The DIY urge, Satan's sin and Pelagianism

I've got a big DIY urge. My motivations usually include being too cheap to buy something (typically because I'm saving up for something else--right now, a 3D printer). A fair amount of the time there is vanity--wanting to brag online, say. Sometimes perhaps there is a minor motivation (which really should be much stronger) to repair things rather than wastefully throwing them out. And sometimes the activity itself is very pleasant (I really enjoy using power tools like a sewing machine, a drill press or a stand mixer; I like the smell of solder rosin or freshly cut softwood wafting in the air). But I think often the strongest motivation is the intrinsic pull of doing things myself.

According to Aquinas, that motivation is why Satan sinned. He wanted the good things that God was going to give to him, but he didn't want them from God--he wanted getting them himself. In other words, the first sin is Pelagianism.

This makes me a bit worried about my DIY urge. Is it an echo of the Satanic pride that led to the downfall of the universe?

Not necessarily. Aquinas' discussion of the first sin is driven by two theses: (a) Satan was very smart and (b) Satan's motivations were good. So Aquinas needs needs to identify a good motivation that led him to sin, not simply by a stupid mistake. It is thus central to Aquinas' story that the DIY urge that Satan had was a good motivation: there is a genuine good in achieving good things by oneself. But in order to achieve that good, Satan refused God's gift of grace, settling for (lesser, presumably) goods that he could get by himself.

The fundamental motivation behind the DIY urge is good, thus. But there is a serious danger that it misses what St. John Paul II called our "nuptial nature": that it is our nature to give ourselves to others and to receive others' gift of themselves. Satan refused God's gift. The parallel danger in the DIY case is that it not turn into a refusal of the gift of others' creativity and labor, a refusal to acknowledge that (to use older language) we are social animals.

Of course, the products of commerce are not gifts personally directed to us. (After all, we have to pay for them!) But there is a sense in which they still have some gift-like nature. People have chosen not to be subsistence farmers, but to make stuff for others. There is an imperfect duty somewhere around here to participate in the back-and-forth of commerce, which bears some relevant resemblance to the back-and-forth of gift giving and reciprocation. And so, like all things, the DIY urge needs moderation, not just for reasons like not wasting time or avoiding vanity, but lest it become a denial of our social nature.

John Paul II and Marx

John Paul II is clearly a philosopher who has thought a lot about Marx and about themes of work and alienation that were important to Marx, having first been treated basically as a slave by the Nazis, working in a quarry, and then later living in a regime where almost everyone was treated as a slave of the state. I find striking that John Paul and Marx, while both agreeing about the possibility and actuality of the phenomenon alienated labor, have a major disagreement. John Paul II (and here I am particularly thinking of his first encyclical, Laborem exercens) has the idea that no matter how oppressive the work, it is possible for the worker to do it with dignity (indeed, personal dignity is literally inalienable, and it is possible to make one's work connect to this dignity). The worker can herself ensure that she is not alienated by working in a way that exhibits virtue (the official translation of Laborem exercens talks of the virtue of "industriousness", probably not the best word in English). This does not, of course, in any way excuse the dehumanizing employer or slave-owner, but it does mean that the employer or slave-owner will in fact fail at dehumanizing the worker if the worker holds on to working with virtue. (Here, I guess, we have an instance of Hegel's master-slave dialectic, though John Paul does not allude to it. The employer or slave-owner will in such a case only dehumanize herself.)

Towards the end of The Acting Person, Wojtyla reflects on a related question: the question of what attitude one could have towards an oppressive state. There are two opposed vices to be avoided: on the one side, acquiescence in evil; on the other side, taking oneself completely out of the life of this state. The virtue is in between. It is the virtue of solidarity which, among other things, involves one's doing one's work for the state (with dignity, presumably), but with a willingness to dissent where dissent is called for.