Suppose, for structural reasons, a substantial number of the unemployed in the industrialized West will never get their jobs back, even if the economy recovers. Simply because the jobs have disappeared; robots can keep the economy humming.
One would have thought Utopia had arrived, that at last we – many, perhaps most, of us – would have been relieved of the crushing, dehumanizing burden of work and could devote ourselves, full time, to the pursuit of Love, Beauty, Truth and Wisdom.
Provided, of course, that the robots keep the economy humming so smoothly that it is rich enough to support us all – in a logical extension of the Welfare State. But that is not beyond human imagination. A few more Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses will take care of us.
It is far harder to imagine that we could get rid of the Protestant Work Ethic. Surely, that should be our primary task. It is intolerable that thousands of unemployed and under-employed people who manage to live well above subsistence level are bitterly frustrated – and bored to death – only because they are languishing for traditional paid work. They are suffering from the Protestant Work Ethic.
Just as we have managed to reduce drastically the incidence of polio, TB and syphilis, we should be able to put an end to the ravages caused by the Protestant Work Ethic. Genesis 3:19: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return,” will have to be removed. (We could leave the dust part.)
That has to start in kindergarten. Lollipops for those who achieve results without working for them. The laziest but most lovable kid wins. The model for this is the beauty contest. No one takes moral exception to that. And everyone knows that beautiful girls, even if their work habits are appalling, are favoured in business offices everywhere, feminist disapproval notwithstanding.
In elementary school, the healthy, normal contempt for the hard working teacher’s pet should be actively encouraged.
In music school, the highest praise should be given to the virtuoso who has reached Carnegie Hall without ever having practiced a scale.
In finance, the most astronomical bonus should be given to the CEO who has set an example by turning up in the office only once in a blue moon.
So let us all work hard together to get rid of it!
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
If one were to take a step-by-step approach, one could emulate the French law of 2001 (or so) that limited work weeks – including in offices – to 35 hours. The idea was that the ‘extra’ work would be available in new jobs that unemployed people would fill. It’s not clear to me that this worked, but people did like booking off after 35 hours. (The French also tend to have about 6 weeks of holidays a year – probably one of the key reasons for American anti-French feelings: they have a reasonably prosperous economy, excellent health care and a better life style than Americans and work less hard for it. Of course you don’t want to be a Muslim 22-year-old in a Paris suburb… though it’s probably no worse than being a black 22-year-old in a Kansas City suburb.)
The French were not, I expect, trying to abolish the Protestant work ethic, partly because most of the country is not Protestant and partly because the French State is resolutely secular. Doesn’t good old Catholic guilt push the faithful to work? We would have to do a bit of comparative religious studies here (not beyond the mandate of Sketches, I would think) to put a label on the corresponding theories/impulses/pathologies of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Jain, etc etc. I’m not sure what we secular humanists are supposed to get rid of. Can I take a couple of weeks off and get back to you?
All I know is ORA ET LABORA. Google tells me this is “The spirit of St. Benedict”.
I will wait a couple of weeks.
Ah… the pursuit of Love, Beauty, Truth and Wisdom. Very nice…. Dear Father Freud stated that Love and meaningful Work are required to enjoy happiness.
I believe Coco Chanel once said something along the lines of “there is time for work, and time for love, and no time for anything else”… Would this be considered a good compromise between the Protestant work ethic, and the pursuit and enjoyment of love and all things beautiful and leisurly that the French seem to enjoy so much?
The association of Genesis 3:19 and the Protestant work ethic is an interesting one. In any case, to whom would you award the Nobels?
According to Genesis, work was punishment. This was far from Max Weber’s mind when he linked the Calvinist Work Ethic to the rise fo capitalism. The recent Nobels to the macro-eononists were not awarded for the relevance of their disoveries to Work versus Love, etc., but to the way the global financial system works, which seems to have little to do with our subject.
According to Malcolm Gladwell, Messrs Gates and Jobs did a LOT of work as young men to get where they got to – and kept working. If one is prepared to let the ‘outliers’ work their tails off so the rest of us can be bad Protestants (and not protest too much), I suppose that’s a system. Who was financing it, again, by the way?
You have two weeks to find the answer.
In Austria if you work more than 40 hours you get time off. Austria has a low unemployment rate a positive current account and National unions and one of the lowest crime rates. Can anybody tell me why I left Austria.