Work Ethics And The Ethics Of Work

Francis of Assisi and Alexander the Great, virtuous men of previous ages. But hard workers? 

Someone, who I remember as Ruskin but can't find evidence of this, said that every age defines its virtues in a manner incomprehensible to the others. The moderns (by which I believe he means Protestant, Anglo Saxon moderns) value above all else industry, so that there is nothing you say better about a man than "he's a hard worker". To the ancient Greeks, for example, this would make no sense - work is for slaves, not free men, and so the defining virtue of the ancients is a boldness and exceptionalness of spirit as would be attributed to an Alexander. Neither would it make sense to the medieval mind, for whom all work is merely another aspect of life in the shadow of an all-important God and thus piety was the chief virtue of the age.

It's a convincing enough thesis, as it goes: we today almost exclusively define our lives by the work we do in them. Almost from birth you are taught to do well at school and university so that you might get a good job, and the chief measure of a man's success is the quality of his job and his quality at it. It is interesting to me that unlike the other two eras I mentioned, today's virtue has not caught the imagination of our novelists and poets to the same degree. With the notable and poisonous exception of Ayn Rand, the virtue of amassing wealth and sweating at the foundry hasn't mattered as much to writers as heroism mattered to Homer and piety to Dante. If work is our defining value, it is a tawdry one.

We should be alive, then, to the possibility that the work ethic we have inherited from an industrial and high-capitalist past will not remain in place forever, and that work will no longer define either our lives or our moral sense of ourselves. We've had high unemployment for nearly six years now and there's been plenty about how it's affecting people's self esteem in the long term, because we think of ourselves as workers first and foremost. However, with the increase in automation and productivity and the rise of the global South to be able to contribute to the developed workforce, there may simply just not be enough work to do. Keynes, brilliant as ever, kinda saw this one coming: in 1930 he predicted almost correctly the productivity increases in the next century and came to the conclusion that everybody would therefore probably be working only 15 hours a week. What he didn't predict was that we would be so consumed with the need to work that our working weeks would actually get longer, not shorter. We would invent more things to consume and work longer to pay for them. We would invent new kinds of work so far removed from producing anything tangible it becomes almost parodic: lawyers for the advertising companies that market banks that invest money in management consultancies that tell people how to better sell $900 handbags.

Because fuck taste, and fuck sense. 

There are many economic reasons why Keynes was wrong, and books by very clever economists debate why. But it's also a more general question we should be asking ourselves. Conservative Andrew Sullivan worries about the failure of the Protestant work ethic in America here, and it seems to me several interesting points are raised. Firstly, that a lot of discourse around the welfare state is based on a fear of loss of work ethic -  the conservative critique that we'll all get fat and lazy if the state is there to provide for us. The implication is that we all need to have not only the threat of absolute terror of bankruptcy and destruction hanging over our heads at all times to motivate us but that there should be actual examples of this clear to see around us to stop us getting comfortable. This is the tacit implication of US arguments against Obamacare, and it is frankly borderline psychotic. I find it hard to believe there are many Englishmen who feel they can slack off at work because the NHS will be there to catch them if they ever get ill. Sullivan is slightly blindsided by this. On the one hand, he says for him "the American Dream remains not only intact but inspiring. I believe in work". But on the other hand as an HIV sufferer the new insurance landscape give him a new freedom:

I feel empowered by the ACA not to work if I choose to and have the savings to take a break. There are a zillion different scenarios in which the guarantee of health insurance removes the absolute necessity of working if you have some savings to fall back on.

He accepts that the lessening of the work incentive might be worth the trade-off, which I think is putting it extremely mildly, but then I would. Not all conservatives would even accept that, and you only need look at the benefits debate in this country to see a massive segment of the population willing to come down firmly on one side of the incentive/security trade-off every single time. In any case it's certainly not a debate we have openly.

