Our big question this year, you’ll recall, is How can followers of Christ be a counterculture for the common good? Addressing this question is more or less a fulltime occupation for Gene McCarraher, who teaches humanities at Villanova University. His first book (which belongs on the same shelf as the work of Christopher Shannon, profiled in our previous issue) was Christian Critics: Religion and the Impasse in Modern American Social Thought, published by Cornell University Press in 2000. Long before the Democratic National Committee got religion, McCarraher was arguing that the American Left needed to rediscover its theological roots. He’s now at work on an anatomy of corporate capitalism and what he regards as the baleful spell it has cast on the American moral imagination.
A faithful Catholic and a fierce socialist—in 2006, socialism is about as countercultural as you can get; even anarchism is more fashionable—McCarraher here sets his sights on “the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse” and “the cant of diligence and virtue” which, he argues, keeps us from recognizing that “the Work Ethic’s boss is Mammon.”
Let the argument begin.
Reflecting on the misery of industrial England in the 1840s, Thomas Carlyle mixed acute discernment with moralistic perversity. Capitalism, he wrote in Past and Present (1843), bore “the Gospel of Mammonism,” in which money, through its “miraculous facilities,” held its devotees “spell-bound in a horrid enchantment.” That’s a nice encapsulation of capitalism’s grotesquely religious character, akin to Marx’s later exposition of “commodity fetishism.” But in the face of that “Gospel”—whose fruits Friedrich Engels would judge in The Condition of the Working Classes in England (1845)—Carlyle recommended, not the apostasy of revolution, but an evangel of Work. To his tired, hungry, sweated countrymen, Carlyle delivered a sermon on that “unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable and foreverenduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being.”
That’s quite an admonition to people already burdened with twelve-or-more-hour days, but Carlyle continued to bless the sweat of Adam’s curse as the beads of beatitude. A little later, in his “Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” Carlyle recounted the character-building benefits of African enslavement with a sanctimonious sadism worthy of Christian Reconstructionists. Behind the racism lay the Gospel of Work, now preached with the brutal eloquence of the whip. “If it be his own indolence” that prevents a man from his “sacred appointment, to labor while he lives on earth,” then, Carlyle pronounced, every “wiser, more industrious person” had a duty to ” ’emancipate’ him from his indolence.” (Arbeit macht frei, as a later generation of the Wise and Industrious would put it.) The man who dubbed economics the dismal science was certainly a piece of work.
But such has been the cant of diligence and virtue from the Pharoahs to David Brooks, our suburban Hesiod, who tells us the current bourgeois ethic is “sweeter, and more optimistic” than its dour Puritan ancestor. Though instructed no longer in the ways of probity inscribed in McGuffey’s Reader, Americans still know the proverbs of exertion passed down by Puritan divines: “An idle mind is the Devil’s workshop”; “Satan always finds mischief for idle hands to do.” These belabored mites of deception comprise the sentimentality of avarice, and the most eloquent refutation they merit is our yawning, carnal repose. Besides, the Devil’s workshops are now located in the world’s burgeoning slums, and Satan outsources his mischief to factories and offices around the planet. Thankful for the competitive edge bestowed by global capitalism, Lucifer now finds plenty of work for busy hands to do.
The Gospel of Work—better known as the Work Ethic—is the feature of our culture that most needs to be countered, and Christians should join William Morris in recognizing that Carlyle’s evangel is “a semi-theological dogma, that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer.” Like the author of “Useful Work versus Useless Toil,” Christians should demand for everyone their triune birthright of “hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself”—not the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse.
So close the book on Steven Covey and those Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; spread the good news of Wallace Stevens and “the pleasures of merely circulating.” If you’re the sort who thinks that the Parable of the Talents is a primer for smart investing, you need reminding that its teller also beckoned to the lesson we should learn from the flowers. “Consider the lilies,” Jesus says. “They neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon was arrayed like one of these.” Draped in the sober raiment of industry, the Work Ethic’s boss is Mammon, a deity more demanding and less forgiving than the God who adorns the idle.
