Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the United States? The Protesta...: 

What's wrong with the United States? The Protestant Work Ethic.

Professor Galloway "on follow your passion".

His advice?

Don't.

More particularly, his advice is dedicated yourself relentlessly to something you are good at, and it will become your passion, in no small part as you'll make money at it.

There's plenty of evidence that's right. . . and just as much that it's wrong.

Professor Galloway is a Calvinist.  He comes by it naturally as his father is from Scotland.  

Oh, sure, you'll note that Galloway states he's an atheist. Well, like a lot of people who are something on an existential level, he doesn't know what he actual is. And what that is, is a Calvinist.  Perhaps a cultural Calvinist, but a Calvinist.

And it was Calvin, not the Church of England, or the Lutherans, who gave us the Protestant Work Ethic.

Well, that's great, right?

Not so much.

John Calvin was as French radical Protestant reformer who was grim in his outlook and basically an asshole.  One of his central core beliefs was double predestination, which held that from the moment of conception almost everyone was going to Hell.  

Calvin taught that all men must work, even the wealthy, because to work was the will of God. Irrespective of their ultimate fate, which they could in no way impact, it was the unyielding duty of men (and I do men men) to toil here on Earth as part of God's plan to continue the creation of the Earth.  Men were not, in his view, to become wealthy, I'd note, but were to reinvest the fruits of their labor over and over again, ad infinitum, or to the end of time.

Calvin held that using profits to help others rise from a lessor level of subsistence violated God's will since persons could only demonstrate that they were among the Elect through their own labor.

The Puritans were Calvinists, and so were the Presbyterians, the latter of which has generally slacked up on Calvinist theology a great deal.  None the less, the impact of Calvinism on the US has been huge.  It founded the thesis that you should work and work, well past the point where accumulation of wealth made any sense.  When you look at people like Elon Must or Donald Trump who have vast sums of wealth but keep accumulating, you are seeing the Protestant work ethic at work.

You are also seeing it when you lay people off in droves. They're lessors, and their economic plight is existentially foreordained.  If they were among the Elect, this wouldn't be happening to them.

Work is what it's all about.

You see that well expressed in Galloway's comments.  Galloway is an opponent of Musk, but they have essentially the same view on work.  Galloway presents in the grim Calvinist style.  You must find productive and useful work and love it, as that's the ticket to everything.

It isn't.

Contrary to what Galloway things, for one things, there are plenty of people who have done well in their carers and know a lot about what they do and hate it.  The legal profession is a poster child for this, but I've found it to be the case for medicine as well.  

And women have become particularly the victim of this in recent years, diving hard into careers as, John Calvin has told them, this would affirm that they were part of the Elect, in the modified American social view, only to find that they are miserable.

And all this because Calvin was flat out wrong.  His theology was wrong, and his understanding of human beings appallingly wrong.

The Catholic view has been much more nuanced than the Protestant one.  Catholicism itself holds to a degree that we work, because we have to, work being one of the results of the Fall.  It also hold, however, that we toil as part of a community and are never to put that aside.  The accumulative nature of the Protestant Work Ethic is basically antithetical to Apostolic Christianity, although there are certainly Catholics, such as Bill Gates, who have become extremely wealthy.  Largescale wealth, however, comes in Catholic theology with a heavy burden to everyone else.  Unlike Calvinist, you can't really morally justify investing over and over while those less well off suffer in your presence.  Indeed, that would be one of the four sins God hates.

Okay, so why is this a problem?

It's a massive problem in that deep in American culture is an anti human dedication to acquisition and toil, that's why.  People are expected to work themselves to death and tolerate those among us who acquire vast wealth.  Ultimately, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, who often have simply benefitted from the circumstances of their birth takes from everyone else, makes millions miserable, and actually makes the economy less and less productive.

Society doesn't exist to generate wealth for those who can accumulate.  Society exists for society.  That means, at the end of the day, that some must be protected, for the good of us all, from their appetites, weather that appetite be for drugs, dissolute living, or avarice.  

The fact that we have forgotten this is literally destroying the country.

A message in the clothing.

I remember many years ago see a cartoon depicting young people with, basically, mid 20th Century style winter farm clothes that had the caption "It is to be wished that the fad of dressing North Dakota will soon pass", or something to that effect.

The satirical cartoonist accidentally sort of anticipated the fad, if it is one, of dressing Hipster.

I saw this couple recently at a City Brew.

Clothes are meant to send a message, whether we mean them to or not, and we normally mean them to.  What's the message here?

This was, I note, on a Sunday.  My gess is that the young, probably dating, couple had just come from church.

Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

Lex Anteinternet: Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World: 

Sacrifice. What's Wrong With The World

In the West, we just celebrated Easter.  In the East, where the Old Calendar is sometimes used, it's today.  This might mean, for the observant, that they were in Church the prior Sunday, in which case, for churches using the Catholic liturgical calendar, they heard this.

Then Judas, his betrayer, seeing that Jesus had been condemned,

deeply regretted what he had done.

He returned the thirty pieces of silver

to the chief priests and elders, saying,

"I have sinned in betraying innocent blood."

They said,

"What is that to us?

Look to it yourself."

Flinging the money into the temple,

he departed and went off and hanged himself.

We all know, of course, that Judas was Christ's betrayer.  Not too many stop to think that he was seized with remorse and hung himself.

Why was he so miserable?

Probably for the same reason that Western society, on the whole, is.

He thought of himself and chose his own inner wishes rather than being willing to sacrifice.

It's struck me recently that this is the defining quality of our age. We won't sacrifice and don't believe we should have to.  It explains a lot.

