September 2, 2022
Soon it will be Labor Day once again, the day on which we in the United States celebrate the value of labor by not laboring. Occasionally, however, my stock jokes can be tweaked into having some sort of serious point. On August 14, in her indispensable Substack newsletter Letters from an American, Heather Cox Richardson reprinted her newsletter from last year celebrating the passage of the Social Security Act on that date in 1935. The Social Security Act established a safety net for a number of groups of people incapable of labor, and therefore incapable of surviving by their own efforts: not just the elderly but the unemployed (it created unemployment insurance) and dependent children.
It was the brain child of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of Labor, Frances Perkins, the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet position. Perkins had witnessed the suffering of ordinary people during the Great Depression, but more largely, as Richardson explains, she set herself in opposition to the reigning capitalist ideology of rugged individualism spouted by the likes of President Herbert Hoover, in which hardworking men supported their families and improved their lot by hard labor without expecting government handouts. It was, of course, a Big Lie: for millions of people, there were no jobs to be had, and those who were employed were often underpaid and subject to horrible working conditions. Perkins witnessed the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, in which 146 workers, mostly women and girls, died because the factory owner had locked the doors to prevent employees from taking breaks. Women and girls: the rugged male individualist breadwinner has always been a myth. Perkins was herself the support of her family because her husband suffered from bi-polar disorder.
I have recently written about the conflict between individualism and collectivism. I am hardly the first to point out how greatly American society overvalues individualism, seeing it as an expression of the ideology of freedom and independence that emerged from the American Revolution. Doubtless there is some truth to that, but it is exaggerated. After all, the opening of the Declaration of Independence asserts that social welfare—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—is an inalienable right of all people, not just those who “earn” it; and whatever that unexplained phrase “the pursuit of happiness” might mean, surely happiness becomes impossible to pursue for those who are starving or homeless, ill with no means of treatment, or too old to be able to buy happiness with their labor. Indeed, such people do not, in an economy in which survival is based on the ability to work, have the means to sustain life, never mind the pursuit of happiness. In short, the wording of the Declaration mandates social concern, not just individual rights and privileges.
A far more important source of unbridled individualism is capitalism, which uses it to rationalize its selfishness, its pursuit of individual success in a competition of all against all. Capitalism, especially of the laissez-faire libertarian variety, prides itself on its hardheaded realism: it is the only economic system that works because it founds itself upon the real basis of human nature, which is selfishness. Socialism’s faith that more than a few exceptional individuals are capable of acting for the general good, as opposed to “rational self-interest” and partisanship for one’s family or clan, is said to be naïve. But that capitalist claim is another Big Lie. The facts of human nature are contested. True, there are biologists of the “neo-Darwinist” variety who do subscribe to the theory that nature is indeed the “survival of the fittest,” a vision of unlimited competition of the type that non-biologists have applied to society in the philosophy of Social Darwinism, in which those who cannot compete are to be weeded out for the improvement of the race. But other biologists regard such a view as an ideological kidnapping of evolutionary theory. Actually, they say, nature is a balance of competition and cooperation, which are equally biological urges. An imbalance between the two tendencies is unsustainable in the long run. Unfortunately, however, in the human world at least, it tends to work in the short run. Such is the story of our time, in both the business and political worlds. Selfish individuals scam, exploit, and loot the system, then get out just before the collapse—or else are in a protected position where they are not the ones to suffer the consequences. Donald Trump made two careers of this kind of grifting, one in business and the other in politics.
