"Working Hard or Hardly Working"
Every Effect of Total Work
Our Present Age, Vol 6 No. 2
“Working Hard or Hardly Working”: Every Effect of Total Work
The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn't work: the familiarities of one's neighborhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking.[1]
—The Invisible Committee
We have lived for many years in a World of Total Work. A World of Total Work pushes us away from True Work, which is inherently bound to our families, our communities, and our seasons.
The World of Total Work makes three basic assumptions when structuring itself:
1) Reality is Atomistic. All things are divisible into self-contained parts. There isn’t anything that intrinsically connects me to anything else. If I want to cut off all ties to my home and move to rural Alaska, I can since we’re all self-contained units.
2) Reality is Ateleological. While many people profess hope in an afterlife, there isn’t anything specific most people are working toward. In other words, we enter the rat race to run it or to have an enjoyable life. There is nothing beyond mere interaction—no end or particular purpose.
3) Interaction is Explained in Terms of Power. All atomistic parts interact with each other within a power dynamic. One party in every interaction has more power than the other party, which means that every relationship is causal (as opposed to familial). Relationships operate to serve a cause-and-effect
Our modern World of Total Work is built upon these modernist assumptions. In other words, the ideas of modernity lead to a society of Total Work. Work itself is not bad; in fact, work itself is good, for it is endemic to the human condition. From early age, when we learn to clean our plates and take out the trash, to middle age of careerism, to our twilight years and the caretaking of grandchildren—work, while not always compensated, is generally rewarded.
Yet while work itself is good, work done solely for instrumental ends finds itself creeping away from work as a gift from God and towards purely instrumental ends, which are typically grounded in human desires. In fact, our entire educational enterprise is situated to make us more suitable workers. And we go to school with the implicit assumption that schoolwork not relevant to our chosen career (and therefore to our salary) is not relevant to our lives. Work is thus reduced to a paycheck and stripped of its eschatological horizon—a “that-for-the-sake-of-which” all things have been made. In other words, we have instrumentalized work so that it is no longer work. True Work has become Total Work, and Total Work is a fundamentally modernist presupposition about the world and how it ought to be structured.
More important than that, however, is this: Total Work can never address our most fundamental questions about our lives: what am I supposed to do? Christians aren’t the only ones who have observed this problem—in her August 1 article in The Atlantic, Christine Emba observed, “But in listening closely to people’s stories, I’ve detected a broader thread of uncertainty—about the value of life and a reason for being.” While her article is addressing the various causes of declining fertility rates in developed countries, her observations are scintillating. Human beings are looking for meaning. Human beings are made to work. If, however, our Total Work operates under atheistic modernist assumptions, it isn’t True Work. Instead of giving meaning to our lives like God made work to do, we have substituted true labor for its cheap imitator: Total Work.
Despite this, there are some benefits to Total Work. Retirees live longer now than they ever have, have more money, and leave their former companies with far greater wealth than they would have otherwise. Notice, however, one crucial thing: all of these are instrumental benefits. It isn’t uncommon for people who retire to be miserably unhappy. This is precisely because God intended for us to work. And this is the advantage of Total Work.
However, the limits of Total Work are extraordinary. First, the World of Total Work operates under the presuppositions of modernity. These presuppositions are antithetical to Christian faith. Second, there are no intrinsic limits to either the pace or the force at which work occurs. Work thus becomes a ceaseless activity, a perpetual motion machine. (While anecdotal, you can see proof of this by just scrolling for a few minutes on r/antiwork and, to a lesser extent, r/latestagecapitalism.) This sort of perpetual activity, whose workers are always marked by strain and tension, is the sort of work that Goethe says “ends in bankruptcy.”[2] It is increasingly difficult for corporate white-collar types to ever log off of their perpetual motion machines—what feels like productive work is in fact only replying to Slack messages, text messages, group texts, emails, and organizing spreadsheets—hardly the stuff that can count as work, and hardly the kind of thing that can give meaning to anybody’s life.
Third, the only extrinsic limit to the pace and force at which work occurs is exhaustion. Both human energy and the resources of the earth are finite, and only when one or the other or both are exhausted can we finally put an end to the madness of Total Work. Fourth, Total Work is anti-narratival. Workers are going and going and going and getting nowhere. This is the antithesis of the Eliot line in “Little Gidding”[3]:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
For Eliot, the end of exploration is (re)union with God—the place “where we started” which we will know “for the first time.” The exploration of Total Work begins and ends in the middle. There is no beginning and no end of Total Work. We retain the vestiges of True Work in our schools which have a clearly appointed beginning and end, both seasonally and year after year until graduation. And yet our corporate culture is always working, always ignoring the narrative of the beginning and the end.
How do we leave the world of Total Work? First, it is to recognize that the system of Total Work is a mindset, and it is a choice. While our systems are set up to be anti-human, there are ways to retain your true humanity in the midst of corporate culture. I remind you of the words of The Invisible Committee: "The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn't work: the familiarities of one's neighborhood and trade, of one's village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking." The first and most important way to migrate from Total to True Work is to attach yourself to a place. Get married, have children, love your parents, live in your ancestral home, make friends, make love—smoke, drink, stay up all night—anything for that brief moment of human connection. For it is in the connection to one another that makes us human. This is the image of God in us—the ability to attach ourselves to one another—the capacity to LOVE.
