Sherry Chandler

Work Ethic?

I get really confused sometimes when people, especially politicians and the news media, start talking about “the American dream.”

Right now, “the American dream” seems to be defined as having a house in the suburbs with a thirty-year mortgage, hopefully Allan Greenspan tells us now it’s too late, not at a variable rate. It seems to mean husband and wife both working to pay for the house and its furnishings, the SUV and the gas needed to bus the kids to daycare. It also seems to mean having the kids booked up from the cradle to college graduation, after which they will all fly off the nest and become “successful.”

Coupled with “the American dream” is the American “work ethic,” which seems to hold that work is good for its own sake, no matter how demeaning or underpaid. “Work” is also defined as something with an hourly wage. Not to have work is deemed a great failure. The powers that be, it seems to me, have convinced us that if we all work long and hard, somehow we’ll get that lucky break (or maybe win the Lotto) and be rich as Bill Gates. But the rich don’t work for wages and those who get rich don’t work for wages, not for long, though they all want to tell you how they started out poor and worked their way up.

In the late twentieth century, somehow all this version of the American dream and the work ethic got mixed up with the idea of righteousness, so that this upright middle class life became the visible manifestation of God’s sanction and people who failed at it were automatically unworthy. They were deviants. They deserved what they got.

I never quite got the hang of this version of the American dream. Maybe that’s why I get nostalgic when I read passages like Charles Bernstein’s description of the 19th Century Pre-Raphaelite poet and architect William Morris:

The pleasure of life is art, according to Morris; and the greatest enemy of art is the system of Commerce and Fashion that produces both unnecessary things and a slavish compulsion to possess them. Work for art’s sake was his sense; the pleasure in daily work that he imagined lead… to his commitment to handcraft and his polemical critique of the deadly drabness of nineteenth-century English industrial design and architecture; to revolutionary socialism; and, significantly, to a militant environmentalism… For Morris, leisure and idleness, as well as pleasure, were central components of any civilization worthy of the name. His insistence that there must always be “waste places and wilds in it” suggests most acutely the originality of his position and his rejection of more utilitarian forms of social progress. Morris’ refrain in The Earthly Paradise, “the idle singer of an empty day,” has been taken as oddly inappropriate for so prolific an artist. But idleness and emptiness are crucial notions for Morris, and his immensely popular early poetry was meant to serve as a respite from the toil of alienated labor; both the reading and the writing of poetry were to be an activity of pleasure…

— Charles Bernstein, A Poetics (Harvard 1992)

Morris was a Socialist and so, by definition, evil. And he was English, not American, so he’s irrelevant. But as the great wheel of ideas turns, I am hoping that I see a bit of a return to this kind of thinking.

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