The other point brought up is I think one of the reasons for this., and Sullivan only touches on it very briefly:

One strong thread in the opposition is the fear that we’ll all stay on the couch, binge-watch Netflix and sleep in late, while the Chinese eat our lunch...  Isn’t there an obvious, if unstated, cultural fear here that Latino culture is less work-obsessed than white Protestant culture (despite the staggering work ethic of so many Latino immigrants)?

Yes, the racial aspect of this is very much there in both the US and UK. One the one hand you have the "lazy" races, the immigrants from Mexico or Africa or poorer parts of the world, and on the other hand you have the distant Oriental races, disciplined and uniform, innumerable, working 14 hour days and outscoring our kids on every test. These discourses are very old and built into our civilisation, not to go all Edward Said on you. The point is to form a mirror image of our own society to define ourselves against, and since the discourse was largely formed in an era when we were very good at going around the world and making money, much of it has to do with work. We Northern white people are good at working and making money, unlike the feckless Catholic South or the barbaric Africans. But we are creative and wholesome in our work, too, not like the unquestioning Chinaman or the dishonest Jew.

The goddess Ayn Rand in her British form 

There is a split here between the US and the UK which would be worth exploring if we had time, but it is interesting to me that the British have actually rarely venerated work all that much given our self-image. Something about that land-owning aristocracy at the top in full sight of everyone dampened it down a bit. Nor has the British self-image ever been about being good businessmen, thought that is often how the world has seen us. A nation of shopkeepers, Napoleon called us, but strangely we've never had much of an affection for the excellent businessman as have the Americans, in whose culture the snake-oil salesman is a character of almost grudging respect, the Lyle Lanley who can swoop into town and sell a pointless monorail with a song-and-dance number. If I were to believe in the concept of national greatness I would point out the conquest of one of the world's oldest and most populous civilisations with nothing but a bunch of tradesmen and a joint-stock company as Britain's most extraordinary hour, equal to the campaigns of the Mongols and the expansion of the first Arab caliphates. The fact is, despite our fond self-image as bumbling amateurs, there must have been a time when we were, extremely, extremely efficient at buying and selling and building and expanding. Yet the hard-work and up-by-the-bootstraps and commercial genius narratives don't figure much in the national imagination. We clearly never truly felt that work ethics were, well, ethical.

Only now, with the threat of being overtaken by China, has hard work been lifted onto its pedestal. And we will fear being outworked more and more as time goes on. We're in the global race after all, which means misery for our schoolchildren and declining expectations for the rest of us. Work will be the god that saves us now we've lost our faith in God. And yet what is the point of working harder when so many jobs are done by machines, by our massive interconnectedness, by Big Data and what have you? Why do we need to win these races? There is no changing the fact that our work can now be outsourced. So let's reduce the amount of work we do. Enough with growth. Thomas Piketty (about whom I shall say more in a later post) has demonstrated in his new book Capital in the Twenty First Century that absent a massive global tax on wealth the gains from future growth will almost entirely go to the top 1%, which to me sounds as good as pointless. Let us be happy with low growth then. Let us stop our worship at the temple of work. Let's work fifteen hours a week, get overtaken by China and find some new virtues.

I'll finish with a last paragraph from Sullivan:

With wages stagnant for most Americans since the mid 1970s, and hard, often back-breaking work failing to provide real gains in income, doesn’t the logic of the work ethic get attenuated? Isn’t it also affected by your knowledge that many people at the very top of the pyramid rake in unimaginable dough for working far less hard than your average teacher or healthcare worker? And isn’t the vast accumulation of wealth among so few itself a contributor to the decline in the work ethic, since it provides so many dependents with such easy, unearned cash? It’s not just the left that has created these disincentives. Global capitalism has done its part as well.

He is right, but as befits a conservative, he understates the case. Work in the 21st Century will not be what it used to. Incentive, the absolute bedrock of every right-wing bromide against the welfare state, incentive, the mighty idol of the free market true-believers, may well become a memory in the face of secular stagnation and the uselessness of so much work that makes so much money for so few. We may find ourselves having to reconsider our values, redefine our virtues, decide on what purpose our life is being lived for. And that will be very hard work indeed.