The Work Ethic: Where Did it Come From Anyway?

If I asked three people the above question, I’d get as many or more answers. For some, it’s the central value of their lives, for some a necessary evil, for some it lies at the heart of self reliance. For some it means opportunity, for others, it gives purpose. It’s the work ethic that commands Americans to work more hours than anyone else on the globe. Where did such a deeply embedded value come from?

In my life, work was rooted in religion, in the phrase, “Idle hands are the Devil’s Workshop.” And in my time, its opposite, “play” was synonymous with “idle”—not a fit activity for adults. My mother was idle only in sleep. If things weren’t going well, she wasn’t trying hard enough. My parents never traveled for pleasure and considered such activity a waste of time and money needed for their childrens’ education. I remember that once, and only once, my mother accompanied my father to a medical convention—and was suffered no end of guilt for doing so. Work was defined by one’s role in society, and money was to be devoted to the same. I also know that all four of us, their children, grieved that they would spend nothing on themselves until the day they died.

No one, however, questioned whether her fifteen-hour- a-day activities were work. It wasn’t until I was a young adult that work became exclusively bound to money. My expected answer to “What do you do?” was, “I don’t work. I’m a housewife.” I left out the first part of this response, but it was understood, anyway. Gradually, the word “housewife” became synonymous with “idle.”  Endeavors for rewards other than money were similarly relegated to the world of “play” or “idleness” in my parents’ view and still retain that negative aura. Money, meanwhile, became the status symbol for work—wealth stood for the amount of work performed and was synonymous with virtue. How else can you explain the willingness of corporate employees to work 24/7? Lack of money, conversely, mean lack of ambition or laziness. “Let’s face it,” I read in a woman’s magazine, “there’s no status, no respect, without the greenback.” As years passed, the emphasis has also shifted from the social role to individual achievement—the importance of being number one.

All of this, to my mind, still rests on the early Protestant view of human passions as the source of all evil—the Devil’s Workshop—and its resulting condemnation of any activity that might, or surely would, result in pleasure—and inevitably excess. Money became the substitute for all pleasure. “Money is supposed to make up for everything I’ve missed out on,” an unknown woman complained over lunch. Or a reward for all the pleasures denied? When, after twenty years of marriage, I told my parents we were getting a divorce, my father snapped “Is it your writing?”

I was struck, but not devastated at this response, because I knew he was simply wrong. My husband, long before this, told me my writing had opened the possibility he might do something similar—something for his own satisfaction and pleasure. And he began to draw. My younger daughter took up writing a “chapter book” about families of animals who lived in caves. The older began writing plays. Today, a social worker, she uses drama as an aspect of therapy. For everyone there was sense of the world opening, a satisfaction that renewed the soul.

I was struck, but not devastated at this response, because I knew he was simply wrong. My husband, long before this, told me my writing had opened the possibility he might do something similar—something for his own satisfaction and pleasure. And he began to draw. My younger daughter took up writing a “chapter book” about families of animals who lived in caves. The older began writing plays. Today, a social worker, she uses drama as an aspect of therapy. For everyone there was sense of the world opening, a satisfaction that renewed the soul.

Max Weber, (1864 – 1920), in his book  Protestantism  and the Rise of Capitalism explored the relationship between Protestant asceticism and the rise of Capitalism, a work that set my mind to buzzing. For me, it explained the unyielding, all-encompassing command of work for so many in my world—and the crisis retirement has become. The only truth I draw today, when applying the ideas above, is that the belief that money sidetracks human emotions is a fallacy—it doesn’t address the power of greed. If you want to cause excess—the product of the Devil’s Workshop—pour all the human passions into one outlet. Or, as my husband, a social psychologist, said, “If you push it in one place, it pops out someplace else.”

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