Like reports of Mark Twain’s death, announcements of the impending demise of the Work Ethic have been greatly exaggerated. Fifty years ago, David Riesman feared that Americans were about to be buried beneath “a dangerous avalanche of leisure.” Thirty years ago, surveying the “cultural contradictions of capitalism,” Daniel Bell worried that a militant hedonism unleashed by the 1960s was eroding the personal discipline necessary for production. Apparently undermined by the very material abundance it created, the Work Ethic receded as the primary focus of cultural criticism. As Vance Packard put it, “consumerism,” not incessant labor, was “the great moral issue of our time.”
Thanks to Packard and his neo-Puritan descendants, “consumerism” has obscured the persistence and intensification of the Work Ethic. For two generations, the trashy delirium of consumer culture has been a welcome foil for would-be prophets, offering abundant opportunity for displays of impeccable righteousness and taste. But anti-consumerist cultural criticism has grown ever more facile and tiresome, and the fatigue stems, I think, from the shopworn and misleading moralism that condemns consumer “pleasure.” For one thing, despite furrowed brows about “instant gratification,” modern hedonism, as Colin Campbell has pointed out, looks a lot like delayed gratification. We window-shop, entertaining fantasies about numerous commodities that we never purchase or even touch. Like the “sex in the head” that bothered D. H. Lawrence, “consumption in the head” is a defining feature of the modern individual. As the vanity fair of the modern imagination, the consumer sensibility is a factory of idols producing at maximum velocity.
Thus, as the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture, consumerism is also a form of imaginative labor that fuels the political economy of accumulation. Conservative moralists in particular don’t like to acknowledge that the accumulation of capital requires the proliferation of consumer desires. We must spend money, we must enjoy ourselves, lest the whole apparatus of production and employment totter and collapse through attrition. Ask President Bush, whose clarion call to a stalwart citizenry after September 11 was—shop, travel, treat yourselves. (Cincinattus, drop that plough and pick up your Visa card.) So why not refer to our “free market” system as a command economy of pleasure? The transformation of leisure into commodities mandates an enormous expenditure of energy in product investigation; in keeping abreast of changes in brands and technologies; in the ambulatory and cognitive labor of shopping.
Attending to the political economy of consumerism opens our eyes to the volume of work that’s expended on consumer culture. On one level, consumerism might be better understood as the work ethic of consumption. People who want lots of stuff have to work harder, both to produce the goods and to acquire the money to purchase them. If they don’t have the cash, they’ll use credit cards and installment plans, both of which enforce a new brand of self-discipline: the monthly budget. Thus, the modern consumer practices a “this-worldly asceticism” every bit as genuine as the kind Max Weber attributed to Calvinist merchants.
On the production end of consumer culture—the part that’s routinely forgotten in the irrepressible urge to moralize—there’s the travail of advertisers, market researchers, and public relations specialists; the ranks of service workers, shackled in their compulsory cheerfulness; the cubicled proletariat ever-ready to take your order, assist you today, or field your petty complaint. (Not to mention the billion-strong anawim who, according to business apologists, should be downright thankful for the ill-paid privilege of sewing our shirts and sneakers.) The other name of Consumer Culture is the Republic of Customer Service, which is to say that talking about consumerism is a way of not talking about capitalism.
When confronted with these objections, the acolytes of the Work Ethic rehearse the boilerplate of Progress. Thanks to hard work, they scold, we’re richer, more comfortable, healthier, and technologically adept. As is so often the case with the apologists of Mammon, historical illiteracy passes for “realism,” and quantity becomes an intimidating surrogate for quality and morality. Talk of alternatives, ethics, or aesthetics is dismissed as the elitist bray of those who’ve never—select your cliché from the following menu—Worked Hard, Met a Payroll, or Had the Headaches that Come with Running a Business.
As for the bad history, there’s plenty of evidence that technical development and workplace organization could have taken any number of directions, and that the path on which they were set—subdivided factory labor, assembly-line machinery, managerial supervision and discipline—was determined by merchants and manufacturers bent on controlling the labor of dispossessed artisans. (The “free market” has always rested on similar coercions, erased from the historical memory of the economics profession.) Indeed, thanks to the Work Ethic, the moral economy of American capitalism has a distinguished lineage of mastery and surveillance: the Puritan curtailment and criminalization of formerly religious holidays; the time-clock and piece-work of industrial exploitation; time-motion studies and “scientific management,” that beatific vision of control freaks; and the “flexible,” “infomated” office of today, where “multi-tasking” and “empowerment”—”enabled” by cell phones, head sets, Palm Pilots, the new hardware and wardrobe of indenture—”permit” you to Get More Done.
