On Work and Human Nature

Long-time readers know that I regard employment as key to the health of any society. Employment integrates the individual with society in the pursuit of the common good; it enables him to discharge his duties to himself, his family, the state, and God; and it keeps him healthy, happy, productive, engaged, and mindful of his obligations to others. Unemployed people suffer physically and mentally, their families tend to disintegrate as they sink into poverty and despair, and they tend toward political extremism, crime, and other indicators of social pathology. A society that doesn't take employment seriously, that thinks having a sizable proportion of its people unemployed is good, and that is willing to tolerate any degree of chronic and involuntary unemployment, is radically deficient, not only organizationally but morally and with respect to its basic priorities.

Work, in other words, corresponds to human nature in a very real and powerful way. (Hobbies and social activism serve the same purpose for those who are moneyed enough not to need to work, at least not regularly). It's not for nothing that earlier societies envisioned work as a form of prayer: a divine office, executed with a humble heart, in accordance with the will of God.

Unfortunately, modern society has more or less succeeded in severing the link between work and the natural human impulses that rationalize and ennoble it. Man is atomized, reduced to interchangeable cogs in a utilitarian economic machine. He is fired wantonly and encouraged to change jobs for reasons of even minor convenience. The resulting bitterness, despair, and alienation is captured perfectly in movies like Office Space and Falling Down. The modern historical norm of hating one's job, detesting one's coworkers, resenting one's superiors and exploiting one's subordinates is grossly unhealthy from both an individual and social perspective.

For myself, I feel ludicrous guilt even contemplating leaving my current job, and not only because there are many who'd be happy to have it and my gripes are pretty minor. Work itself is a gift, and man ought to -- indeed, wants to -- be in a position in which he can cherish it, as he would any good thing. Modern society affords him no such opportunity; indeed, it abstracts from our economic order all that makes it human and salvages only that which makes it impersonal, bureaucratic, and insufferable. This is true not only at the micro level but at the macro, too. Suppose our elite was presented with two economic plans: one would cause the Dow to shrink to around 2,000 (much closer to the historical norm) but cause unemployment to drop within rounding error of zero, putting all those who want work in stable jobs that would provide for at least their basic necessities; the other would put 20% of the population out of work but cause the Dow to rocket up to 50,000. Which would they pick? We all know the answer.

What can be done to repair this situation? For one thing, recognition of the fact that stability in employment matters is necessary. It's not enough that a man should always be able to find a job somewhere; having to find a new job every 12 months is a bad, or at least suboptimal, situation. He must, if he wants, always be employed at the same place or by the same company. A community of fellows (which is really all a workplace is, and the demand for which arises from human nature) cannot spring up where the population is transient. Ask anyone who lives in a sizable military town.

Deprioritization of economic goods in favor of basic human goods matters, too. "Is this good for GDP" should be asked only after "Is this good for the health of the polity" is answered favorably. We should resort to technocratic economic number-crunching only where failure to do so imperils our primary goal of promoting a healthy and integrated social order, and even then subordinate it to that goal, seeking to cause as little disruption as possible.

How do we enforce this? Possibly the same way we enforce our present order, which seeks to smash the traditional family, unduly elevate talentless minorities just to stick it to white people, and enrich psychotic criminals. That is to say, announce a set of standards and then proceed to severely sanction--socially, financially, and legally--any employer who does not comply, while rewarding to the greatest extent possible those that do. Carrot and stick. It works for the PC apparatchniks; it can work for us, too.

Comments

[Samson J.]

***Deprioritization of economic goods in favor of basic human goods matters, too. "Is this good for GDP" should be asked only after "Is this good for the health of the polity" is answered favorably.***

Exactly right, and this was the biggest thing that turned me away from unbridled free-market capitalism. I'd rather see the "nation" make less money, and people be happier.

Man is indeed designed to work; the problem is that the kinds of "work" that exist today are not what we are designed for. Compare grinding away in some office to the joy that people get from gardening, for instance.

[Kristor]

But the dichotomy between a strong DJI and low unemployment is false. Ditto for the dichotomy between a strong DJI and good employment. The more of the people that are working, the higher the DJI; and the better, more moral, more beautiful their work, the higher the DJI. There are, to be sure, lots of other things that push the Dow up, but hold those equal and put everyone to work at good, real jobs that are not part of the "fake" economy, as I have called it, and the Dow would go through the ceiling.

Actually, of course, you couldn't put everyone to work at good real jobs and hold all the other factors of the Dow equal. All those other factors would either push the Dow up as sequelae of full employment at truly valuable work increased realized true value across the economy, or else they would push the Dow up because they would have to be changed for the better in order to create the conditions for all that good real work.

Offer those same captialists a third choice: everyone gets a good, real job *and* the Dow goes to 50K, and that's what they would choose. Everyone wants good things to happen. The Dow, and the people who operate upon it and profit from it and follow it etc., are not themselves the source of error and evil, but rather only inditia of evil - and of good.

[Peter S.]

There is not only the practical and psychological necessity of work for the individual, as discussed above, but the necessity also of rendering the work something other than a distraction from the sacred; ‘ora et labora’ – work and prayer – as St. Benedict gnomically expressed. How is this to be accomplished? One means is by recurrent, brief punctuation of work with prayer and remembrance – this can be practiced quite readily and with a minimum of formality, indeed without outward sign, should such be problematic. It is quite possible to deepen from this to a kind of quasi-continual background remembrance of God; such a state is in no way extraordinary, but is nevertheless distinct from the general forgetfulness of God and insensibility to the sacred in which we frequently find ourselves, particularly in the midst of pressing distraction. Formal supports help: even a small icon reproduction or similar item charged with significance, placed in general view, can help to retrieve the attention and soften the heart.