Christianity was originally a repudiation of the selfish-individualist view of human nature, but not a naïve one. It did not preach a smiley-button philosophy that everyone was basically good. The profundity of the Christian view is that it accepts that we have an innately selfish natural self, which Paul calls the “natural man.” But grace enables the birth of a second, spiritual self, capable of replacing, or at least restraining, the natural self. The natural self, the result of the Fall, is corrupt and capable of no good. The spiritual self redeems the damage of the Fall, and it is the spiritual self that is capable of the central Christian virtue of agape, spiritual love. Spiritual love is the unconditional love that God has for all human beings, but not because we deserve it. Love is not based on deserving, is not something anyone can claim to be owed, and does not have to be earned: it is unconditional. The King James version of the Bible translates agape as “charity.” Agape is more than, and yet includes, charity in the modern sense of the term. When Jesus was asked what it means to love one’s neighbor, he responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan—who did not ask the man wounded by the side of the road whether he had health insurance so that the cost of caring for him would not fall upon hard-working taxpayers. A nasty little acronym of libertarians is TANSTAAFL: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. But Jesus fed thousands, and did not even claim it as a tax write-off. The essence of agape is compassion, or empathy, on which I have written in the past. Charity’s unselfish care derives from that compassion. So does the other defining trait of agape, which is forgiveness and the tendency to reconciliation. Agape is the kind of love God has for us, but the most loving thing God does for us is to make us capable, through grace, of his kind of compassion, charity, and forgiveness, even if to an imperfect degree. I would say that that is what it means to be redeemed, to be saved, saved from one’s own fallen, corrupt, selfish nature. In some miraculous way, we find we are capable of more. It is amazing, unexpected: it makes no sense. Popular literature is full of scenes in which evil people at the last minute redeem themselves by doing some unexpected good thing. Often they themselves are surprised by it.
The ideological kidnapping of Christianity begins with the minimizing of our own capacity for agape and an over-emphasis on the corrupt natural self. It did not take long, aided by guilt-obsessed theologians like Augustine, for Christianity to become a religion of guilt, accusations of sin, and threats of eternal punishment. There were a few theologians, like Origen, who followed the logic of agape to its conclusion, which is universal redemption. Origen said that the punishments of hell were temporary and rehabilitative rather than strictly punitive—essentially said that hell was really purgatory—and that in the end agape was irresistible. Everyone is predestined to be saved—even the devil. This was declared heretical, and was replaced by the Augustinian notion that most people are predestined to be damned, and deservedly so, but that God spares a few for inscrutable reasons of his own. In our time, George MacDonald wrote one of the great Victorian fantasy novels, Lilith, to dramatize his creed of Universalism, the faith that everyone will eventually be saved. C.S. Lewis regarded MacDonald as his literary mentor, but went to the trouble of casting him as a character in his own fantasy, The Great Divorce, so that MacDonald could admit that he was wrong and that eternal damnation is a real thing. Calvinism, which came to the United States with the Puritans, developed the Augustinian notion of the corrupt natural self into what sociologist Max Weber called the Protestant work ethic, a kind of pseudo-Christian individualism. Hard work that leads to visible success in the world provides proof that one is redeemed, one of the Elect. Those who do not work hard, or who work hard but are not successful, are not to be pitied. Salvation has to be earned, and they have not earned it. The sufferings of the poor and downtrodden are their own fault, and do not matter. No compassion is necessary.
The over-individualizing of work is based on three assumptions. First, that the goal of work is individual success, wealth, power, privilege: the idea of service, of contributing to society, is liberal sentimentality. “Service jobs” are those low-paying jobs that nobody respects: they are for those who can’t compete. Second, that goal is achieved entirely through one’s own efforts, by how hard you pull on your own bootstraps. Third, it does not matter how many people you trample on or deprive on the road to success, because, human nature being innately selfish, they are just as selfish as you are, and would trample or deprive you if they could, if it was to their advantage.
