A Word for Being Useful
Prōdesse • verb • (proh-dess-uh)
Definition: to be useful, to do good
Origin: Latin
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Prōdesse is a Latin verb, so it obviously is not spoken these days, but its meaning—like kismet—highlights how the meaning of words can change as they expand into other cultures.
Today, arguably the most common word that derives from prōdesse is the German word prost that is commonly translated as “cheers.” Unsurprisingly, this translation fails to speak to the true meaning of the word. Prost derives from the Latin prosit which is another tense of the verb prōdesse, and a more precise definition of prost would be “may it be beneficial.”
As people shout “prost!” over beverages, they are proclaiming that they want this communal gathering to be beneficial. They are not coming together for some arbitrary reason. They are communing to be useful, good, and beneficial to one another.
When prost is merely translated to “cheers,” the meaning, usefulness, and goodness of the word has been stripped away. Now it merely signifies a toast without any clear purpose except for maybe the enjoyment of consuming alcohol. And when the focus and definition shifts to simply encompass a celebration of drinking, it becomes much easier to encourage people to consume far too much alcohol, which could then make them the opposite of useful or good while they are intoxicated.
When “prost!” and “cheers!” become meaningless sounds that people are encouraged to say thoughtlessly, this is a sign that we have already started to become off kilter because we believe that we are saying meaningful words when we are in fact articulating their opposite. When we say meaningless words that we believe are meaningful, we will be more likely to engage in meaningless, irresponsible actions.
Prōdesse and prost demonstrate an interesting extraction of meaning, yet the most significant aspect of prōdesse is the belief that being “useful” and “good” are one in the same because nowadays they are no longer interwoven concepts.
In most of the ways we talk today, being useful and being good have become bifurcated verbs, and this separation between goodness and usefulness has enabled destructive, alienating ideas of productivity to obscure the importance of being good in the practice of living a good life.
Productivity and Usefulness
Earlier this week, a friend shared with me an article in Carolyn Hax’s advice column for The Washington Post consisting of a husband complaining about how his wife was upsetting him during the pandemic because she was not being as productive as he would have liked.
In his infuriating plea for advice, he described how both himself and his wife are lawyers, and that they had calculated that both of them would have an extra 30 hours a week due to the lack of traveling and commuting related to their demanding jobs. With his additional 30 hours, he wanted to be “productive” so in six months he read 25 biographies, became conversational in two foreign languages, became a marathon runner, and started volunteering; and he was furious that his wife had chosen to use her time to “unwind,” reject “productivity culture,” and read fantasy novels. According to him, she had refused to improve herself while he certainly had.
At the end of his submission he had essentially concluded that divorce was obviously the solution to their problem. After receiving Hax’s advice, he also submitted an update informing her and the readers that he and his wife were divorcing.
I found this article to be especially important in relation to prōdesse because it highlights how a common understanding of being productive in America is also neither useful nor good.
This man could have easily decided to use the majority of his extra 30 hours a week spending quality time with his wife, yet his concept of productivity, which he clearly believes to be both useful and good, encouraged him to passionately pursue hobbies and trivialities instead of enriching his relationship with his own wife.
What is the point of reading 25 biographies if you don’t even know the person you intend to share your life with? Why become conversational in two foreign languages if you cannot converse with your own spouse? Is becoming a marathon runner during a global pandemic more important than spending time with your wife?
It is obvious that this man’s notion of “good” has its roots in the productivity associated with industrialization and the alienation that comes from it, and not in the shared communal goodness one is supposed to express when they say “prost!”
His productivity and goodness centers on being alienated from the human experience, and Karl Marx touches upon this idea in his criticisms of capitalism and industrialization.
In his foundational text Das Kapital, Marx observes that since most industrial workers do not see the end result of their labors they become alienated from their work and their labor. They do not know precisely why they need to be productive because they are so far removed, both physically and mentally, from the result of their labor, but they do know that they have to be productive in order to keep their job. Productivity has now become essential while also unrelated to goodness or evil because the laborer has almost no connection to the end result. They’re merely mindless workers.
Additionally, since most people are not passionate about the jobs within capitalism and industrialization, yet their job dominates their lives, they will become alienated from themselves because their lives have now become shaped by something they do not care about, but must continue. How can you know yourself if you never have the time to engage in your passions?
Lastly, within industrial capitalism, laborers will become alienated from their fellow workers and other human beings because they do not collectively gather at their jobs in order to cultivate enriching relationships, but instead to individually pursue the meaningless, “productive” tasks they have been paid to administer. When you are around your fellow human, but have been disincentivized to commune with one another, you will also become alienated from humanity.
The man from the advice column’s understanding of productivity, usefulness, and good had nothing to do with his well-being or that of other people, and everything to do with the accomplishment of meaningless tasks in the belief that the tasks themselves, regardless of the outcome, are meaningful.
His alienation has wholly corrupted his understanding of usefulness and good, and now they are no longer interwoven. Prōdesse is a word and a concept that struggles to exist today because tragically productivity and usefulness seem to no longer need to have a connection to goodness.
The Bifurcation of Useful and Good
It is hard to say when the definition of useful and good became bifurcated, but I believe it is fair to say that corporations, capitalism, and industrialization have played a role in this process.
Neither corporations, capitalism, nor industrialization are inherently good or bad, and the act of attaching an inherent meaning to any of them corrupts our understanding of usefulness and good. The United States loves to profess an inherent goodness to all three, and this bizarre belief makes Americans ill-equipped at stopping or regulating businesses when they engage in bad actions. Frequently, America will argue for the necessity of preserving a massive corporation that has committed wrongs because they are too big to fail or that their preservation equates to a necessary evil.
From this perspective, an entity that has done something wrong—such as Purdue Pharma and the Sackler Family who made billions of dollars getting Americans addicted to prescription opioids—remains a “good” entity because of the alleged inherent goodness of businesses. This concept of inherent goodness despite bad actions obliterates our understanding of good and evil, yet in order for a corporation to engage in either good or bad actions it needs employees who are consistently useful.
Usefulness has now become severed from goodness because the pursuit of profits and wealth has rendered good or bad into meaningless afterthoughts.
When being useful has no relation to being good, people will naturally aspire to be productive for the sake of productivity, and they will determine their usefulness based on the amount of money their actions generate.
A lawyer for Purdue Pharma or the Sackler Family that can negotiate a deal that allows them to continue to flood the market with opioids and make billions of dollars while suffering minimal repercussions will definitely be described as “useful,” but the lawyer certainly would not be “good.”
Prōdesse is no longer a concept that can exist within such an environment, yet as its meaning has been stripped away, we should be unsurprised when people say “cheers” or “prost” as they celebrate their bad actions.
In American, the pursuit of wealth has been a founding ideal for our society. Jamestown, Virginia—America’s first British settlement—was a corporate venture by the Virginia Company of London. These colonizers did not aspire to live good, nurturing lives in America, but to find a way to make a profit from the land. Engaging in wars and taking Indigenous land had now become “useful,” and our language has been corrupted ever since.
To liberate ourselves from an unhealthy understanding of “productivity” and “usefulness,” we must have a clear understanding of goodness, and be productive and useful to cultivate goodness. This is how these words can become interwoven again.
