Blog - 4/18/08 - Clean Your Own Toilet
I was in the bathroom the other day and as I took a look at the toilet I thought to myself, “Uh-oh, it’s looking a little grimy, it looks like it may be time to clean the toilet, but I have better things to do.” Of course I had better things to do. Why is it that I didn’t want to clean the bathroom? The answer is selfishness. I work a full time job and the last thing I want to do on my free time is scrub a toilet. Everyone likes to have fun, but there are certain obligations, tasks and duties that have to be accomplished beforehand.
Cleaning the toilet is symbolic of all housework. As an adult living in a house or apartment it is your duty to do housework. A duty is a moral commitment to someone or something that results in action. When someone recognizes a duty, that person commits himself to the cause involved without considering the self-interested courses of actions that may have been relevant previously. This is not to suggest that living a life of duty precludes one from the best sort of life, but duty does involve some sacrifice of immediate self-interest.
A duty is a moral commitment. Morality is the learning process of distinguishing between virtues and vices. The proper system of values and principles of moral conduct promotes good customs (virtues), but also condemns bad customs (vices). Moral judgment determines whether an action should be considered as appropriate or inappropriate, selfish or unselfish. In other words, people who don’t clean their toilets are selfish, and people who do clean their toilets are virtuous and unselfish.
There are added benefits to cleaning your toilet aside from the obvious benefit of having a clean toilet. The exercise you do in performing the task is a benefit. Also, a central concept that forms part of the basis of the free market economic theory of western capitalism is that workers who work hard and play by the rules are eventually rewarded, and that those who do not should be allowed to enjoy the fruits of their own poor performance. Cleaning your toilet regularly will build up your work ethic which is a belief in the moral benefit of hard work and diligence and its ability to enhance character.
Depending on the culture, housework is a huge part of family structures and dynamics and there's more at stake than just a load of dirty laundry. Housework can effect marital happiness. A study in the Netherlands determined that division of household labor was a source of conflict in 91% of its partnerships.
Housework is the routine tasks that must be done in order for the system that is your home to function properly and efficiently. Housework is thankless because it’s something you do that nobody notices until you don't do it. It’s tedious drudgery, but if you don’t do it you are doing yourself a disservice because you weaken your ability to deal with this type of adversity.
Our standard of living continues to improve and technology has changed many of the tasks needed to be achieved to keep our home in order. As society has evolved we are increasingly becoming insulated from nature. This apparent improvement has its drawbacks. We lose touch with our connection to the earth. The civilized man has a fine Geneva watch, but he has lost the skill to tell the hour by the sun. He has a car, but has lost the ability to walk long distances. He has a GPS system, but he has lost the ability to read a map.
Cleaning your own toilet (or toilets) acts as a long term incentive to minimize the number of toilets in your home. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “In history our imagination plays us false. Kingdom and lordship, power and estate are a gaudier vocabulary than private John and Edward in a small house and a common day’s work.” If your professional career is too demanding to allow you to clean your own toilet, then perhaps you should cut back on your hours. Doing housework helps keep you in touch with your humanity and humility. When you have another person to do it instead you are cutting yourself off from the value of this work which makes you prone to feeling adrift and other psychological maladies.
When you partake in the daily share of the physical labors of the world then you alleviate a small portion of the physical labor that an underclass person hired by you would have to do thereby improving that person's chances of finding a full-time job that does not require physical labor. Tolstoy said that we should "get off the backs of the laborers." Thousands of working people are so overburdened with toil that there is no leisure nor energy left for the cultivation of the mind.
When you hire a servant to clean your toilet, you are fooling yourself if you tell yourself that you are providing a good job to your servant. Perhaps you are providing yourself with conspicuous subservience. See the the article in the Economist magazine on servants. According to Parent-Duchatelet, Lily Braun and Ryckere, about 50 percent of prostitutes were first servants. Simone de Beauvoir writes, "One look at "maids' rooms" is enough to explain this fact. Exploited, enslaved, treated as an object rather than as a person, the maid or chambermaid cannot look forward to any improvement of her lot; sometimes she has to submit to the whims of the master of the house: from domestic slavery and sexual subordination to the master, she slides into a slavery that could not be more degrading and that she dreams will be better."
According to the study in the Netherlands previously mentioned, in the U.S., husbands do much less housework than their wives, and when they do actually do it, it's seen as "helping out" their wives – who are primarily responsible for these tasks. But don't just blame the men for this: for at least some women, the men are actually discouraged from doing more. Why? One reason seems to be that these women don't believe the men are as good at tasks as they are. (But that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: if they are never allowed to do anything, then they don't get the opportunity to become proficient at it.) Another suggested reason is that women, not just men, define their own roles in terms of their domestic responsibilities, and it's just as threatening for them to give them up, as it is for men to take these tasks traditionally thought of as "female" on. In households where women contribute to less than half of the family’s income, the more money she makes, the less housework she does. Men with more educational attainment tend to do more housework.
So go grab a sponge and some comet, go to your bathroom, roll up your sleeves, (don’t use rubber gloves—that’s cheating) put some Bon Ami or Comet on the sponge and stick your hand in the toilet water (flush first if you need to). Wash the inside of the bowl both above and below the surface of the water. Scrub the underside of the upper rim of the bowl. Scrub the hole of the toilet until you’ve at least cleaned the area that’s in view. Wash the outside of the toilet bowel in that hard to clean area where the pubic hairs collect. Do it once a week. I’ve found that the hardest part about cleaning the toilet is getting myself to start doing it, but while you’re doing it, the task can be therapeutic.