In reality, the myth of the “self-made man” is exactly that, a myth. Even that most solitary of workers, the writer, works with editors, publishers, bookstores, libraries, institutional intermediaries that connect the writer with an audience. Writing may take place in solitude, but it is an intensely social act, a form of connection with and interaction with a community. In a more conventional business context, the self-made business titan lauded by Ayn Rand’s libertarian novels is an ideological construct, and not even an original one: it is an updating of Carlyle’s concept of “captains of industry” in Heroes and Hero-Worship, which looked to industrial capitalists as a new breed of heroes. What is minimized in these constructs is the social dependency of the self-made individual. Even the lone genius inventor who is so often the paradigm of the type must go on to found or join a business—a team or network. Thomas Edison and Bill Gates may have invented in solitude, but marketing their inventions involved them in founding General Electric and Microsoft. Even Tom Swift went on to found Swift Enterprises. The founding and nurturing of a business requires capital and the labor of other people. But in order to maintain the bootstrap philosophy, the ideology has to pretend that only the CEO at the top counts. The big entrepreneur is touted as the exemplar of the work ethic: he deserves his top position because he is more innovative and works harder than anybody else. The self-serving nature of the corporate and financial elite is rationalized by the argument that what they invent or produce are gifts to society that society should be properly grateful for. Moreover, their enormous wealth is actually also a social good, because it will “trickle down” to the lower levels of society. This individualistic myth, in the form of Reaganomics, has produced the income inequality that is wreaking havoc with American society, and is driving the right-wing insurrection we are currently facing. Although it has now evolved into fascism, the Trump phenomenon began as a backlash against the “elites,” the oligarchy of supposedly self-made men (the male pronoun is accurate enough), before those elites successfully deflected public frustration with the smoke screen of the culture wars.
What did trickle down was the individualistic work ethic itself, in the form of the single-breadwinner traditional family about which conservatives are often nostalgic. Sociologist Stephanie Koontz exploded that myth quite some time ago in The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1993). The nuclear family of the 1950’s with its male breadwinner was in fact a new phenomenon and not traditional at all, and families depended on social support long before the “socialism” of the New Deal. Often, rugged individualists do not even realize that they are benefitting from government and other social support, as became absurdly obvious in the controversy surrounding the Affordable Care Act, when a sign appeared in the yard of my neighborhood reading “Government, Hands Off My Social Security.” It has become common knowledge that red states who fear and hate government “interference” are more dependent on government assistance than blue states, who are in part supporting them.
The true goal of work is not personal success for one ruthless person at the top and grim survival of all the rest by being that person’s employees. You do not have to be a Marxist to see that work is actually social, in both its process and its goal, its means and its ends. To work is, as we have said, to join a team, a group effort. Mind you, it has to be a genuine team: phony team-building exercises mandated by a selfish and mercenary CEO will not work. What can work, as some experiments in the 60’s showed, is fostering a real sense of community, of belonging, so that individuals willingly self-sacrifice for the greater good but at the same time are cared for as individuals, not treated as cogs in the machine, expendable. Translation: you just might have to let your employees go to the bathroom.
Moreover, if the process of work is communal, so is its goal, at least if it is genuine work, as much social effort is not. Northrop Frye defined work as the transformation of the world into the shape of human needs and desires. Precision is necessary: transforming the world does not mean raping both the natural and the urban environments, and the needs and desires have to be genuine, not selfish. Nor do we need drawn-out arguments about what those common needs and desires are. They are, to use Jefferson’s term, self-evident. As Frye put it, defining what he called “primary concerns,” food and drink are better than starvation; safety and security are better than murder and violence; freedom is better than slavery; love is better than rape or exploitation; health is better than illness. Post-structuralist attempts to deny this because “there is no common human nature and no common values” are, frankly, pseudo-intellectual bullshit, blind to the unbearable suffering of common people every day. One hears of “the dignity of labor”—it turns out that the phrase actually has a meaning. It means a communal effort to make our common world a better place. One does not have to believe in a God who comes down and waves a magic agape-wand over us. There are plenty of people for whom it is BYOW, bring your own wand.
When people in the United States scream about “socialism,” assuming they actually have something in mind and are not just howling like a pack of dogs whipped up by some politician or Fox News, they are expressing outrage against this affirmation of the social nature of work, common work for the common good. The powers that be are often brutal union-busters because they fear any communal spirit: it may lead to what in the old days was called solidarity, and in the even older days fraternity. It is a potential power that could shake the oligarchy. The culture wars exist to turn the common people against one another so that they cannot organize on the basis of “We are many, they are few.” Meanwhile, the Citizen Kanes at the top, the Ayn Rand style capitalist elite, are isolated and seem to become progressively more solipsistic.