What have these labor-saving devices achieved? More work for everyone. (That was always the purpose behind the technology: save labor on one task so you could perform some more.) Imprisoned in the free market, Americans now work longer hours, are more harried, tired, and distracted, and dislike their jobs and bosses more than they have in a generation. According to Juliet Schor, the average worker now spends a month longer at the job than in 1970. And that job follows them everywhere: as one executive proudly crowed to Jill Fraser in White-Collar Sweatshop, “I want my employees to have telephones in their bathrooms.” It will be a great day, brethren, when “wage slavery”—once fighting words for the Republican Party—re-enters our moral vocabulary.
As for “élitism,” this is the self-pity of the Entrepreneur disguised as moral umbrage. Rather than bow before this American idol and its bombast of “productivity,” we should defer to an “élitist” like John Ruskin, Romantic scourge of industrial bondage, and take to heart his prophetic rebuke to the pious bourgeoisie of his day. “I know no previous instance in history,” he wrote in Unto This Last (1862), “of a nation’s establishing a systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion.” Ruskin rejected the “occult” beliefs of Smith, Malthus, and Ricardo—soon to morph into the amoral elegance of neoclassical economics—and posed an elementary distinction between “wealth,” or “the possession of the valuable by the valiant,” and “illth,” that which causes “devastation and trouble in all directions.” Note that moral and spiritual criteria are integral to Ruskin’s conception of economics, not tacked on as “externalities” or “values”—that last word always a signal of evasion and fraudulence. “The final outcome and consummation of all wealth,” Ruskin asserted, must be evaluated, not in the number of commodities or the size of portfolios, but in the volume of “full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures.” “Modern wealth”—that is, for the most part, the kind whose unbounded expansion is the summum fetish of capitalism—induced a “dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being.” That’s not a bad rendition of today’s workforce: rising without a good night’s sleep, vexed throughout the day, waiting for “the weekend,” that commodified surrogate for genuine Sabbath rest.
Ruskin also belies the nihilistic ideal of “productivity” so central to the creed of Work. However hard-nosed or realistic they portray themselves, business leaders and economists reveal their essential kinship with wizards and warlocks when they wave this rhetorical wand. Befogging distinctions between wealth and illth in the haze of quantification, “productivity” partakes of that mysticism of the measurable peculiar to “disenchanted” modernity. By Ruskin’s more exacting and more realistic standard, much that’s presently calculated as “wealth” is really a pile of “illth,” and the work that produces it (and consumes it) is a sinful waste of talent.
As a champion of the endangered artisan, Ruskin also helps us understand how the Work Ethic poisons creativity—the very thing it’s supposed to hallow and promote. When industrial capitalism dispossessed “backward” and “unproductive” artisans in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Gradgrinds cast their habits and techniques on the scrap heap of Progress and substituted calculable, unrelenting diligence. Indifferent to anything but the methodical, quantifiable, and profitable, the devotees of the Work Ethic have invented the assembly line, the speed-up, the office cubicle, the mandated smile, and overtime. Workplace power, technical design, and aesthetic prowess become the concerns of people called “engineers,” “managers,” and other “experts” devoted to “efficiency”—yet another obsession posing as a virtue. In a tragic feat of historical alchemy, the gold of craft—a union of mental and manual dexterity—became, in the crucible of the Work Ethic, the dross of “management” and “labor.”
Any new ethic of work must aim, in Morris’ words, to “stamp all labour with the impress of pleasure.” That wonderful day would arrive, Morris thought, only when workers declared apostasy from Carlyle’s mangy Gospel: that “hypocritical and false” doctrine, as Morris put it, that “all labour is good in itself”—”a convenient belief,” he added sharply, “to those who live on the labour of others.”
What new doctrine should they affirm? A generation after Morris, Eric Gill and Simone Weil suggested poesis—skill in making, the discovery and creation of beautiful forms for objects of daily use. Poesis is the goal of which “productivity” is the perversion. The most penetrating Christian students of work in the last century, Gill and Weil asserted that work and beauty embraced when what the worker “likes to do is to please God,” as Gill put it. Labor, in this view, is not only a means of subsistence but an education in beatitude, a “training of persons for the end envisaged by religion . . . to see all things in God.” Along with art and science, labor, Weil believed, allowed us to “enter into contact with the divine order of the universe.”
