Now Let Us Praise Work

Recently, I suggested that someone should write a newspaper column giving bad advice. You know, the kind that is going to make you miserable, that will undermine your relationships and that will sabotage your career prospects.

Apparently, I was prescient. No sooner had I finished my post than I saw a column that the New York Times saw fit to print. It’s gist-- the man in question, a rabbi no less, wants to teach his three year old son to be lazy.

I would mention one curiosity from the article. Never, not once does he mention that his child has a mother or that he has a wife. Apparently, he is so woke that he does not even consider such facts worth mention. This tells us that he is proselytizing for wokeness. He should have stuck with religion. 

Of course, if you do some elementary research you discover that Elliot Kukla was not born Elliot Kukla. He is a transgender rabbi, one who, for all I know, might have given birth to the child in question. Thus, he is a biological mother pretending to be a father. And he wants to tell people how to live their lives....

As it happens, Elliot Kukla is not really lazy, in the technical sense of the word. He suffers from an autoimmune disease that requires more rest than normal. He does not tell us how his body is impacted by taking cross sex hormones or whether he has undergone surgical mutilation. One suspects that those are not very good for one's energy level.

He says:

I have Lupus, an autoimmune disease that causes chronic fatigue. On a good day, I can get by on 10 hours or so of sleep. When my condition flares, sometimes for weeks on end, I need to sleep for much of the day and night.

Of course, he has our sympathy. And we hope that medical science will find a way to cure him of his illness. 

So, why is he pushing laziness on the world? Perhaps, he does not want to feel all alone. He does not want to feel that he is different from the industrious masses who surround him, and who do not require quite as much sleep.

Effectively, it is not an argument. It appears to be self-serving.

Anyway, Kukla starts droning on about how the work ethic, the one that comes to us from the Protestant Reformation and that is largely responsible for the advent of capitalism, deprives people of the ability to go out and smell the lilacs.

In truth, there is nothing very original about this. Romantic poets in the eighteenth century, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, made precisely the same point. To which we might respond by pointing out that life expectancy and all the conditions of creature comforts have vastly improved, thanks to said Industrial Revolution. And thanks to industrious people.

I will mention in passing, since Kukla seems largely ignorant of these facts, and also that sloth was considered to be a deadly sin, well before the Reformation. And, from the time of Thomas Aquinas theologians identified sloth as a major contributor to depression.

At a time when more and more Americans are suffering from depression, we would do better to recall the words of Harvard psychiatrist, Richard Mollica, who once opined: the best antidepressant is a job.

Anyway, Kukla opines that people are tired. It might be that they are tired of being shut down and shut in. It might be that they are tired of not going to offices, and of not having the everyday social interactions that used to be the stuff of their social lives. It might be that they are tired of not working. After all, to be obvious, the more you work out the more energetic you will be.

The transgender rabbi does not see things that way:

America in 2022 is an exhausting place to live. Pretty much everyone I know is tired. We’re tired of answering work emails after dinner. We’re tired of caring for senior family members in a crumbling elder care system, of worrying about a mass shooting at our children’s schools. We’re tired by unprocessed grief and untended-to illness and depression. We’re tired of wildfires becoming a fact of life in the West, of floods and hurricanes hitting the South and East. We’re really tired of this unending pandemic. Most of all, we are exhausted by trying to keep going as if everything is fine.

Perhaps everything is not fine when you undergo treatment for transgenderism, but most people would rather get back to work. Those unhappy few who have quit their jobs are out looking for better jobs. They are not whining over the petunias.

Naturally, Kukla uses a tired woke trope to disparage work. The Puritans, the ones who, through their hard work, laid the foundations for the Republic, once said that they wanted slaves to work. Of course, to be fair, the Northern States did not have slaves. Many Northerners, like Alexander Hamilton, were abolitionists. Southern states had slaves, and were not especially enamored of the work ethic.

Little matter. Some Puritans wanted slaves to adopt a work ethic.

