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Americans are often contrasted with Europeans by the way we take work seriously. We identify with our jobs, not our inheritances or our noble ancestry. Often the first question we are asked when we meet somebody is “What do you do?” which is short-hand for “Who are you?” We connect the working life to human dignity. We have to do this because we are democrats, and we want to do this because we are not snobs. Others may envy the aristocrat’s leisure. Not us: we admire those who have something to do. For us, as Tocqueville noted long ago, jobs may be easy or hard, well paid or poorly paid, but every kind of honest work is honorable. As much as anything, this is what we are: a country that honors work.

But it was not always so. And perhaps—we fear—it might not always be so.

The first century of our existence was marked by slavery, which cast a dark shadow over many things, including the dignity of labor. Among its many wrongs, slavery made work dishonorable, something for respectable people of advantage to avoid.

To the defenders of slavery, it seemed obvious that society was inevitably oppressive and work essentially degrading. As South Carolina Senator James Henry Hammond told the Senate on the eve of the Civil War, all societies require “a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life. . . . Such a class you must have, or you would not have that other class which leads progress, civilization, and refinement.” To Hammond, it did not matter much whether laborers were bought as slaves or hired as wage earners, as long as they created more value than they consumed. No oppression, no progress.

Hammond, more honest and more cutting than most defenders of slavery, freely admitted that slavery was oppressive. But he challenged slavery’s opponents to find any social system that was not. The mill-workers of Lowell, Massachusetts, awakened by the factory whistle at the dawn of every fifteen-hour day and living at the mercy of the foreman on one hand and faceless mill-owners on the other, could at any moment be deprived of their homes, their beds, their meals, and their jobs. Was this freedom, Senator Hammond might have asked?

an endangered virtues essay

the Work ethic

Russell Muirhead • The Work Ethic Hoover Institution • Stanford University

by russell Muirhead

Boyd and Jill smith task Force on virtues of a Free societywww.endangeredvirtuesessays.com

Russell Muirhead • The Work Ethic 2 Hoover Institution • Stanford University

The American Civil War soaked the ground in blood, and like all fights, it was a war not only of strategy and physical strength, but of ideas. The ideal of union, though powerful, was not enough. It was also necessary to say what the union was for, which in the fullness of time required rejecting slavery. The rejection of slavery, in turn, required another idea: the affirmation of work.

The most obvious point in favor of free labor is that it is free—it is chosen. But this argument would not satisfy the likes of Senator Hammond. Hammond thought that wage-work was oppressive very much like slavery was oppressive because it was assented to against a background of poverty and desperation. A real choice requires real options, and options are exactly what most workers lack.

In the years just preceding his ascent to the presidency and the country’s descent into civil war, Abraham Lincoln tried to work out an answer to this problem. Against Hammond’s image of the American economy—one filled with impoverished wage laborers sweating to make a subsistence living in the North, and oppressed slaves in the South—Lincoln emphasized that it is wrong to think all workers are either hired laborers or slaves and either way are oppressed. Most are neither hired laborers nor slaves: rather, they work for themselves. Nor do they necessarily end up where they start. Many workers, starting as “penniless beginner[s],” labor for others for a while. But eventually they come to buy their own tools, own their own land, and work for themselves.

This opportunity to advance to a condition of independence, where people rely only on their own arms to prosper, is what could fund, in Lincoln’s view, a true work ethic. Opportunity makes work compelling. For the independent farmer, “every blade of grass is a study,” Lincoln said. In other words, the farmer who works for himself is stimulated to think—about what makes things grow best and most bountifully, what might save time or sweat, and what, in general, works. When a person works for himself, no work can be simply physical or thoughtless.

The right kind of work activates a vast collection of human powers. It concentrates the mind, engages the heart, and directs the body. The self-made man or woman makes himself or herself; it is through our work that we “make a name” for ourselves. In this way, work is worthy of people who see themselves as dignified, free, and equal.

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In Lincoln’s day, it might have made sense to imagine an economy of farmers and artisans filled with the hope of becoming their own bosses. The Homestead Act, passed after the Civil War, was meant to give hope and opportunity a realistic footing.

A century and a half later, this image remains compelling yet less realistic. In the modern economy, most people depend on employers, not only for their livelihoods,

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but also their health insurance and pensions. Where the farmer of the nineteenth century worked the earth, and the artisan of old worked materials into more useful forms, today we are more likely to work each other, managing our reputations in elaborate hierarchies that stack managers upon managers, and where no single person can point to something at the end of the day and say, “I did that.” We curry the favor of our superiors, flatter our customers, and badger our suppliers.

The dream of escaping the web of interdependence and becoming your own boss survives, but mostly in fantasy form: it is mapped onto things like the lottery, which invites us to take a chance on a pay-out so large that we would never have to work again. This is freedom.

So we work, but perhaps without a work ethic. To be sure, many people—polls say about 80 percent—feel their own work is meaningful and identify with it. At the same time, recent evidence suggests that job satisfaction is declining, especially among young workers in their 20s and 30s. This generation does not appear to reject the work ethic as unhappy or pointless, as did the romantic rebels of the 1960s. Nor do they affirm it. The result is an elusive sense of purpose that, for some, is not inconsistent with attaining the marks of high achievement, like admission to college or landing a good job. But it makes experiencing work as meaningful difficult.

