Liberation Professionals?

Recently, I’ve been sharing a reflection from Virginia Woolf with my students. In Three Guineas, she describes the kind of professional we ought to avoid becoming.Woolf’s skepticism about women joining men in the professions reminds me of the discussion Mev had with Jon Sobrino about the need not just for liberation theologians, but liberation phgotographers, accountants, and, one can imagine, every kind of professional (The Book of Mev, p.54). Here’s Woolf: “Those opinions cause us to doubt and criticize and question the value of professional life – not its cash value; that is great; but its spiritual, its moral, its intellectual value. They make us of the opinion that if people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion – the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes. Moneymaking becomes so important that they must work by night as well as by day. Health goes. And so competitive do they become that they will not share their work with others though they have more than they can do themselves. What then remains of a human being who has lost sight, sound, and sense of proportion? Only a cripple in a cave.”