But, as always, every value has its counterbalancing Contrary, and, although work is social, it has a genuinely individual aspect that is quite different from “individualism.” To find it, we may begin with the idea that work is “Adam’s curse.” After the Fall, God curses the ground and tells Adam that from now on it will produce food only with incessant toil. But that is fallen work, which is what Marx called alienated labor. Milton understood that humanity is not happy in perpetual idleness. He goes to some length in Paradise Lost to show that Adam and Eve do work in the unfallen state. They garden, and the work is both useful and enjoyable. Although he does not emphasize it, gardening is also creative, which is the reason it is enjoyable and absorbing. William Morris developed the ideal of creative work much further in News from Nowhere (1890), the greatest of traditional utopias. In it, humanity has rejected the urban experience and returned to the pastoral, the ideal of getting back to the Garden. Industrial capitalism has been reformed, and instead of mass production, which depends on proletarian labor, the making of bricks without straw, production has been decentralized and individualized on the model of the arts and crafts movement that Morris promoted in real life—and not just promoted but exemplified, doing his own printing, designing William Morris wallpaper, and so on.
For over a century, Morris’s vision has been dismissed as naïve, impractical idealism, but I wonder how it will look a century from now, when mass production by mass labor will have been largely replaced by automation. That process is advancing right now, and those who can look down the road are talking of such contingencies as a guaranteed minimum income, because there simply will not be enough work to sustain full employment, especially on the level of unskilled labor.
Already in the 1990’s, when he was Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Labor, progressive writer and thinker Robert Reich predicted the disappearance of the kind of blue collar work that my working class family regarded as the norm. He predicted that increasingly, such work would all but disappear, leaving two other categories of work: service jobs, which cannot be automated or outsourced but which do not pay well and are not respected, and the type of work characteristic of what he called “symbolic analysts,” people with higher education whose work consisted of the manipulation of words and numbers. His prediction was exactly on target, for better or worse. The problem has been that we abandoned the people whose income and whole lifestyle was grounded in unskilled manual labor to their own devices—or rather, to a combination of opioids and angry Trumpism. Meanwhile, the symbolic analysts, better known as neo-liberals, increasingly dominated the upper echelon of the Democratic Party, and have become disconnected from, and often dismissive of, the working class constituency that used to be the party’s backbone.
The entire situation has to change, and there’s no use saying it never will because you can’t fight City Hall: massive change is coming, whatever City Hall thinks of the matter, because the present situation is unsustainable and is going to fall apart, one way or another. In contemporary terms, City Hall is the 1%, the oligarchies who are presently thwarting all attempts to deal with the present crisis. My guess is that the power of the oligarchies, great as it is, networked as it is, will finally be dislodged when climate change becomes widely catastrophic—in other words, not all that long from now. This is the scenario of Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent science fiction novel, The Ministry of the Future (2020), admired by the likes of Barack Obama, which essentially replays the scenario of his earlier novel Pacific Edge (1990), my favorite utopia of all time. In both novels, change in a utopian direction has only occurred through mass social uprising amounting to a mostly-nonviolent revolution. In Pacific Edge, that uprising took place through the usual political means. In Ministry of the Future, it occurs as a collective reflex of self-preservation in the face of possible extinction. If that portion of the elite that seems as disconnected from reality as any MAGA supporter continues to tell people to eat cake even though “normal” high temperatures in the summer will reach 125 degrees, as a recent study predicted, that elite will be leveraged aside—one way or the other. It will be a wonderful irony if the greatest danger we are facing turns out to be the one that saves us by making revolutionary change a necessity instead of an endlessly deferred option.
What needs to happen is actually fairly straightforward. The elimination through automation of alienated labor, low-level, disagreeable, often dangerous unskilled jobs, will and should continue—but not, as now, at the cost of turning our backs on a whole class of people whose work and the lifestyle built upon it will disappear. If the 1% can be forced to release some of their huge amount of disproportionate wealth for the purpose, a guaranteed minimum income, with guaranteed childcare and parental leave, can be combined with forgiveness of all college loan debt and free liberal education for all, as has been the tradition in Europe until recently. The notion of creative work can return, “creative” being defined in a down-to-earth, non-artsy-fartsy way would be merely an extension of what some artisans and craftsmen do right now. Kevin Claiborne, the protagonist of Pacific Edge designs houses, individualized, Frank Lloyd Wright style houses, but for everybody, not just rich people, and each house is a new challenge of practical creativity. The comparison with the libertarian captain of industry in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, who is an architect, is instructive. Last year, I watched a group of workmen design and build our new stone retaining wall, including a set of stone stairs. It is a modest but genuine work of art, designed to fit the circumstances of our property. Sometimes I just enjoy pausing to look at it.
