With this installment I begin a new set of pieces from “Everyday Life in the Late American Empire: The Logic of a Dream,” this one on the role of work in our lives. Hope you like it. —Jim
The foundation of human existence is work: organized mental and/or physical activity meant to sustain life. This can mean almost anything, but it is possible to distinguish it, at least partially, between that which is considered necessary to survive, and acts that are discretionary—acts of love, broadly construed.
For most people in human history, work has been the defining fact of everyday life. Procuring food and shelter for oneself and one’s offspring can happen in any number of ways, ranging from doing it yourself to getting someone to do it for you (via payment, coercion, or some other means) instead. Other things can happen—among them more complex and efficient ways of performing work and creating time and space for non-work—but only if, and after, a reliable means of sustenance has been established.
In all societies there has been a stratum of privileged people who don’t have to work, whether on the basis of large reserves of surplus wealth or a privileged social status, which often converge. The number of such people is sometimes vanishingly small. This leisured class marks one end of a spectrum whose other end is defined by slavery. In slavery, one derives one’s sustenance by performing surplus labor solely for the benefit of someone else. Most people, most of the time, have spent their days somewhere in between these poles of effortless ease and bondage.
The question of whether you want to work, or like to work, is usually irrelevant. There can sometimes be an element of discretion of when or where you do it, or which work you do, and through a combination of circumstances, experience, or luck, an individual may be able to maximize opportunities, minimize exertion, and achieve relative (if temporary) satisfaction with the state of one’s working life. But whatever respite one enjoys, or any comfortable retirement one achieves, non-work is defined—and valued—because it exists in an economy of scarcity in the context of one’s own life or in relation to others.
I’m talking here about what might seem like the fixed realities of work, but of course, in fact, the world of work is endlessly dynamic. The nature of work has also evolved in terms of materials (iron, bronze, steel, silicon), and in anthropologically-defined stages of human development (hunter-gathering, agriculture, industrial production, service economy). Certain kinds of work have enjoyed more status than others. The same kind of work can also vary in its relative status. There have been times and places, for example, where stage performers have been regarded as little more than common prostitutes; in contemporary U.S. society, successful ones are secular gods (the less financially successful ones sometimes feel like prostitutes; both are professions which can also vary in relative power and status). Clerics, who in the past often moved armies, nowadays typically keep a low profile outside their immediate faith traditions, where they are regarded by outsiders as little more than relics.
The nature and status of work often reflect prevailing economic conditions. But cultural factors can also be important. (In polite circles these days, prostitution is now referred to as “sex work,” an indication of the commodification of experience in a service economy, changing gender dynamics, and secularization.) Certain kinds of work may be perceived as sacred in a literal or figurative sense; work itself can also take on spiritual dimensions, whether as a matter of ritual or legacy.
When we look at the meaning of work in American history, we see two very powerful countervailing forces. The first is the creation of a racially-based system of slavery in the Western hemisphere that was incorporated into what became the United States. In a slave-based society, work is a yardstick of degradation: one measures oneself by the degree to which labor consumes one’s existence. Status, by contrast, is measured in terms of leisure, whether in terms of the time one can devote to the practice of politics (as in classical Athens) or in genteel leisure (as in the plantations of the antebellum South, though it should be said that the landed gentry sometimes had to strain harder than they let on to keep up appearances). Whatever countervailing forces may be at work in any civilization—and there a number in the United States—the appeal of a slave economy for its beneficiaries is hard to understate, given the alacrity with which its adherents have adopted it and the resistance that has usually accompanied attempts to dismantle it. Selfishness is an extremely powerful human instinct.
The most powerful countervailing force to the emergence of a slave-based society in the United States was religious, specifically a cluster of reform-based offshoots from Protestant denominations—Congregationalism, Quakerism, and later sects such as Baptists and Methodists—that emerged in the wake of the Reformation. At its core, Christianity has an antislavery animus, in that it posits the moral worth of every human life, though of course it may condone, if not actually encourage, any number of other oppressions (render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s). But Protestantism in general, and the Anglo-American varieties that coursed through colonial New England and Pennsylvania in particular, placed a new emphasis on an individual’s imperative to seek a personal relationship with Christ. This helps explain, for example, the almost manic compulsion with which New Englanders built schools and fostered literacy, both of which have long been correctly viewed as powerful, if not infallible, solvents for dissolving the bonds of slavery (see: Frederick Douglass). Early varieties of Puritanism were Calvinist, emphasizing the powerlessness of individuals to achieve salvation on their own. This injunction, coupled with a seemingly paradoxical emphasis to search one’s soul for signs of irresistible grace, created enormous psychological frictions. Under such circumstances, one very good balm for such internal anxiety was to seek refuge in busyness—hence the famous Protestant Work ethic first systematically described by sociologist German Max Weber in his 1905 book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. There are few better distractions for a state of suspense than trying to do something useful.