When we call people lazy (including ourselves), we are often pointing out that they’re too tired and weak to be productive, while often simultaneously accusing them of faking feebleness to get out of work for malevolent purposes. As Dr. Price puts it, “The idea that lazy people are evil fakers who deserve to suffer has been embedded in the word since the very start.”

Shunning laziness is integral to the American dream. The Puritans who colonized New England believed that laziness led to damnation. They used this theology to justify their enslavement of Black people, whose souls they claimed to have “saved” by turning them into productive laborers.

By all indications the American work ethic is on life support. More than a few denizens of the Vietnam counterculture had no real use for work. They preferred decadence to work. The nation is suffering for as much. Anyone who thinks that America will be able to compete in the world markets without its people adopting a good work ethic is deluded.

Speaking of deluded and of a warped sense of history, Kupka says:

Hundreds of years later, working to the point of self-harm to build the boss’s wealth is still lauded as a “good work ethic” in America, and the word “lazy” is still connected to racism and injustice. It’s poor, unhoused, young, Black, brown, mentally ill, fat and chronically sick people who are most often accused of sloth. We rarely hear about lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their fortune is inherited.

Actually, in decadent America laziness is no longer stigmatized. People who work hard are usually seen as less than fully human. Exception given for the notorious workaholic named Elon Musk.

The Guardian reported on the Musk work ethic:

Musk has long been celebrated by the business press for his work ethic. His extraordinary schedule – a long working day broken into five-minute increments, so that every second is accounted for (lunch is usually wolfed down in a meeting) – has been reported, approvingly, for some years now. And certainly, Musk has more on his plate than many chief executives. As well as running Tesla, the first mass-market car company to be founded in the US in decades, he is the head of SpaceX, which aims to fly people to Mars, and Neuralink, a company attempting to build a brain-computer interface.

The problem is, if people decide to work less, they will be living off the wealth produced by those who work more. They will become sponges taking welfare from the more productive.

This view has endured in American culture. Hundreds of years later, working to the point of self-harm to build the boss’s wealth is still lauded as a “good work ethic” in America, and the word “lazy” is still connected to racism and injustice. It’s poor, unhoused, young, Black, brown, mentally ill, fat and chronically sick people who are most often accused of sloth. We rarely hear about lazy billionaires, no matter how much of their fortune is inherited.

You might have guessed that a woke writer will recommend that we stop working and shut down industry in order to save the planet. 

Even as we look with hope toward a postpandemic future, we will still be living on a fragile, warming planet with increasing climate disruptions. It’s urgent that we find ways to work less, travel less and burn less fuel while connecting and caring for one another more. In other words, it’s critical that we un-shame laziness if we want our species to have a future. The world is on fire; rest will help to quench those flames.

And naturally, he wants us to return to the state of nature, to laze in the grass:

Laziness is more than the absence or avoidance of work; it’s also the enjoyment of lazing in the sun, or in another’s arms. I learned through my work in hospice that moments spent enjoying the company of an old friend, savoring the smell of coffee or catching a warm breeze can make even the end of life more pleasurable. As the future becomes more tenuous, I want to teach my child to enjoy the planet right now. I want to teach him how to laze in the grass and watch the clouds without any artificially imposed sense of urgency. Many of the ways I have learned to live well in a chronically ill body — by taking the present moment slowly and gently, letting go of looking for certainty about the future, napping, dreaming, nurturing relationships and loving fiercely — are relevant for everyone living on this chronically ill planet.

Actually, the ways that someone with lupus learns to live with the disease are not relevant beyond his own personal case. Trying to apply them to the rest of the nation, to turn the nation decadent, to return to an aristocracy where people did very little but live off their rents, does not feel like a winning formula.

If the rabbi knew anything at all, he would know that America was founded on a work ethic, one that rejected all forms of hereditary aristocracy, and that did so because aristocrats lived off the work of others.