%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 Items to fit into your overhead compartment |
| This article from The Conversation starts out looking like a book ad, but is it really an ad if the book is 120 years old? Not long ago, a relative of mine told me he had been working so hard in the yard that he’d “literally thrown up”. As opposed to metaphorically throwing up. Though I suppose "throwing up" is itself a metaphor, or at least a euphemism of sorts. It was, oddly enough, a boast. I once worked so hard shoveling snow that I "literally" had a heart attack. My response? Started paying people to do the snow-shoveling. Fortunately, that hasn't been much of a thing over the last 12 years. See? Some good things come from climate change. Elon Musk once claimed “nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week”, apparently unaware that people from Archimedes to Nobel laureate Sir Alexander Fleming managed just fine on a normal schedule Note how he didn't specify changing it for the better. ...today, overwork is one of the few politically neutral ways to show virtue. If that's the only way to show virtue, I'll stick to my vices, thanks. Why is work treated, strangely enough, as if it were next to godliness? Even if I hadn't already seen the headline, I knew the answer: John fucking Calvin. As an aside: Trust me, I have already thought of all the Calvin (the kid with the tiger) jokes, so there's no need to make any more. One of the sharper answers came from German sociologist Max Weber. His book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905) has become a classic – though we need to be careful about what “classic” means here. Like the Bible or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, The Protestant Ethic is widely bought, regularly invoked, and rarely read. Again, I seem to be an outlier. I've read (and own copies of) those other books, but not Weber. The Protestant Ethic is a study of how religious ideas, especially Calvinism, helped shape the mindset upon which modern capitalism thrives. What'd I tell you. Anxious about their prospects for salvation, Protestants looked for signs of divine favour in worldly success. That anxious looking, Weber thought, helped to create – and then helped to reinforce – the disciplined, work-and-future-oriented modern subject that capitalism depends on. I could protest (pun intended) by saying "not all Protestants," but that would miss the point. It was one of Weber’s key ideas, and not just in this book, that modernity had lost previous ages’ sense of spiritual meaning... On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of "spiritual meaning," either. What was new, Weber thought, was the moral stance: that working hard, living frugally and accumulating wealth weren’t just practical skills for succeeding, but inherently virtuous forms of behaviour. Profit, for some, was more than a merely desirable personal outcome; it was a duty. We still see that in today's world. Calvinists believed in predestination. This is the idea that God has already decided who is saved and who isn’t, long before any merely human act could modify this outcome. While this makes some sense from a theological perspective—after all, if God can be surprised, then God is not omniscient, and it was important to a lot of people that God be omniscient—I want to point out that, while I've argued against the concept of free will here and in the old blog, "predestination" is not the only alternative. The result was a kind of compensatory behaviour. Believers began looking for signs of God’s favour. Success in one’s calling – or “Beruf”, a word that means both “job” and “vocation” – became such a sign. Working hard, avoiding luxury, reinvesting profits: these weren’t just sound habits. They might be clues that one was among the elect. And that is the piece I was missing from my outsider's view of Western religious thought. How do people reconcile the "camel through the eye of the needle" bit in the Bible with the pursuit of wealth? It's long been obvious to me that people do it, but I didn't know why, apart from the very human desire for more. I know some people claim that the "eye of the needle" was the name of a gate in Jerusalem's walls, but to me that stretches interpretation to the breaking point. Over time, these behaviours detached from their religious roots. You didn’t need to believe in predestination to feel the drive to work endlessly, or to prove your value through success. "Consider the lilies of the field," my ass. The moral weight Weber saw in the Protestant calling has not vanished. It has been reborn: now it answers to dopamine hits and brand loyalty. We no longer justify our work in relation to God’s glory, but we still work as if something eternal depends on it. I suppose one could consider intergenerational wealth a kind of "eternal." Weber certainly wasn’t celebrating what he described. He was, instead, trying to document the moment when a spiritual or theological project hardened into something far more mechanical, compulsive and inescapable. And look, just to be clear: I'm not advocating for or or against that point of view. Australian philosopher Michael Symonds has argued that this tragic logic, where the terror of predestination drives believers into a compulsive ethic of work, produces a world where meaning itself becomes hard to grasp. I do, however, question the validity of the idea of "meaning." This is one of Weber’s most unsettling points: a system designed to prove spiritual worth ends up building a world whose very operating logic seems to deny that any such worth exists. I'd be remiss if I didn't point out that this is hardly the "world." While it's certainly a viral meme that has spread to other cultures, there are societies that don't buy into the grind. The US is not one such society. The language of “vocation” is everywhere, but it has been flattened into a lifestyle brand. Work isn’t just work anymore; it is supposed to be passion, purpose, identity. You’re not just employed, you’re “doing what you love”. This idea is tempting, but it quickly turns into a trap, because if work is meaning, then failure or exhaustion start to look like moral flaws. Except that, as noted above, exhaustion, at least, has become a humblebrag. But the anxiety has shifted. For early Protestants, work was a way of reassuring yourself that you might be saved. For many today, work is a way of proving you’re not disposable. Just to be clear, because I'm obviously not quoting the entire source text: the idea is not that hard work and success lead to salvation, but that hard work and success are signs of a salvation that has already been predetermined. One reverberation from this is that, in that worldview, if you're poor, you deserved it. If you're rich, you deserved it. Therefore, helping the poor becomes a kind of sin, while helping to make the rich richer is a kind of virtue. We feel the pull to be useful, to produce, to stay busy – even when the rewards are uncertain, or vanish altogether. I've been reminded that there are various connotations of the first-person plural pronoun. The most obvious is the difference between the inclusive "we" and the exclusive "we." If I tell you, "We're going to a party," it may not be clear just from that sentence whether I mean "you and I and maybe some others" or "I and maybe some others." The one less obvious to me is the rhetorical "we," which is obviously the one being invoked here, because I'm certainly not in that "we" group. Weber’s point wasn’t just that, once upon a time, religion fatefully shaped economics. It was that a certain kind of theology, and the specifically religious anxiety to which it gave rise, engendered a system that outlived its theology and hardened into something else entirely. While I can't completely buy into the article—all the talk about meaning and transcendence is kind of irrelevant to me, too—I do think it provides some insight into how we (specifically the US and its close allies, to use the rhetorical "we" myself) got shaped. What it doesn't do, and what it says Weber doesn't do, is show us the way out. I'm tempted to claim that there isn't one, but I'm trying to be less dire in my thoughts. They say knowledge is power. Well, here's some power, if "we" want to use it. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