Second, True Work takes seriously the intrinsic limits of work. The first is the Creational constraint God placed upon work, for work’s rhythm must be in harmony with creational time (Gen 1:14; 8:22) and space (Gen 2:15). We tend the earth like the Levitical priests tended the temple, for this is our purpose here on earth. The second is the covenantal constraint. First, this means we observe with all sober-mindedness and self-control a Sabbath. This must be observed on Sunday (Matt 11:28; Heb 4:10). Take time off—but only after six days of work. True Work has its motives and methods grounded in the covenant expectations for the people of God. This means True Work is never motivated by greed or envy and must be concerned with promoting justice—in short, True Work works to advance the wellbeing of the community in which it is situated. Work which fires workers for efficiency, strip mines the earth of its resources, or benefits only our friends—this is not work at all. True Work benefits our entire community because it is situated within it.
Third, True Work has an appointed end. As an economic policy, capitalism has its advantages. If, however, capitalism advances too far as its lecherous globalist cabalistic overlords ruin its foundations, then it becomes truly anti-human because it is no longer bound by considerations for the good of the community. Cheap fashion and cheap food are easy examples of this. Both cause irreparable harm to the local area and their consumers. True Work, however, fits into the vision John Paul II casts:[4]
Work is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work man not only transforms nature, adapting it to his needs, but he also achieves fulfillment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being.’
Total Work is incapable of doing this because “Globalization has increased our awareness of, and sympathy for, other times and places. At the same time, however, it produces a detachment from all times and places.”[5] Globalization is not, of course, an unmitigated evil. However, it is by its nature anti-local—even apples we eat can be over a year old, shipped in from all over the world.
True Work is not antithetical to Hard Work—in many ways, they are synonymous terms. True Work is not opposed to Leisure, as Josef Pieper demonstrates in his work on the subject. Leisure, he suggests, is not “laziness, idleness, and sloth,” but in fact its opposite. While Pieper overly denigrates the value of work (his criticism is of Total Work, which he equates to hard work but does not always recognize the value of True Work), his observations are critical: the end of True Work is worship, for this is the end for which God made us.[6]
True Work recognizes the end of man, which is to “love God and enjoy him forever.” Love for God is demonstrated by love for our neighbors:
For, in order that a person may know what it means to love himself, an end has been appointed for him to which he is to refer everything he does so that he may attain happiness, for he who loves himself wants nothing other than to be happy. And this end is precisely to cling to God [Ps 73:28]. Therefore, when a person who now knows what it means to love himself is commanded to love his neighbor as himself, what else is he commanded to do but, so far as possible, to urge his neighbor to love God? This is the worship of God, this is true religion, this is true godliness, this is the service due to God alone.[7]
This is work aligned with our end: “For what else is our end but to reach the kingdom that has no end?”[8] True Work operates within this framework of self-love which is service to God and to each other. It is leisurely, but it is also unafraid to embrace hard work which benefits the whole local community.
Finally, True Work is not limited by relationships defined in terms of power relations. Foucault believed that there can be no society without power relations. This has seeped into corporations, into businesses, into the attitudes of those enslaved to Total Work—everything is power, and the duty of the proletariat is to overthrow the power of their oppressors. Taken to its conclusions, these relationships are always cyclical. Either powerful men retain their power and push down us “common people”— the Musks and Zuckerburgs of the world (or every white man becomes a symbol of those men)—or someone else takes their position, becomes the powerful man, and then operates in the same way. If, however, we reject the language of power structures and efforts to undermine them (corporate DEI initiatives are pandering—but notice those implementing it are always gay), and instead affirm the inherent nature of hierarchy, where each person and institution has a place in service of the community, then we can actually live in a world of True Work which affirms the value and dignity of every human being. It is slow, but it is sustainable because True Work is the only kind of thing that can give meaning and purpose to our lives, for it is for such an end God placed us here: “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”
Addendum: A Common Misunderstanding
In 2013, Will McDavid wrote a piece on the blog Mockingbird about the futility of human work. In typical Mockingbird fashion, McDavid affirms a “Low Anthropology,” not a bad thing in itself, but problematic if we don’t end with the High Christology. McDavid is correct in noting the problems of working until burnout, of the rat race, of a few of the issues surrounding the so-called “Protestant Work Ethic.” Of course we don’t want to view work as the means of self-justification, as McDavid rightly points out. However, he misses the mark in his wholesale condemnation of work because he misses the distinction between the Total Work World of the present age and the True Work World God intends for us to live in. Work, even when it is twisted by sin, is still fundamentally good. I don’t mean for this post to become just another “work-affirming-theology,” but if that’s all I accomplished then everything I said still remains true.
[1] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 46.
[2] Maximen und Reflexion, No. 1415 (edition Günther Müller, 1943).
[3] T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1971), 59.
[4] John Paul II, On Human Work [Laborem Exercens] (Boston: St Paul Editions, 1981), §9.
[5] William T. Cavanaugh, Being Consumed: Economic and Christian Desire (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 44.
[6] Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, trans. Alexander Dru (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2009), 20–21, 43, 72–74.
[7] Augustine, The City of God 10.3, trans. William Babcock (Hyde Park: New City Press, 2012), 1.308. See too ibid., 19.4, and Augustine, On Christian Teaching, 1.22.21; 3.10.16, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 17, 76. Cf John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion 1.2.2; 1.3.1.
[8] Augustine, City of God 22.30, trans. Babcock, 2.554.
I love the low anthropology/high Christology contrast.