On the 500th birthday of John Calvin, with reference to the Protestant Reformation, work, and capitalism.

Calvin argued that everyone should work because it was God’s will. He also thought everyone should be in a trade that brought the most income. He believed that a person’s future was pre-destined and that no one could know or alter their destiny. However, through working a Protestant could become a model citizen in the eyes of God. An application to work would be a sign of good grace; success at work was seen as a personal salvation. Protestants were expected to work all the hours God gave them to achieve this state of grace while the ascetic Protestant lifestyle meant that the wealth produced from work was not destined primarily for personal consumption. Hence, Weber pointed out, this wealth was used for investment, thereby helping to give birth to capitalism.

In a weak moment a few years ago I confessed:

When my wife left 20 years ago this month she accused me of being a workaholic, of needing to work like a drug addict needs a fix, and that this was a form of spousal abuse. I denied it at the time and made excuses for my behavior, but she was right. My name is Gary and I'm a workaholic.

I don't want to recover. I like it, even now that I have fully faced my "condition". In a way admitting to myself that it is so was a great relief, a liberating act that allowed my to embrace it heartily and develop it more fully. I've even committed poetry (a crime I never do in public), waxing lyrical about the mental and physical high I get when I've worked long, hard and well. It sharpens my perceptions and awareness, speeds my mind and body, gives me a sense of physical and mental well being that at my age is not otherwise available except in special moments like meditation or good sweaty sex with a willing and uncritical wench who doesn't give a fig about my condition or how I spend my days except to be glad that I'm energetic and long winded, however I keep myself in good working order.

I'm not sure that Calvin would entirely approve, or that his God would smile on my industry, but I suspect that there is a common well-spring, that it could be described as spiritual if you are inclined to see things in those terms, but to me it's about the drugs. My body is a wonderful pharmaceutical factory that doses me with happy juice as a reward for my labors. This in turn helps ground me, tethers my sometimes too energetic mind so that it doesn't simply escape and get lost in space, and allows me to keep up a pretense of acceptable sanity so long as you don't look too closely or ask pointed questions.

Back to Calvin:

Even when the strict Calvinist connotations of the Protestant work ethic faded away, the idea of the ethical value of work lived on. Some, like Sir Thomas Carlyle, the nineteenth-century Scottish writer, took the meaning of the work ethic to an extreme. Carlyle made work itself into a type of religion (1). He elevated work to noble heights where all work was seen as good and idleness was viewed as a vice. John Stuart Mill criticised Carlyle’s view and made the point that work should not be done for work’s sake but should have some meaning and useful outcome (2). . .

Carlyle was mistaken, but in an age when anything and everything was made into a religion his confusion is perhaps understandable. Mill was wrong too in insisting that work had to be useful, that it could not in a sense be a form of play and done for itself rather than some socially approved utility. Work is all of those things and more, but not always the same. Like sex or eating, it sometimes has a purpose and sometimes doesn't, sometimes is a pleasure and sometimes a bore, sometimes is deeply satisfying some times the reverse, with every intermediate shade in the spectrum.

In Calvin’s time, the Protestant work ethic made a positive case for work, but the negative connotations of work have come to the fore in the past three decades through the discussion of ‘work-life balance’. Now that the recession has made it more difficult to retain one’s job or find alternative employment, this focus on work provides us with an opportunity to rethink its value. One positive outcome of the tough economic conditions would be if they generate a more critical approach to those who believe work is inevitably bad for our health.

This has been a minor theme here:

Consider the French problems and the general dissatisfaction with the European Social Model. Some of the same issues exist in Japan too. The chief defect is "social death". You may have a safety net, welfare payments and rationed health care but you don't have a job. You have no career, no status, no place in society, no respect, no prospects and so no life. You are a dead man walking, a rider of the purple wage, a "shitter".

This was from discussion following Paris Is Burning, a meditation on the unrest that lit up the streets at that time, the same month that I did my workaholic confession.

I suspect that a great deal of the confusion about work is an artifact of selection bias: those who write often have little understanding of work.

College professors are not proletarians.

I sometimes jokingly refer to my years as an itinerant adjunct as strawberry-picking, but it’s only a joke because it’s transparently silly. I did honest work but I wasn’t breaking my back in the hot sun, humiliated, subordinate and expendable, little more than a sentient machine. My working conditions were pleasant (I find schools pleasant), I enjoyed virtually complete autonomy in my workplace, I was respected as a professional and got full social credit for my work. Although I was sometimes needed, sometimes not, I accepted my responsibility to make my work ongoingly desirable. And as an independent contractor I could say screw this anytime, and I fully controlled the means of my production. It’s an insult to the struggle of real working-class folk to compare my life to theirs.

As noted in many previous posts the idea that manual labor reduces one to "little more than a sentient machine" is laughable, a rote repetition of ancient prejudices, the foundation of some forms of slavery that were justified by the belief that some races and classes did not actually possess minds, did not understand the words that they spoke, like machines that responded to certain environmental cues and reproduced sounds that real humans did understand. Push a button, words emerge, but cognition is absent. See Soul Butter, Crafty Posers, Science Class and Techne for earlier rants on this subject.

That eons old prejudice of soft handed scribes blinds them to the nature of work. It is little wonder that the writings over the ages and current policy are equally mistaken, since they are all the products of people who have at best a dim grasp of the subject, and they are further constrained by the intellectual conformity that grips their institutions. Little in the canon leads them out of that barren spiral, and if they have the temerity to break away they are often ostracized. It's too great a departure from the foundational supports of their institutions and threatens the perquisites of their intimate tyrannies. In this, as in so many things at this time, the experts are the source of confusion.