So...I tend to often oversimplify the relationship between work and religion. In my mind, one of the largest obstacles to getting rid of work as a concept, IS religion. This is largely due to the modern political divide, and the ideological forces that have shaped politics in my life time. The right has a worldview based in religion, more specifically, evangelical christianity, and such a mindset tends to glorify work. Protestant traditions like this are often linked with the protestant work ethic, and given how my own understanding of the world has evolved over the years, I saw work as very endemic to the christian worldview, as an institution established by god, and part of this "fallen" world that we live in.
But then I lost my faith, my ideological worldview was shredded, and my understanding of work changed. Shifting from Christianity to atheism/humanism shifted my entire ethical base. it shifted my understanding of why the world is as it is, and caused me to basically rediscover things as I went along. And when I analyzed work, this is what I saw. There is no inherent purpose to work, a lot of this purpose comes from religion and christianity, it's the right who always goes on about the so called dignity of work and insists on imposing work onto people, and belief in work has quasi religious qualities. Given how my economic understanding evolved post christianity, I've come to see religion as a bit of a blinder. A lens that distorts the world. Plato's cave, the matrix. i would agree with marx that it's the opium of the masses, a coping mechanism designed to channel their frustrations with the world and the current state of things and to focus not on improving this world here and now, but in focusing on the next. But if this is your one life, your one and only life, why the everloving fudge should you spend most of it working? Even if you live multiple lives, as I would believe now, as my current spiritual views do include reincarnation, why waste ANY lives just working them away if it is unnecessary? It makes no sense, and as such, the work ethic never sat well with me.
I also believe, given the emphasis of christian culture and ideology within the republican party, that the democrats should oppose them from a secular perspective. But liberals...are a lot more like conservatives than i gave them credit for. They're basically conservative lites, speaking to many of the same values the right does on religion and work ethic, just a lot more moderate. Meanwhile, I want a cleaner break from these forces. And for me, if the republican party is the party of religion, the democrats should represent secularism. And if the republican party is the party of trickle down economics and job creation, the democrats should be the party of safety nets and "handouts". Rather than avoiding conflict with the right and its value system, I encourage direct confrontration. As such, my views evolved in such a way where I feel more able and willing to take on the right directly, and to reject their values outright and replace them with my own.
Of course, and this is a lesson I've learned the hard way over the past decade since then, the left is a lot different than I thought it was. I mean, when you're on the right, you buy into a caricature, and I kind of took the caricature seriously and was like "yes, i'm unironically for this" on most issues.
But...let's face it, the left also tends to have a lot of religious people, which give it a more conservative outlook than I would like, and it tends to value the work ethic too. For a while, I linked the work ethic to religion. Take HRC in 2016. She was christian, a methodist, and a lot of her moderation specifically seemed to be because she was a christian. And why would I want a conservative lite if I could just vote conservative? I think that's the core reason she lost, by the way. And Biden, he also valued the work ethic in his own way. His own approach was, admittedly, more liberal. Rather than being shaped by conservative values and religion, his own approach seemed to come from his upbringing in the 1950s where his dad, himself, a union worker, believed that work had dignity. He was fed FDR's gospel of jobs more directly and that's why he had that mindset. of course, i always thought liberals who believed in jobs having dignity was weird. I mean, i thought it was stupid. Why should we wanna spend our lives working for rich people? Even if the state created the jobs, is that any better? Do we NEED these jobs? How is this different than what the communists did with their centralized planning and state controlled means of production? If anything, job creation via the state basically is closer to communism in practice than my own ideas. And that's not a mistake. I've always adopted the class consciousness approach from marx, but I never went in with the solutions of communism, including jobs for their own sake, it seems stupid and inefficient. But yes, this is a secularized version of the work ethic.
Benjamin Kline Hunnicutt as well as others I've read like Elizabeth Anderson have noted that the religion topic isn't as clear cut as I thought it was. The original work ethic wasn't just pro work, it was anti consumption. Because calvinist christians were ascetics who hated the idea of enjoying life, and who wanted us to work to create a surplus, and then give it to charity. Secular people took this ethic and used it to justify the wealth and conspicuous consumption of the rich and the poverty of the poor. They perverted the ethic, but the ethic still endured.
Pre FDR, to some extent, the link between religion and work ethic/gospel of consumption/growth was somewhat turned on its head. Christians feared the gospel of consumption because they feared consumerism would turn people from god. They also believed that fewer working hours meant more time to dedicate to spiritual pursuits. So they actually wanted shorter hours and not a lot of consumption to make the US more godly. Now, i wouldnt subscribe to that per se, I certainly use my free time to enrich myself intellectually and spiritually, including deep research into topics of interest, and my own ethic is more of the aristocrats of the previous ages, that the labor of many allows the few to pursue lives that better humanity by giving them the free time to explore things and create and innovate and think. Of course, I have that 1920s mindset that shorter working hours should uplift us ALL to do that. Like, I dont think that under the right conditions, that the loss of work would lead to social disintegration, and if it does, it's a self fulfilling prophecy because the work fetishists have dulled peoples' minds to anything but work to such an extent that people literally dont know what they would do without it. Life without work WOULD cause a mass existential crisis and a radical reorientation of values, and many people fear the results of that. Having basically LIVED that over the course of my life, I have faith that people should come out on the other side fine, but to be fair, humanity has done little but to continue to disappoint on the intellectual front since my own awakening, and perhaps many would choose other, more harmful paths. Still, given my own experiences, I would insist on encouraging that mass awakening. I do think society needs an existential crisis, and it needs to turn away from work and its current values. Of course, for me, this comes from a post christian secular desire to awaken people and to teach people what I know.
