“Everyone wants a revolution. No one wants to do the dishes.”
This saying is often attributed to the activist Dorothy Day, and even though it’s unclear if she really said it, it would be fitting if she had. Day co-founded the Catholic Worker movement, opened her home to the forgotten and unwanted, and practiced civil disobedience in her advocacy against war and for the poor. But in these tireless efforts, she found that the high ideals of her compatriots didn’t always translate into the hard work that was needed to make a serious difference in the lives of those forgotten people who flocked to her doors. They wanted a revolution, to be sure, but few of them wanted to do the dishes.
Why Good Intentions Aren’t Enough—And What Actually Works
One of the lessons that compassionate revolutionaries should learn from this is that while the world will always benefit from the selflessness of the Dorothy Days in our midst, her model of extreme generosity simply doesn’t scale. The “revolution of the heart” which happened inside Day doesn’t take place inside most of us—and that’s the problem. To create the kind of world that compassionate revolutionaries want to bring about, where no one goes hungry or has to sleep in a cold alleyway because their neighbors act selflessly on their behalf, the vast majority of us must be changed. We must all be willing to do the dishes.
But while radical revolutionaries of the heart have been lamenting a world which treats “the least of these” as grist for the mill of capitalism, something extraordinary has been happening right under their noses—the dishes have been getting done. By the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote their little manifesto, the process was already well underway: extreme poverty around the world was beginning to shrink (from 84% in 1820 to 8.6% in 2018), global incomes began to rise dramatically after being mostly stagnant for millennia, slavery was disappearing, and early death from curable disease was shrinking.
What caused this shocking turnaround for the least of these? Did people finally decide to take seriously St. Basil of Caesarea’s scolding exhortation that the extra shirt they have in their closet was stolen from the poor? Did the rich sell all of their goods and give their profits to the needy? Nope. We can credit this turn of events to that dirty little word that causes most good revolutionaries to spit and cross their hearts after they utter it aloud: capitalism.
There is a significant gap between the selflessness and generosity that revolutionaries like Day thought was needed to turn this world around, and how much of those things we actually have in supply. Few are willing to give all of themselves to others—including most revolutionaries! Even so, incredible progress has been made at a rate which was previously unimaginable. The lesson here is that the best society is not necessarily the one with the highest ideals—it’s the society that can deliver the most benefits even when nobody wants to do the dishes. What kind of society can meet the needs and wants of the highest number of people without violence and without expecting everyone to be a saint? It’s a society that allows for free markets.
In their forthcoming book Mere Economics, Art Carden and Caleb S. Fuller summarize what motivates people in an economically open society to, for example, put a cheeseburger on your plate:
Did the cattle ranchers, wheat farmers, potato growers, truck drivers, meat packers, app developers, and servers wake up early or go to bed late because they were thinking about feeding you, specifically? No. They have families to feed, kids to raise, churches to support, and hobbies to pursue. They have their own interests.
The early economist Adam Smith would have agreed. He wrote in The Wealth of Nations:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.
The amazing trick of capitalism is that it leverages our self-interest—our desire to feed and house ourselves (and yes, also often our families and even those whom we support through charitable donations)—and turns it into something that can benefit someone else. This means that your dead-end coffee shop job is not a pointless effort—it’s a holy calling. Through it you not only feed yourself; you also add value to the life of each person your work touches.
Thus, what might present as selfishness at the level of motive is actually reciprocity, mutuality, and interdependence in practice. The man who buys avocados which were sourced from a Mexican farmer may not have experienced Dorothy Day’s revolution of the heart, but he nevertheless does for that farmer something that mere charity or generosity could not do—he makes him productive, gives him a purpose, and allows him to contribute something to the world.
Balancing Generosity and Market-Driven Solutions
Of course, none of this high talk about the holy calling of work is to put down generosity. Christians like Dorothy Day and St. Basil are called by their faith to generosity whether they live in a rich or poor country, and many secular people feel compelled to do the same. Moreover, the realities of mental illness, disability, addiction, and just plain bad luck also create problems that markets can’t always easily address, which means we will always need people to be generous—from the investment banker who faithfully donates 10% of his paycheck to a local homeless shelter to the revolutionary who opens her apartment to people who don’t have a warm place to sleep for the night.
But free markets are also a means of helping our neighbor, just in a different way. Instead of telling other people to sacrifice, we can step back and leave our neighbors to enrich themselves through their work; or else exchange goods, services, or money with them for our mutual benefit. In other words, markets give us permission to take the weight of the world off of our shoulders and let freedom do its thing. While there will always be opportunities for us to step up and do the dishes in support of those who can’t help themselves, there’s a great deal of peace in knowing that in a free society, more often than not, the dishes will get done. And that’s something that very few revolutionaries can honestly promise.
