I
used to like “The Office.”
That is, until I found myself in a cubicle of my own and related a little too well with Jim Halpert when he says, “If this were my career, I’d have to throw myself in front of a train.”
Last summer I spent three months interning for a nonprofit. Working a 40-hour week, I exhausted approximately one-fourth of my summer in a gray box tucked in a corner under fluorescent lights staring at a bright computer screen. It was draining, and I couldn’t help but think how the sterile environment conflicted with much of what Aristotle calls “the good life.”
At Hillsdale, we study the liberal arts with the hope that it will teach us about the good things. One of these good things is beauty, a value that serves no utilitarian purpose, but is rather worthy in itself. Our very own 2012 commencement speaker Roger Scruton writes of beauty as “a value, as important in its way as truth and goodness, and indeed hardly distinguishable from them.”
It is difficult to define beauty, though philosophers have been trying since Socrates asked his first question. Classical thinkers believe beauty is found in order and proportion; Enlightenment thinkers believe beauty is the eternal manifested in the transient; and some contemporaries think beauty is relative to individual preferences. Yet regardless of its definition or the form it takes, beauty is recognizable. We know there is beauty in a sunset just like we know there is beauty in a tale of sacrifice. Similarly, we recognize when beauty is lacking.
There was no beauty in the cubicle where I sat this summer. Why? Because the company I worked for paid little attention to the good things. Rather, its sole focus was efficiency. The nonprofit was a well-oiled machine that churned out its product with precision. Yet while the company flourished, my fellow employees remained unhappy. Their work environment lacked beauty, a value essential for achieving happiness. An environment that fails to consider the aesthetic needs of its occupants implicitly states that the happiness of the human worker is not as important as the production of a product or service. The human person becomes merely the means to an end.
I do not mean that every business should turn all its attention and money to creating beautiful environments. A business is not an art museum or a social club — it must produce a product to succeed and, indeed, it could be argued that production is its final purpose. Rather, I want to emphasize that most people spend a good chunk of their lives at work. If we are to live good lives, then our work environments must include the values essential to that good life. Production is not anathema to those good things; indeed, it is a part of the good life. The produced goods and services are often fundamental to man’s survival or, at the very least, add texture to his daily life. What is needed is a purposeful consideration of what beauty might be and how it might be manifested in our work lives.
Since the invention of the cubicle in 1969, it has become the norm in the business world. Yet Robert Propst, the inventor of the first cubicle, renounced his creation before he died in 2000, calling the cubicle a “monolithic insanity.” He recognized that while the cubicle increased business efficiency by saving money and office space, it sacrificed beauty and other good things in the process.
Perhaps another lesson from Aristotle applies here as well. Aristotle spoke of the golden mean that exists between two extremes. Perhaps more businesses should search for a mean between beauty and efficiency — a mean that will both ensure fat green numbers on the balance sheet and happy employees in their high-rises offices. It is a tragedy that a successful business with ample resources to create a beautiful environment and a quality product would choose anything less.