When Work is Everything, Nothing is Working

Remembering Josef Pieper's Minor Classic

We’ll get back to Psalm 23 soon.—Management

Why is the world suffocating in work? Why does everything feel like survival instead of joy? The pandemic amplified all of this, but the short answer is: work has swamped everything, from what it means to think to what education is for to whether there is even anything like a hobby any longer.

Hannah Arendt, in her The Human Condition, makes an important point about the ways in which ancient economies worked: for there to be a free political class, there had to be a class bound to labor. Someone had to do the dishes, mind the household, and take care of the necessities in order for others to be freed to do the work of running the polis. Senators couldn’t very well be expected to do dishes now, could they? There’s a lot that’s malicious about this vision: its effectively a justification of slavery and of a permanent sub-class of people who are eternally subordinated. The modern period becomes an attempt to both vindicate this vision in more sophisticated kinds of ways, turning slavery from a purely economic arrangement into a racialized one.

But the modern period is also an experiment to expand who gets to be political, not by solving the ancient problem of labor, but by disavowing the problem that the ancients openly. And so, unequal laboring continues to happen, only now covered up by the language of political equality: all men are created equal, but not all men own property or get the time off to exercise that equality. As Martha Nussbaum points out in her book on the cosmopolitan vision, affirming the equality of all absent the material conditions making that possible makes for a vacant concept. Exhausted people can’t organize, and people working day shifts can’t go vote, particularly when early voting gets limited under the auspices of voter fraud.

It’s a daunting situation: we want to be equal, to be free to live, as we are told we should be from the moment we’re born, and yet, we don’t have the resources to make that happen. And so, we work harder to achieve it. In an effort to rectify this situation, people start organizing harder. Absent a political world where government will make it easier to vote, people start working harder to get themselves in a position to not need the government and its aid. Over time, this drive to work harder seeps in, making hobbies irrelevant unless they are side hustles, and sleep impossible to come by unless it comes at the end of an exhausted day.

It’s the perfect recipe for disaster: as people work harder, the productive frame gains more and more traction for determining what exactly our equality is made of. We can say all we want that dignity is an intrinsic capacity that no one can take away, but we still applaud those who take that dignity out and squeeze out some actual results from it. And so, those who rise to the top, frequently because of material accidents of time, space, gender, and birth, are assumed to be the ones who are making the most of their dignity. Never do we stop to ask whether it’s not dignity that’s the problem, but the way work has gone from being that thing that only a few did as necessary for others to flourish, to an aspect of human life which swamps everything. Everything becomes something to work at, and nothing is enjoyable unless it is worked at.

This, my friends, is the bleakest of all possible worlds, one in which everything is an accomplishment in waiting, and nothing can be received simply as a gift.

And that’s where Josef Pieper comes in.

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Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher, concerned with many things, and among them, the conditions of thought. His little book on the cardinal virtues is worth reading for other reasons, but today, I wanted to point toward his book Leisure: The Basis of Culture. In 60 short pages, Pieper explores why thinking itself, and then, why culture, drowns in work. Thinking, he writes, was once thought of as a combination of the contemplative and the active, receiving from the world, and only then doing critical thinking.

Losing the former means that all thought is for doing, full stop. Even the concept of the “intellectual worker” can’t be sustained, except as thinkers who more expertly operate within doing-things-cultures of bureaucracies. Once this former aspect is lost, and thought is conceived of only as constructive, it becomes easy to see why things like the humanities always feel threatened: if they’re not producing something, they’re not much good.

The rest of the story writes itself: when knowledge becomes not an exercise in wonder or exploration, but of instrumentalization, then the human becomes a being who builds out cultures of work, work which is embedded everywhere. Leisure, he writes, is central to culture, because it holds together the contemplative and the active, as a celebration first. By approaching the world in celebration, rather than use, everything changes: we can appreciate our limits of thought as well as the breakthroughs of others; we can view the bounty of the world as a gift to be shared and not a possession to be demanded.

It’s at the end of a long semester, and summers aren’t a break for professors, contrary to the illusion: I’m teaching a summer course, doing some much-needed writing, and planning for the Fall. Increasingly, universities, as Pieper diagnosed nearly 75 years ago, are viewed as information factories, as doing-things-machines, such that any sense of contemplation or wonder has to be justified in terms of the world-changing knowledge it produces. Most of the time, a quiet office is a good antidote from this, but after reading Pieper again, it’s apparent to me how deep the logic of work has wormed its way into me, despite my best intentions. It’s time for some resets, to recover the value of delight without immediate production. The Sabbath is not meant to be a stand-alone day, the break from the grind, but the day that spills out and refracts its light into the rest of time.

Pieper’s conclusion is a bit disappointing, because there are real questions that are raised with the material conditions needed to make this an actual possibility. That Pieper doesn’t address these isn’t a matter of avoiding them, I don’t think: he’s quite aware of the problem of the proletariat, but doesn’t think that the solution is to make everyone the proletariat, the worker. The solution is, as he says, to abolish this distinction, and to make the world a celebration, that no one lives under the grind. It’s Ivan Illich before Illich, or better put, it’s the Kingdom of God, in which everyone has what they need, that everyone might rest under their own shade.

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Reading: Joseph Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture. It cuts to the heart, and could have been written yesterday. Augustine’s Confessions, the Sarah Ruden translation, is on my bedside table, as slow reading. I have no plans to do anything with it other than to let it ruminate.

I’ll be taking next week off from writing, as I’ll be on vacation, where I’ll be reading, sleeping, eating, and doing nothing. See you at the end of May.