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The inability to locate purpose in the world of work may seem strange to some who see the point of work so clearly that it would seem to require no interpretation, no argument. The point of work is quite simple, in this view: to make us safe in an unsafe world.

Human beings are full of needs, and work answers these needs. This is why the habit of work—“industry,” as Ben Franklin called it—constitutes almost the whole of prudence. Someone who has a skill or a trade that answers the needs of others and who possesses the disposition to practice this trade with regularity and honesty will never be entirely without. For those who lack trust funds, connections, safety nets—who, like Franklin, step into life alone in the “wide world”—the habit of work is the most practical virtue they can possess. The disposition to work is the most practical virtue a person can possess.

And yet, if work is meant to keep us safe, it also points beyond safety to something finer: luxury. Elemental needs can be satisfied, but wants never end. As soon as one want is met, a new (and more expensive one) grows up to take its place. Even Ben Franklin, that archetype of the work ethic, had a taste for luxury. As he notes proudly in his Autobiography, after he experienced some success as a printer, Franklin traded in his earthenware bowls for China dishes.

Luxury is attractive because it satisfies discriminating tastes. Driving a Porsche is enjoyable even when no one can see you. And for those whose tastes cannot

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discriminate, luxury is attractive because it distinguishes those who possess it from those who cannot. Luxury creates a visible order of rank. That it is a false order of rank only makes it better, since it is more open—you don’t have to deserve your place, you only need to afford it. Unlike natural excellence, luxury is open to anyone who works, earns, and saves—and finds a little luck. But luck comes most to those who work.

Because we might make our own luck, the work ethic possesses a hopeful and optimistic cast. Free labor, as Lincoln said, “opens the way for all—gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement of condition to all.”

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Work gets its reason from wants and desires that almost no one can escape. Seen this way, work is natural: it is what we do because we are what we are. Does work really need an ethic? Should we really need fancy purposes to experience work as meaningful?

The traditional purposes of work—security, comfort, and luxury—anyone can appreciate. Yet these very purposes also threaten to undo the dignity of work: for the traditional purposes of work ultimately suggest that the good life is an escape from work.

They don’t so much reveal the value of work itself, but of what work brings; they direct our attention not to the importance of work, but of wealth. Since even in the best cases, work is never free from disagreeableness, the traditional view is that it would be better to skip work and go directly to the wealth. Win the lottery. Or scheme to have someone else do your work for you. Against those whose riches come easy, workers look like chumps—doing what they need to do but would be smarter to avoid.

A true work ethic does not merely ratify the traditional approach to work, but transforms it. The Protestant ethic overturned the traditional approach to work by connecting work not with worldly goods like security and wealth, but with salvation. In the Protestant ethic, work is commanded by God, and—this was the radical part—God’s command touches all socially useful and honest labors, regardless of their social status. The woman on the farm and the ruler of the nation each has work to do, and each kind of work is equally important. Leveling distinctions, the Protestant ethic establishes a democracy of work: all work has dignity. And all work has a point, which is to create a community that exemplifies God’s teachings. Skills are not tools one acquires to gain advantage over others—to get ahead—but are gifts that are meant to be deployed for purposes larger than our own.

By connecting work to purposes larger than ourselves, the Protestant ethic invested all useful and honest work with meaning. And this is what the work ethic in its contemporary form still requires. To work from an ethic (rather than simply from need or vanity) is to work with a view to excellence. It means cultivating our own gifts,

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activating our full powers, and giving them focus. This focus comes from participating in something larger than ourselves.

More concretely, we might point to two ingredients essential to the work ethic: devotion to a practice and contribution to society. A practice is an activity with its own internal standards of excellence (independent, for instance, of money-making) that supports the instinct of craftsmanship, or pride in a job well done. Social contribution means, simply, that we can point to how our work contributes to a decent society.

For some kinds of work these two ingredients will be hard to locate. Job roles that have been stripped of their skills, their discretion, their variety, and their responsibility offer little scope for developing excellence. Consider how fast-food check-out clerks now ask, just as you are placing goods by the register, whether you might like a few choice items with your order: “Would you like some chips with that?” Asking this question is not the clerk’s idea or a manifestation of the clerk’s consideration for the customer’s comfort and satisfaction. It is dictated by management in an effort to stimulate one last impulse buy, and it is uttered by compulsion, without verve or genuine intention (like a telemarketer’s script). When managers take control in this way of every word spoken by clerk to customer, whatever small room there might be for individuality and authenticity is foreclosed.

In addition to the de-skilling of jobs, bureaucratic structures that fragment jobs into infinitely small pieces can make it difficult to detect how our own work contributes to anything outside the organization in which it is nested. The comic strip Dilbert and the sitcom The Office hardly exaggerate the pointlessness that work comes to possess when it is disconnected from the larger world and takes its bearings only in response to managerial whims.