But yeah, for a while, christians actually supported fewer hours so they could dedicate more time to god, while secularists were the taylorists, the scientific managers of the earth 20th century who focused on efficiency. For them, it was easy to be in favor of the religion of work. More work means more stuff, time is money, everyone should spend all of their time working to maximize the stuff and the money society as a whole has. They basically internalized economics and that capitalist work ethic mindset that originally came from protestantism, but here it developed this scientific pro progress bend.
And...let's go back to my own position on this. On the debate between the fewer hours movement, and the pro growth pro consumption pro work people, I'm ACTUALLY a moderate by say, 1920s standards. You can see this with my own plan to reduce working hours. I laid out what society would look like if we channelled all increased productivity into working less, and then I channeled what it would look like if we worked 40 hours forever. Both extremes come with their own set of challenges. If we dont grow at all and remain at the same GDP per capita, we remain in a time warp. It's kinda like how communist countries still look like roughly the time where their revolutions happened, where cuba and north korea seem perpetually stuck in the 1950s, while capitalist countries regularly modernize. Some change is good, some growth is good, and I fear if we dont grow at all, we'll be left behind and no longer be the envy of the world. You dont want to not grow at all. And if we did it from the 1930s or 1950s onward, sure, we might work like 8-15 hours a week, but we'd be...perpetually living in the 1930s or 1950s. Is that really a good thing? No. As such, neither would I want the next century to look exactly like the 2020s forever.
At the same time, say we maximized growth and worked 40 hours forever. Would we be better off than we are now? On paper yes, in practice no. Yes, the world will look a lot more modern. We'd have new gizmos. Technological advancements, medical advancements, new products and services, etc. Even from a time perspective, more stuff TO DO. But....life would also look a lot like now despite that. We'd still have 40 hour weeks, we'd still be tied to our jobs, in fear of losing them, poverty would still exist, economically, the core structure would look the same warts and all.
As such, I'm not really a fan of taking either perspective to the extremes. And that's the problem with philosophy and ideologues. people tend to take things to extremes. They get their principles and rather than understanding that shades of grey and nuance exist, they just insist on one extreme or the other. But keep in mind if option A is 10 hours a week with $80k GDP per capita, and option B is 40 hours a week with $320k GDP per capita, i'd probably settle for some form of option C where we get like, 25 hours a week with $200k GDP per capita. Growth is good, but it's not the end all of everything. Leisure is good, but consumption can enhance leisure. It's a balance, and the goal is to find the proper balance.
Less work hours means more time for leisure. More stuff means more fulfilling leisure. Let's face it, I'm not some christian ascetic who hates enjoying life. I'm a hedonist at heart and consumerism does enhance life. But at the same time, more consumption requires more labor. So there's a tradeoff. More hours of labor means more stuff, but less time to enjoy it. Fewer hours means less stuff, but more time to enjoy what you have. What should the tradeoff be? I don't think there is one single one size fits all answer. Some people are fine with relatively little but with tons of time and freedom. Some want higher standards of living but with fewer hours.
Our society imposes this one size fits all answer on people with the 40 hour week. Of course, the 40 hour week people are actually the scientific managers and the productivity at all costs people. Even for the wealthy, they acknowledged some leisure was good a century ago because people needed time to consume their products. We cant just work forever to produce stuff that no one wants or needs or doesnt have time to enjoy. But to be fair, they only supported leisure to improve their profitability. They dont value it for its own sake.
With me, I ideally give people a choice. A basic income ensures a floor that everyone can live on, ending poverty and freeing them from the tyrannies of capitalism, while people choose to work as much or as little as they want. Still, I do support a gradual reduction of working hours. I support only taking 25-50% of productivity or so to do so, which would make us more like a western european country GDP per capita wise. Had we done this over the past century, we'd have a GDP per capita closer to the UK, France, or Germany, which is still pretty high. And we'd probably work 25-30 hours a week. Projecting that into the future, again, we might have a GDP per capita around $160-240k, and work 20-30 hours a week. Let's say $200k with 25 hours. Sounds like a nice tradeoff. Plenty of room for consumption and consumerism, but also for leisure. And freedom for all.
Again, it's actually a moderate position, it's not either of the extremes. I recognize the value in a consumerist society while recognizing it goes way too far. I recognize the value of work life balance, without abandoning all growth in favor of it. I just want work participation to be voluntary, and I want the balance to be better than it is now. My answer isnt one way or the other, it's both, it's a moderate, hybrid position. It should be the sane position of the productivity and growth at all costs people didn't dominate the discussion for so long.
But yeah, I do have to acknowledge that religion plays a more muddled role than I thought it did. My views are as they are because I'm reacting to the modern right, which is driven by extreme protestantism and pretty much went ride or die on the concept of work and job creation since the 1980s. As such, my vision for the left is secular and tends to reject those values somewhat, becoming the boogeyman they claim to fear: some liberal secularist who wants to destroy work ethic and redistribute the wealth. But...in the past, liberals were work fetishists too, and they have maintained that perspective, they havent changed, the right just developed a different and more radical way to do it that kind of exposed the charade for what it always was in my view. And religious people used to actually oppose this kind of capitalism, since they'd rather spend more time with their families and in church, while thinking a consumerist lifestyle was evil. I just wanted to acknowledge those traditions on this blog given my current worldview is what it is.
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