Boundary Keepers
Louis R. Tarsitano on the Duty of Professionals
To announce the limits of human skill, and the boundary between the natural and the supernatural, is the primary service that professionals provide to those in their care. Thus, for example, the professional soldier must say to his government, “This much can be accomplished by the means at hand, but the success of any further efforts will require a miracle of divine intervention.” If the governors to whom he speaks are also professionals, they may disagree with him about where to draw the border between the natural and the supernatural, but they will agree that the border must be drawn.
On the other hand, if he is dealing with nonprofessionals (either undisciplined amateurs or men motivated by ambition without any sense of service), he will encounter real hatred when he announces that some goal can be achieved only by an act of God, who may or may not be willing to grant their desires. The old saw that prostitution is the “oldest profession” is nonsense, since a prostitute tries, or pretends to try, to give the customer exactly what he wants. The first two professions (the old First and Second Estates) were made up of priests and soldiers, who served everybody else (the Third Estate, or the Commons) as much by saying “no” as by saying “yes.”
Nor are real professionals “careerists.” One can provide himself with a long and pleasant career without ever serving anyone. Any number of clergymen and soldiers do it all the time, hiding behind their “professionalism.” So can the supposed members of other professions that have been derived from the distribution of labors once reserved to clergymen and soldiers.
The Pain of the Professional
This was brought home to me when I first began teaching, a quarter of a century ago. I was assigned to teach everyone’s favorite college courses, freshman composition and introductory literature. Initially, I thought that many of the senior professors were merely lazy when they did their best to avoid taking such classes. Then I handed back my first set of student essays, and I saw the hard eyes of students who had never before received anything less than an “A” for their collections of ungrammatical maunderings, and usually with the comment “very creative.” It was time to decide whether I wanted to be a teacher or to have a career.
There are some people, of course, who receive both the grace of honest devotion to their professions and the grace of the sort of professional success that builds bankable resumés. I know many of them, but very few from that time and place.
I shared an office with several other junior instructors (imagine the squad room in a police melodrama, but without the nice furniture), most of whom had gotten a reputation for being “teacher types” rather than “tenure-track types.” We were gathered for a few end-of-term refreshments at my apartment, when someone turned on the television to catch the local news. The lead story was a fire—in our office.
The grades had been posted that afternoon, and one of our many grateful students had kicked in a window, piled up all our papers, books, and furniture in the middle of the room, and set them ablaze. One serves where one is called, but all such service is not rewarded with advancement or acclaim. That is the way with professions, since endurance and service are the key virtues that separate a calling from a career.
“Bedside manner” apart, doctors face a similar problem when they have to report the hard objective news of laboratory tests to their patients. Patients often take the announcement “you have diabetes” or “you have cancer” as a personal affront, or as the proof of ill will on the part of their physicians. It takes a lot of practice for young doctors to learn how to deliver unhappy news without flinching, even if their hearts still secretly ache for their patients.
I’ve had medical students tell me that their professors often take the easy way out, offering the advice, “Learn not to care.” But there is a great deal of difference between being hard and being strong, and strength is the professional virtue. My own counter-advice has been to remember how the medical profession began in Christendom, with orders of nursing monks and nuns, and with knights hospitaller. Their profession was primarily to faith in Jesus Christ, and only secondarily a dedication to the art of medicine.
Louis R. Tarsitano (d. 2005), a former associate editor of Touchstone, was a priest of the Anglican Church in America and rector of St. Andrew?s Church in Savannah, Georgia. He also was the co-author, with Peter Toon, of Neither Archaic Nor Obsolete: The Language of Common Prayer & Public Worship (Brynmill Press, Ltd., 2003).
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