclusion for Washington.
Washington saw academic education divorced from manual labor as enervating in most cases. After criticizing Wayland students specifically, he turned to the results of the public education system in Washington D.C. on young black women. Though he thought the schools in the country’s capital to be better than most, he argued that focusing on academics separated from the material world taught these young women to scorn their mothers who worked as laundresses for the wealthy. Worse, they had cultivated a culture of consumption that left them wanting things they had no ability to procure because they had no marketable skills or trade and no desire to develop any.
Having developed desires without the “ability to supply their wants,” Washington concluded, “in too many cases” these young women “went to the bad.”[9] This phenomenon was a general problem with academic education, according to Washington, who believed that “any person or any race” who developed increased desires without the attending means to achieve them was likely being set up for moral temptation and degradation.[10] Washington opined that these women would have been better served to receive the same amount of “mental training” in addition to “the most thorough training in the latest and best methods of laundrying and other kindred occupations.”[11] Nor did he see women as uniquely susceptible to what he perceived as the ill effects of academic education.
Washington strongly censured the young men of the city who slid into debt by spending their earnings on superficial displays of wealth.[12] For both men and women, he thought it would be best for them to be removed to the countryside where they could engage in ennobling labor “upon the soil” that was true and real.[13] Thus, truth and goodness were related in Washington’s thinking.
The Importance of Manual Labor for Pursuing the Beautiful
Beyond truth and goodness, Washington venerated beauty in nature and culture. The beauty in nature is a gift of God, and truly educated people will surround themselves with beautiful works of human creativity that will elevate their sensibilities. While academic education can play a role in developing a sense of beauty, interacting with nature and engaging in labor has a beauty all their own.
Washington was most concerned about encouraging people to develop an appreciation for the beauty of nature. He did not consider anyone to be truly educated unless he could “see” the beauty of the foliage in the “swamps and woods.” Washington credited his experience at Hampton, working with the best breeds of livestock and fowl, for helping him to develop his sense of wonder at the beauty of nature.[14]
The physical act of laboring with nature was also important for revealing beauty. At Tuskegee, he planned to teach students the “latest and best methods of labor” so that they would learn to “see not only utility in labor, but beauty and dignity,” lifting their assessment of physical toil from “mere drudgery.”[15]
Washington’s appreciation for nature and labor was also tied to his religious beliefs. He asserted that students who seek an education should expect to “see something beautiful, elevating and inspiring in everything that God has created” and “placed about us.”[16] Nature and labor were both gifts of God that should be appreciated. Thus, as students gain the ability to see the beauty in nature and labor, they will gain a better appreciation for God’s providence.
Beyond nature, Washington expected his students to develop an appreciation for the best in culture. This emphasis for Washington drew on his experience at Hampton and how much “stimulus and satisfaction” he received from learning to make a bed perfectly, with “the pillows placed always at the right angle, and the edges of the sheets turned over according to rules of neatness and system.”[17] He found it particularly frustrating when students could “locate the Desert of Sahara or the capital of China on an artificial globe” but “could not locate the proper places for the knives and forks on an actual dinner-table, or the places on which the bread and meat should be set.”[18]
While this domestic orderliness is not usually considered an art form, British philosopher Roger Scruton noted the aesthetic power of a “table [that] is laid according to rules of symmetry” with “the right cutlery, the right plates, the right jugs and glasses.” Furthermore, he observed, “religious people” traditionally take time before the meal to recognize that “the world is in other hands than ours” and, thus, “precede their eating with a grace, inviting God to sit down among them before they sit down themselves.” Scruton concluded that these deep connections between religion and domestic order and beauty cultivate piety or moral excellence.[19] In light of Scruton’s thinking, Washington’s emphasis on beauty in the home was deeply intertwined with his love for the beauty of God’s creation.
Conclusion
Booker T. Washington’s call to engage the world physically is even more pungent today than it was at the turn of the twentieth century. Our world has become consumed with abstract and disembodied experiences that are destroying our mental, social, and physical health. Let us take to heart the honesty, goodness, and beauty of the material world God created and allow our engagement with it to heal some of the destruction of the digital world.
[1] Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1901), 32.
[2] Booker T. Washington, Working with the Hands: Being a Sequel to “Up from Slavery,” in Covering the Author’s Experiences in Industrial Training at Tuskegee (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1904), 5.
[3] Washington, Working with the Hands, 9.
[4] Washington, Working with the Hands, 10.
[5] Washington, Up from Slavery, 151.
[6] Washington, Up from Slavery, 90.
[7] Washington, Working with the Hands, 10.
[8] Washington, Up from Slavery, 88.
[9] Washington, Up from Slavery, 90–91.
[10] Booker T. Washington, “The Economic Development of the Negro Race Since Its Emancipation,” in The Negro in the South: His Economic Progress in Relation to His Moral and Religious Development, by Booker T. Washington and W. E. Burghardt Du Bois (Philadelphia, PA: George W. Jacobs, 1907), 59.
[11] Washington, Up from Slavery, 91.
[12] Washington, Up from Slavery, 89.
[13] Washington, Up from Slavery, 90.
[14] Washington, Up from Slavery, 66–67.
[15] Washington, Up from Slavery, 148.
[16] Booker T. Washington, “The Highest Education,” in Character Building: Being Addresses Delivered on Sunday Evenings to the Students of Tuskegee Institute, by Booker T. Washington (New York: Doubleday, Page, and Company, 1902), 116–17.
[17] Washington, Working with the Hands, 11.
[18] Washington, Up from Slavery, 123.
[19] Roger Scruton, Green Philosophy: How to Think Seriously about the Planet (London: Atlantic, 2012), 262–63.
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