The reason why such varieties of Christianity were so powerful lay in their power to transform selfishness into enlightened self-interest: helping others was a sign—and, maybe, just possibly, an actual agent—of your own salvation. Initially, the notion of individual empowerment that characterized 19th-century American evangelicalism was a spiritual one. But it took on increasingly secular overtones, from saved souls to saved earnings (a term that endows the results of work with autonomous moral force). The economic and cultural conditions that fostered a revolutionary political break with Great Britain also fostered a growing confidence in the ability of individuals to decide what they want, to be confident they could achieve what they want, and work toward a state of secular grace where they could sustain themselves in ways that were as emotionally satisfying as physically satisfying. Under the terms of this emerging worldview, the moral basis of national life was increasingly understood in terms of whether or not individuals would have the equality of opportunity to pursue such an agenda, giving those deprived of such opportunities the moral, political, and legal basis to agitate for them. This would, as we know, become the chief engine for social justice in American history, from emancipation to gay marriage.
But in terms of the topic at hand—the nature and meaning of work—these transfigured religious currents dovetailed with other changes taking place in the western world to create something relatively new under the sun: the modern concept of a career.
It’s not exactly a new one. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, a career, defined as the “pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement” in one’s working life, has been around for thousands of years. This notion of progressive achievement, its non-static quality, is what distinguishes a career from a job (work one performs for a fixed period of time with no direct or implied promise of something else) or a profession (an occupation that requires some specialized training and a comfortable standard of living, but not necessarily a fundamental change in the character of one’s work or social standing). By this standard, there have been aristocratic careers in a great many societies: soldiers who are commissioned as officers and become generals; priests who become bishops and cardinals; advocates or lawyers who become judges or ministers; and so on. These are people who perform a series of jobs and roles over a large chunk of a lifetime, gaining responsibility, power, and perquisites in the process. The expectation for a career is that you end up in a different place than where you started, and that the occupational trajectory of your life is one of upward ascent—even if one experiences setbacks along the way, and even if disappointment and dashed hopes may characterize the outcome.
What began happening in the 19th century in much of the world was an explosion in the number and range of people who could plausibly imagine careers. That said, a true career path I’m describing remains something that a minority of people in modern societies can achieve, even if a great many want to or actually try. Sometimes the quest is aided by education or licensing, but it’s not necessarily required, as in the case of the mail-room clerk who ends up in the executive suite on the basis of wiles and experience rather than diplomas.
There are two key aspects to the idea of a career. The first is having a long-term goal, a star in the firmament, with which one orients one’s days. In this regard, a career parallels other life objectives such as raising a family or achieving a state of spiritual satisfaction or grace. Which is actually the second point: a career is a way of making work—a grim necessity for most people most of the time—not simply a means of sustaining one’s life but also the meaning of one’s life and endowing any tedium that might be endured along with way with a sense of larger purpose. Again, it was not impossible, for, say, a farmer or a shoemaker to think in such terms. But it was more likely for an entrepreneur or a professor to do so (and, perhaps, lead a farmer or shoemaker to reappraise the existential value of “honest” or “real” work in light of such lofty imaginings).
Again, this notion of a career was particularly shimmering in the case of the United States, where confident notions of an individual’s agency and a widespread perception of environmental opportunity made the promise of satisfying work all the more alluring (and, for those denied it, all the more frustrating). This is the world in which you and I were born, the world which has shaped our expectations. But the foundations of that world have long been weakening, and we’ve reached a point where we can sense the instability beneath our feet. Still, the structure appears intact, and we continue to inhabit it.
Thanks Jim. An often quoted story- the parable of the 3 bricklayers. The 3rd bricklayer had a career.
The parable has many different variations, but is rooted in an authentic story. After the great fire of 1666 that leveled London, the world’s most famous architect, Christopher Wren, was commissioned to rebuild St Paul’s Cathedral.
One day in 1671, Christopher Wren observed three bricklayers on a scaffold, one crouched, one half-standing and one standing tall, working very hard and fast. To the first bricklayer, Christopher Wren asked the question, “What are you doing?” to which the bricklayer replied, “I’m a bricklayer. I’m working hard laying bricks to feed my family.” The second bricklayer, responded, “I’m a builder. I’m building a wall.” But the third brick layer, the most productive of the three and the future leader of the group, when asked the question, “What are you doing?” replied with a gleam in his eye, “I’m a cathedral builder. I’m building a great cathedral to The Almighty.
I think we need to help the next generation view the trades as careers, or a Cullin suggests, meaningful work. The obscene cost of a 4 year degree and the vast opportunities to access information and skills at lower cost makes this possible. People are shocked to discover that some folks study on their own, pass a state bar exam, get a license- without ever attending law school.