From this vantage, the Work Ethic, together with its minions “productivity” and “efficiency,” sponsors a massive assault on the integrity and dignity of the human person, even if conducted under the auspices of faith. (Bleating about “Christian” or even “enlightened” capitalists misses the point: good intentions don’t bridle the structural imperatives that dictate the substitution of productivity for poesis, along with the subsequent deskilling of labor.) Where workers enjoyed direct access to the means of poesis—not the access mediated, as under capitalism, by money—they could become artists. The artist is not “a special kind” of worker, Gill mused; rather every worker is “a special kind of artist.” For Weil, this artisanal and sacramental conception of labor entailed the fullest democracy in the workplace. “The fully skilled worker, trained in modern technical methods, resembles most closely the perfect workman,” and any factory or workshop blessed with such artists “could fill the soul through a powerful awareness of collective life.” By Weil’s standard, the modern regime of work and productivity was a literal desecration of labor, a blasphemy of its sacramental character. “It is sacrilege to degrade labor in exactly the same sense that it is sacrilege to trample upon the Eucharist.”
The probability that even those sympathetic to this vision may consider it quixotic is a sign of how effectively the Work Ethic has clouded our horizon of possibility. But as the Emilia-Romagna region of northeastern Italy demonstrates, the prospect is by no means utopian. Known as “the Red Belt” for its doggedly Left politics, the Emilia-Romagna features an economy dominated by cooperatives and worker-controlled industries, whose artigianti work fewer hours than Americans and maintain some of the highest standards of craftsmanship in the world. (If you must know, their “productivity” as measured by gdp is among the highest in the European Union—which is to say, in the world.) The political culture—a judicious combination of Catholic subsidiarity and socialist universalism—enables an abundant and exquisite provision of education, health, and other social services, while the culture of labor allows workers to emulate the artisan and the epicure.
This genuinely leisured state resulted from a prolonged struggle, not only over the means of production but also over the ends of production. Americans have engaged in that sort of debate only briefly and sporadically—during the 1930s and the 1960s— but the time may well have arrived when the very meaning of labor itself needs to be posed as a political, moral, and religious issue. I daresay that the labor movement will reverse its present march toward extinction only if, pointing to the success of places like the Emilia-Romagna, it can offer a bold alternative to the current regime of post-industrial toil. I daresay also that Christians will have nothing of real interest to say about work until they renounce their fealty to the Work Ethic and abrogate the Puritan covenant of redemptive diligence. In the spirit of Gill and Weil, they will have to write instead a covenant of the lilies, and the construction of such a moral economy—not the creation of ideological camouflage like the “soulful corporation”—should be the first task of business and professional schools in Christian higher education.
That covenant of the lilies should be leavened by the Euro-mandarin philosophy of Josef Pieper, whose Leisure: The Basis of Culture (1952) is a Thomist treatise that doubles as an ur-text of revolution—a call, as Pieper himself puts it, for a “de-proletarianization of the proletariat” and an Exodus from “the world of total work.” Pieper reminds us that leisure is not a “vacation” but rather a sacramental way of being in the world, the flourishing of a “celebrating spirit,” the enjoyment of an “approving, lingering gaze on the reality of creation.” Like love, leisure is most fully itself when it repudiates the performance principle. When, leisurely, we forego seeking to impress God with our talent for the strenuous life, it is possible to live untroubled by the “absence of preoccupation” and radiate “a calm, an ability to let things go, to be quiet.”
That’s the same advice Augustine gave to his restless heart. The life of God, Augustine wrote in the Confessions, is simultaneously work and rest, because all God does, working and resting, he does with “the majestic ease of play.”
If salvation means sharing in the life of God so far as rational creatures may, then salvation must mean, in part, the marriage, or rather the remarriage, of work and play; and if we are already privy to foretastes of the Kingdom here and now, then signs of its fruition must appear in playful, felicitous labor. That’s emancipation, and the Gospel of Work is just another yoke from which the real gospel should relieve us.
Eugene McCarraher is currently a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. He is completing The Enchantments of Mammon: Corporate Capitalism and the American Moral Imagination.
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