There is no need to listen to the voices that say the strategy I have outlined is wildly impractical—it is as practical, and no more economically damaging, than the succession of tax cuts for the wealthy that we have seen since the 1980’s. What would happen, interestingly, would be a return to exactly the situation that was frequently discussed in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when there was a prophecy of a coming age of leisure, one that would be a boon for liberal education. Why did none of that come about? Not because the theorists were wild utopians with no sense of practicality. No, that development was deliberately squelched by those who wanted to be Pharaohs and who needed a vast population of overworked, passively dependent slaves to build their pyramids. The general mood right now is that, yes, things will fall apart, but what will result will only be apocalyptic dystopian collapse. No one can say for sure what the outcome of the present crisis will be, but an attitude is a political act. We know this on a personal level, because we all know people whose negative attitude has clearly become to some degree a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the same is true of our social as well as our personal attitude. I would rather risk turning out to be a pathetically quixotic idealist than feel I was guilty of adding my negative vote to a collective failure of nerve. The idea that dystopia is inevitable is, in my opinion, neurotic. Utopia, meaning a society that is far from perfect but in which primary concerns were universally fulfilled, is perfectly possible, and we should build it, refusing to accept failure as an option.
Fulfillment of primary concerns, which would mean economic security and an amount of leisure, would liberate a vast amount of repressed social energy and desire, which, as said before, is exactly why the elites fear it. They got a taste of what that could mean in the 60’s, and it terrified them—still does. It’s why a lot of the older elite turned conservative after starting out as moderates. What shall we do with that liberated energy? I have been speaking of work in terms of service, of contributing to the transformation of society. But there is something beyond the useful, symbolized in the Biblical tradition by the Sabbath. The Sabbath is what is beyond work. What is beyond work? Rest, leisure, play. Liberal education, as I have said before, is a Sabbath activity—not practical, not useful, a line drawn beyond which the work ethic may not pass. I have tried to live according to the belief—and where did I get it but the 60’s?—that the imagination can change the world. That is the work of teaching, of writing books and newsletters. But beyond a point, the imagination rebels against the demand to be practical. It cannot be reduced to work, and its chief products, the arts and sciences, cannot be reduced to practicality and high seriousness. “All art is quite useless,” said Oscar Wilde. “Poetry makes nothing happen,” said W.H. Auden. Before there was work, there was play. In The Great Code: The Bible and Literature, Northrop Frye says:
But the phrase “work ethic” suggests the question of what is not work, and our normal habits of language tell us that one opposite of work, at least, is play. Work, as we usually think of it, is energy expended for a further end in view; play is energy expended for its own sake, as with children’s play, or as a manifestation of the end of goal of work, as in “playing” chess or the piano. Play in this sense, then, is the fulfilment of work, the exhibition of what the work has been done for. (145)
He goes on to speak of the astonishing speech of a personified female Wisdom that erupts suddenly in the 8th chapter of the Book of Proverbs. Wisdom says she was with God from the time of the great six days’ labor of Creation. But while God was working, what was she doing? Frye says, “The AV [Authorized Version, the King James] speaks of this wisdom as ‘rejoicing in the habitable part of his earth” (8:31), but this is feeble compared to the tremendous Vulgate phrase ludens in orbe terrarum, playing over all the earth” (145). That is why, on Labor Day, we do not labor, but instead celebrate labor according to its goal and fulfilment, which is play.
Reference
Frye, Northrop. The Great Code: The Bible and Literature. Edited by Alvin A. Lee. Volume 19 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2006.