Interestingly, in a matter of synchronicity, after I started writing this I happened to listen to an episode of Catholic Stuff You Should Know on Augustine's City of God and Lewis' The Great Divorce that ties in perfectly.  It's here:

The one that explains exactly where we are.

CAN WE BUILD THE CITY OF GOD?

And I do mean exactly.

Also, a matter of synchronicity, we passed the 111th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic after I started this.  

The wealthy men on board the doomed ship, and a lot of the other men, stayed on the sinking ship so that women and children would be saved.  The men who went were largely the crew, needed to man the lifeboats as part of their tasks.  Otherwise, men didn't complain, they just stepped aside so that as few women and children as possible wouldn't die. A Catholic Priest stayed with them to prepare them for entry into the next life.  All of them were living up to a standard, but the interesting thing to note there is that it was a standard.  They were heroic, but not because they exceeded the standard, but rather because the occasion came to apply it, and they unflinchingly did.

Now we shove women into combat, something that in any prior age would be regarded as an outright societal act of cowardice and a complete failure of male virtue.

We've come a long ways, all right.  And not in a good way.

Sacrifice was almost the defining quality of any prior age, or at least those that preceded the late 1960s, and very much the defining quality of the 18th through mid 20th Centuries.  Men would die before they'd let women and children be injured, and if they didn't, they'd be branded as cowards for the rest of their lives.

Most people married, and marriage was understood to have a sacrificial element to it in numerous ways.  People didn't "write their own vows", the vows were part of the ceremony and they were, well, vows.  Promises you weren't getting out of, in other words.

Latin Rite English wedding vows still reflect this.  The entire series of events reads goes as follows.

First, the Priest asks a series of questions, to which the couple responds "I do", or words that effect:

(Name) and (name), have you come here to enter into Marriage without coercion, freely and wholeheartedly?"                   

"Are you prepared, as you follow the path of Marriage, to love and honor each other for as long as you both shall live?"                       

"Are you prepared to accept children lovingly from God and to bring them up according to the law of Christ and his Church?"

Only after ascent to that, the Priest reads:

Priest (or deacon): Since it is your intention to enter into the covenant of Holy Matrimony, join your right hands, and declare your consent before God and his Church.

Groom: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Bride: I, (name), take you, (name), to be my husband. I promise to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, to love you and to honor you all the days of my life.

The element of sacrifice is so strong in marriage, that in Croatia, a Catholic country, an added element is present, in which the Priest states:

You have found your cross. And it is a cross to be loved, to be carried, a cross not to be thrown away, but to be cherished.

That's really heavy.  That's not a fuzzy bunny, flowery rose, type of view of marriage at all.  You're signing up for a real burden.

But one to be cherished.

And that's the thing that the West has lost. 

We don't want to sacrifice at all.

If you look at life prior to the late 1960s, sacrifice was darned near universal.  Everyone, nearly, married and divorce was rare.  People sacrificed for their marriages.  Most married couples had children, and having children entailed sacrifice.  Reflecting the common values of the time well, the screenwriter of The Magnificent Seven summed it up in this fashion in a comparison of family men to hired gunfighters:

Village Boy 2 : We're ashamed to live here. Our fathers are cowards.

Bernardo O'Reilly : Don't you ever say that again about your fathers, because they are not cowards. You think I am brave because I carry a gun; well, your fathers are much braver because they carry responsibility, for you, your brothers, your sisters, and your mothers. And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground. And there's nobody says they have to do this. They do it because they love you, and because they want to. I have never had this kind of courage. Running a farm, working like a mule every day with no guarantee anything will ever come of it. This is bravery. That's why I never even started anything like that... that's why I never will.

The line, "And this responsibility is like a big rock that weighs a ton. It bends and it twists them until finally it buries them under the ground." was literally true for many.  Indeed, it's been noted that up until some point after World War Two Finland, which routinely comes in as the happiest country on Earth, had a very early male death rate, simply because the men there worked hard, and basically worked themselves into the grave for their families.

People were not, of course, perfect, and therefore children naturally arrived on the scene with an unmarried origin.  Depending upon the age of the couple, that often ended up in a marriage before the child was born, adding an added element of sacrifice in which the couple sacrificed, in essence, an element of freedom or even their future for what they'd brought about. When that didn't occur, the child was more often than not given up for adoption, which involves an element of sacrifice, but because it arises in a different context, we'll not get too deeply into that.

Things tended to be focused on that fashion. There were people who didn't follow this path, but they were a minority.

This has been portrayed, since the 1970s, as some sort of horrible oppression.  But the surprising secret of it is that people seem to be hardwired for it, and when it's absent, they descend into, well, a descent.

None of which is to say that sacrifices aren't present in the modern world. They are, although by and large society tries enormously to avoid them.

It's tried the hardest in regard to the natural instincts of all kinds.  People are able to avoid nature, and so they do, least they have to sacrifice. But that's a sacrifice in and of itself, but for what?

The self, is what we were told initially.  But the self in this context turns out to be for the economy.  In a fairly straight line, we're told that you should avoid commitments to anything requiring commitment, so that you can get a good career, make lots of money, and go to Ikea.

Very fulfilling?

Ummm. . . 

No, not at all.  

In The Great Divorce, which I haven't read but which Catholic Things summarized extensively, Lewis placed a self focused Anglican Bishop in the role of the self-centered intellect.  Self Centered is the epitome of the current age.  And that self-centered role placed the figure in Hell.

We're doing a good job of that figuratively for the same reason, and literally as well.

Prior Related Threads:

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 1. A thought on community

What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 2. Care, lack of care, and an existential lack of focus.

Lex Anteinternet: What's wrong with the (modern, western) world, part 3. Our lost connection with animals.