Work may be a mere source of livelihood, or the most significant part of one’s inner life; it may be experienced as expiation, or as exuberant expression of self; as bounden duty, or as the development of man’s universal nature. Neither love nor hatred of work is inherent in man, or inherent in any given line of work. For work has no intrinsic meaning.
No adequate history of the meanings of work has been written. One can, however, trace the influences of various philosophies of work, which have filtered down to modern workers and which deeply modify their work as well as their leisure.
While the modern white-collar worker has no articulate philosophy of work, his feelings about it and his experiences of it influence his satisfactions and frustrations, the whole tone of his life. Whatever the effects of his work, known to him or not, they are the net result of the work as an activity, plus the meanings he brings to it, plus the views that others hold of it.
To the ancient Greeks, in whose society mechanical labor was done by slaves, work brutalized the mind, made man unfit for the practice of virtue. It was a necessary material evil, which the elite, in their search for changeless vision, should avoid. The Hebrews also looked upon work as ‘painful drudgery,’ to which, they added, man is condemned by sin. In so far as work atoned for sin, however, it was worth while, yet Ecclesiastes, for example, asserts that “The labor of many does not satisfy the soul.’ Later, Rabbinism dignified work somewhat, viewing it as a worthy exercise rather than scourge of the soul, but still said that the kingdom to come would be a kingdom of blessed idleness.
In primitive Christianity, work was seen as punishment for sin but also as serving the ulterior ends of charity, health of body and soul, warding off evil thoughts of idleness. But work, being of this world, was of no worth in itself. St. Augustine, when pressed by organizational problems of the church, carried the issue further: for monks, work is obligatory, although it should alternate with prayer, and should engage them only enough to supply the real needs of the establishment. The church fathers placed pure meditation on divine matters above even the intellectual work of reading and copying the monastery. The heretical sects that roved around Europe from the eleventh to the fourteenth century demanded work of man, but again for an ulterior reason: work, being painful and humiliating, should be pursued zealously as a ‘scourge for the pride of the flesh.’
With Luther, work was first established in the modern mind as ‘the base and key to life.’ While continuining to say that work is natural to fallen man, Luther, echoing Paul, added that all who can work should do so. Idleness is an unnatural and evil evasion. To maintain oneself by work is a way of serving God. WIth this, the great split between religious piety and worldly activity is resolved; profession becomes ‘calling’ and work is valued as a religious path to salvation.
Calvin’s idea of predestination, far from leading in practice to idle apathy, prodded man further into the rhythm of modern work. It was necessary to act in the world rationally and methodically and continuously and hard, as if one were certain of being among those elected. It is God’s will that everyone must work, but it is not God’s will that one should lust after the fruits even of one’s own labor; they must be reinvested to allow and to spur still more labor. Not contemplation, but strong-willed, austere, untiring work, based on religious conviction, will ease guilt and lead to the good and pious life.
The ‘this-worldly asceticisim’ of early Protestantism placed a premium upon and justified the styles of conduct and feeling required in its agents by modern capitalism. The Protestant sects encouraged and justified the social development of a type of man capable of ceaseless, methodical labor. The psychologyof the religious man and of the economic man thus coincided, as Max Weber has shown, and at their point of coincidence the sober bourgeois entrepreneur lived in and through his work.
Locke’s notion that labor was the origin of individual ownership and the source of all economic value, as elaborated by Adam Smith, became a keystone of the liberal economic system: work was now a controlling factor in the wealth of nations, but it was a soulless business, a harsh justification for the toiling grind of nineteenth-century populations, and for the economic man, who was motivated in work by the money he earned.
Bu tthere was another concept of work which evolved in the Renaissance; some men of that exuberant time saw work as a spur rather than a drag on man’s development as man. By his own activity, man could accomplish anything; through his work, man became creator. How better could he fill his hours? Leonardo de Vinci rejoiced in creative labor; Bruno glorified work as an arm against adversity and a tool of conquest.
During the nineteenth century there began to be reactions against the Utilitarian meaning assigned to work by classical economics, reactions that drew upon this Renaissance exuberance. Men, such as Tolstoy, Carlyle, Ruskin, and William Morris, turned backward; others, such as Marx and Engels, looked forward. But both groups drew upon the Renaissance view of man as tool user. The division of labor and the distribution of its product, as well as the intrinsic meaning of work as purposive human activity, are at issue in these nineteenth-century speculations. Ruskin’s ideal, set against the capitalist organization of work, rested on a pre-capitalist society of free artisans whose work is at once a necessity for livelihood and an act of art that brings inner calm. He glorified what he supposed was in the world of the medieval artisan; he believed that the total product of work should go to the worker. Profit on capital is an injustice and, moreover, to strive for profit for its own sake blights the soul and puts man into a frenzy.
The gospel of work has been central to the historic tradition of America, to its image itself, and to the images the rest of the world has of America. The crisis and decline of that gospel are of wide and deep meaning. On every hand, we hear, in the words of Wade Shortleff for example, that ‘the aggressiveness and enthusiasm which marked other generations is withering, and in its stead we find the philosophy that attaining and holding a job is not a challenge but a necessary evil. When work becomes just work, activity is undertaken only for reason of subsistence, the spirit which fired out nation to its present greatness has died to a spark. An ominous apathy cloaks the smoldering discontent and restlessness of the management men of tomorrow’
To understand the significance of this gospel and its decline, we must understand the very spirit of twentieth-century America. That the historical work ethic of the old middle class entrepreneurs has not deeply gripped the people of the new society is one of the most crucial psychological implications of the structural decline of the old middle classes. The new middle class, despite the old middle class origin of many of its members, has never been deeply involved in the older work ethic, and on this point has been from the beginning non-bourgeois in mentality.