It is not the case that a work ethic makes sense regardless of the way jobs are designed and organized. By their sheer scale, advanced industrial economies threaten to make the work ethic irrelevant in the worst way—by making it quaint.

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But it is not quaint yet, and it would distort our experience to claim that work today is wholly unworthy of a work ethic. The builder, the teacher, the counselor, the banker, the nurse, and the engineer—among countless examples one could find—can all point to what it means to be good at what they do and how what they do contributes to the world around them. They can, in short, “give an account” of their work.

Even when we can give an account of our work, it may seem beside the point—which is getting one’s job done. A chemist does not need to explain why it is good to be a chemist in order to do her job. A mechanic who has to figure out what’s killing the car’s battery has a job to do—and no one wants to pay the mechanic ninety dollars an

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hour to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Giving an account requires distance and time that are hard to find amid the pressures of daily life.

Yet ultimately, the preservation of the work ethic (and work worthy of an ethic) depends on being able to give an account, not only as individuals but also as a society. Market forces, left to their own, may sooner dissolve the work ethic than sustain it, especially insofar as they teach that wealth is more important than work. At the moment, we are witnessing a hollowing out of the job spectrum—the economy is producing more jobs at the low end that require very little skill, and more jobs at the high end that require great creativity and intelligence. Middle-class jobs are meanwhile eroding. These middle-class jobs are not only valuable because they give security and social standing to the great bulk of the citizenry. They are also valuable because they underwrote the connection between work and dignity. Thus the challenge of our political economy is to maintain the kind of work that makes sense of a work ethic. The honor of work and, more fundamentally, the equal-respect characteristic of a democratic culture, depend on it.

Sources:

the classic account of the work ethic is from Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, talcott Parsons trans. (London: routledge, [original german publication 1904–05, first english translation 1930] 1992). the classic example of the work ethic is Ben Franklin’s Autobiography [1791 in French, first english translation 1793], the good-natured irony of which Weber appears not to have noticed. a discerning exploration of Franklin’s example can be found in robert Wuthnow, Poor Richard’s Principle (Princeton university Press, 1996). Lincoln’s defense of free labor is crystallized in his 1859 speech to the Wisconsin state agricultural society, which can be found here: [http://showcase.netins.net/web/creative/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm]. the classic criticism of work under conditions of capitalism is in Karl Marx, “economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” The Marx-Engels Reader, robert C. tucker, ed. (new york: W. W. norton, 1978). excerpts from senator James Henry Hammond’s 1858 “mud-sill” speech can be found at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h3439t.html. in a more contemporary vein, my own attempt to understand what makes work worthy of a true ethic can be found in Just Work (Harvard university Press, 2004). an illuminating account of good work is in a book of that very title by Howard gardener, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and William damon (new york: Basic Books, 2001). William damon has also explored how young people today have difficulty locating purposes in work in The Path to Purpose: Helping Our Children Find their Calling in Life (new york: Free Press, 2008). On job satisfaction today, see: Lynn Franco, John gibbons, and Linda Barrington, “i Can’t get no . . . Job satisfaction: america’s unhappy Workers,” research report r-1459-09-rr, the Conference Board inc. new york, January 2010; a. Colby, L. sippola, and e. Phelps, “social responsibility and Paid Work” (in a. rossi., ed., Caring and Doing for Others: Social Responsibility in the Domains of Family, Work, and Community, Chicago: university of Chicago Press, 2001); and the variety of poll data at gallup.com, which has been tracking job satisfaction in america for decades.

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the preferred citation for this publication is russell Muirhead, “the Work ethic (2011),” in Endangered Virtues, an online volume edited by Peter Berkowitz, http://www.endangeredvirtuesessays.com.

about the author

Russell Muirhead • The Work Ethic Hoover Institution • Stanford University

Boyd and Jill smith task Force on virtues of a Free society

The Virtues of a Free Society Task Force examines the evolution of America’s core values, how they are threatened, and what can be done to preserve them. The task force’s aims are to identify the enduring virtues and values on which liberty depends; chart the changes in how Americans have practiced virtues and values over the course of our nation’s history; assess the ability of contemporary associations and institutions—particularly schools, family, and religion—to sustain the necessary virtues; and discuss how society might nurture the virtues and values on which its liberty depends.

The core membership of this task force includes Peter Berkowitz (cochair), David Brady (cochair), Gerard V. Bradley, James W. Ceaser, William Damon, Robert P. George, Tod Lindberg, Harvey C. Mansfield, Russell Muirhead, Clifford Orwin, and Diana Schaub.

For more information about this Hoover Institution Task Force please visit us online at www.hoover.org/taskforces/virtues.

Russell MuirheadRussell Muirhead is the Robert Clements Associate Professor of Democracy and Politics at Dartmouth. The author of Just Work (Harvard University Press, 2004), he is currently at work on a book on partisanship titled A Defense of Party Spirit. Previously, Muirhead taught political theory at the University of Texas at Austin, Harvard University, and Williams College. He was a Radcliffe Institute Fellow (2005–6) and a winner of the Roselyn Abramson Teacher Award at Harvard College. He holds a PhD and AB from Harvard University and a BA from Balliol College at Oxford University.