St. Theophan the Recluse has much practical wisdom concerning such matters that I would love to quote from, but – not having this readily available at present – let me quote a relevant passage from Frithjof Schuon, one that treats, not merely the punctuation of work, but the engagement with work proper:

The great spiritual methods, even those which insist the most expressly on the excellence of the eremitical life, have never excluded the possibility of following a path in the midst of the occupations of life in the world; the example of the Third Orders is proof of this. The question we propose to answer here is that of knowing how it is possible to reconcile an intense spiritual life with the obligations of outward life, and even to integrate those obligations into the inward life; for if one’s daily work – whether one’s profession or housework – does not constitute an obstacle to the spiritual path, this implies that it should play the role of a positive element in it, or more precisely the role of a secondary support…

Such an integration of work into spirituality depends on three fundamental conditions which we shall designate respectively by the terms “necessity,” “sanctification” and “perfection.” The first of these conditions implies that the activity to be spiritualized correspond to a necessity and not to a mere whim: one can sanctify – or offer to God – any normal activity necessitated by the requirements of life itself, but not just any pastime lacking a sufficient reason or having a reprehensible character. This amounts to saying that any necessary activity possesses a character that predisposes it to conveying the spirit; all necessary activities in fact have a certain universality which renders them eminently symbolic.

The second of the three conditions implies that the activity thus defined be actually offered to God, which is to say that it be done through love of God and without rebelling against destiny; this is the meaning of the prayers by which – in most if not all traditional forms – work is consecrated, and thus ritualized, meaning that it becomes a “natural sacrament,” a kind of shadow or secondary counterpart of the “supernatural sacrament” that is the rite properly speaking. Finally, the third condition implies the logical perfection of the work, for it is evident that one cannot offer an imperfect thing to God, nor consecrate a base object to Him...

If these conditions, which constitute what could be called the internal and external “logic” of the activity, are properly fulfilled, the work not only will no longer be an obstacle to the inward path, it will even be a help. Conversely, work poorly done will always be an impediment to the path, because it does not correspond to any Divine Possibility; God is Perfection, and man – in order to approach God – must be perfect in action as well as in non-active contemplation.

– Frithjof Schuon, “The Transfiguration of Man”, pp.52-4

[bgc]

I find myself ambivalent on this topic - it's hard to get to the essence of it.

Hunter gatherers work pretty hard getting food, but with considerable time for social activities - when agriculture was invented most people had to work much harder - and at grueling, dull tasks - for not quite-enough food. This probably reached its peak in China and Japan where most people toiled in the paddy fields all the day and every day for a handful of rice.

Perhaps the best life as an agriculturalist was in Africa - where high levels of fatal infectious disease and violence kept the population density so low that women could raise children AND grow the food, and men spent their time hanging-out and fighting each other for dominance.

*

In Britain today, the majority of the population are better off not-working - and the difference is not small - they are MUCH better off not working.

There was recently a major campaign to stop the government imposing a 26,000 pound upper-limit on housing benefit.

In other words, at present a significant number of people are getting paid more than 26,000 pounds a year JUST on their rent! This is more than the national average wage, much more than most school teachers would take home. You would probably need to be in a top ten percent income job to take home significantly more than many people get in benefits for not working.

Yet the mainstream Left - including Bishops of the Church of England - hysterically portrayed the attempt to limit housing-related income to 26K as being an attack on The Poor!

So, in the UK most people work, but they are actually paying to work - and if they are high earners, they only see half of every extra pound they earn.

*

At work, the quality and job satisfaction of the work has gone down in every field. Modern people often don't work so hard, or such long hours, but it is universally agreed that much modern work is irrelevant at best and soul-destroying at worst - the reason is bureaucracy.

Much of the population work in bureaucracies, and the rest have to spend much of their time doing what the bureaucrats require of them - bureaucracy is probably the single biggest fact of modern life. And it is death of the human spirit.

So, in conclusion, I find it hard to be positive about 'work' in a general way - some work kills the body, some work kills the mind, some work is in the service of evil...

[Kristor]

The sort of "work" that bgc describes - with which I am all too familiar, alas - is what Schuon describes, in the passage Peter has quoted (thanks again for that, Peter - I gotta read this guy), as "unnecessary" work. It is make work, or as I keep calling it, fake work. In other words, it is not work at all in the economic sense. In the physical sense, it is indeed work, but unlike what any economist would call real work, that creates real value, fake work *maximizes physical entropy.* It is a *total waste.*

So, of *course* it is soul-killing. Indeed, it is nothing but slow murder. No wonder we have the expression, "going postal."

The economist Mancur Olson had a trenchant theory that well-ordered, highly functional and successful societies are doomed eventually to weaken and die because, since being so strong they are so well-protected, prosperous and stable, their rule-making apparatus proceeds without hindrance to elaborate and impose upon the social apparatus of real value creation an ever more rococo, obscure, bizarre, and unreal - yet totally logical - system of rules, regulations, protocols and procedures, that more and more strangle productivity and kill morale. Over time this weakens the society, without anyone really noticing, and renders it vulnerable to invasion or other disasters, which sooner or later ensue. Disaster has the effect of wiping the legalistic slate more or less completely clean, so that ordinary folks, liberated to get back to the real business of life, proceed again to create value. The result is a boom, and a burst of social creativity that rebuilds civilization - or rather, builds a new civilization on the ruins of the old.

What we need is a Jubilee, in which all regulations - and I mean all of them - are wiped off the books, and the legislature can start over.