Once in my Australian childhood, during an election campaign, I asked my father how he was going to vote. He replied with a thump of his meaty fist on a nearby table.
“We’re workers,” he said, “so we votes Labor.”
I’ve never forgotten the way he defined himself, if only because it made me determined to clamber out of the working class and to shake off its bullying solidarity.
My father painted houses for a living; he would have thought it effete and futile to paint canvases. Since I went on to get paid for writing and for discussing books with students, he probably considered I didn’t know what work was. Nor, in his sense, do I: For me, it has always been a pleasure, indistinguishable from play.
But my father was a child of the Depression, who grew up with a ragged tribe of siblings in the backblocks in the 1930s. A job, when he finally found one, was a personal validation and a means of anchorage to society.
It seems odd to me now that he should have thought of work, which he actually hated and retired from early, citing a spurious war wound, as a stalwart proof of virtue and virility. In earlier times, our culture treated work as a curse or at least a lowly, shaming necessity like defecation. Adam and Eve spent the time in Eden cultivating their garden and were only condemned to earn a living after their expulsion from the good, happy, idle place. Christianity made work a consequence of the fall and for that reason afflicted women with what are penitentially known as labour pains. The Greeks took an even more disdainful view of work, which for them was beneath the dignity of a true human being.
The 12 labors of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labor-saving gadgets — not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.
REVOKING THE CURSE
The world we recognize as modern began by revoking the curse on work. As Alain de Botton argues in his new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, ours is the first society to believe that work should make us happy, “even in the absence of a financial imperative.”
The change dates from the Reformation. John Calvin sanctified capitalism by suggesting that salvation owed more to good works than to blind, trusting faith.
One of the puritans mocked by Ben Jonson in his play Bartholomew Fair is called Zeal-of-the-Land Busy: Zealotry and business, as Jonson recognized, had made a shrewd and lucrative merger. In 18th-century France, the compilers of the Encyclopedie laughed at the lassitude of the governing elite and treated artisans with unprecedented respect. Denis Diderot, one of the encyclopedists, was fascinated by specialized trades like glassblowing, masonry and silver-plating, which showed that menial men possessed rare, almost magical skills.
The philosopher John Locke challenged hereditary privilege when he declared that all property derived from “the labour of our body and the work of our hands.” We use those two terms interchangeably, but for Locke they were not synonyms. Labor remained carnal, still as much of an agonizing chore as a woman’s birth pangs, whereas work was performed by our nimble, ingenious fingers (which are also working when they are holding a pen or tapping a keyboard). In 1776, economist Adam Smith made such handiwork the foundation of what he called “the wealth of nations.”
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