NEW YORK — For much of the year now fleeing us, Americans engaged in a noisy, bitter, fervent, thrilling argument about work.
There it was when Mitt Romney suggested that 47 percent of Americans are lazy, shirking dependents mooching on the toil of others. There it was when President Barack Obama told entrepreneurs that “you didn’t build that.” There it was when one party sought to reinvigorate labor unions and collect more taxes from “millionaires and billionaires,” and the other party pushed back against unions with “right-to-work” laws and pressed to rebrand millionaires and billionaires as America’s “job creators.”
And now, as a new year looms and Washington scrambles to avoid jumping off the so-called fiscal cliff, the argument about work is still with us. How strong a safety net should workers have? How long must an able-bodied person work before retirement? Should those who have thrived economically pay more taxes, or be rewarded for their superior enterprise?
It is an argument of great importance that yet manages to feel boring, because the camps are so clearly demarcated and the positions so well rehearsed. But once in a while, someone wades into the debate and offers hope of new ways of seeing, like the Rev. Timothy Keller, a Christian theologian who recently published a book-length critique of America’s strange relationship with the idea of work.
The book, “Every Good Endeavor,” is ostensibly a meditation on work from a Christian worldview. But Dr. Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, wrote it with the hope that it would be “overheard” by people of all backgrounds, he said in a recent conversation.
One reason Americans may be struggling to reach political accommodation about work is that, as Dr. Keller shows, they are talking about different things when they talk about work.
Surveying the United States’ privileged “knowledge classes,” Dr. Keller describes a population that is “work obsessed,” holding their jobs to be the fount of “self-fulfillment and self-realization,” seeing leisure as merely “work stoppage for bodily repair” and allowing office principles like “efficiency, value and speed” to infuse and overwhelm their personal lives. In this world, where work becomes the chief source of identity and meaning, families ache and — from Wall Street to elite sports to political office — dishonesty abounds, because professional loss can sink a person’s sense of being. “They just have to keep their spot,” Dr. Keller said.
The pastor reminds congregants that he is not criticizing industriousness, but rather its elevation to the status of an idol, a false god: “Work is a good thing turned into an ultimate thing,” he said on the phone the other day. “Idols are good things that you have to have, but you need to demote them.”
At the other end of the class spectrum, Dr. Keller writes of an equal and opposite pathology: a common perception of work as miserable toil, inherently “frustrating and exhausting,” to be “avoided or simply endured.”
“The working-class culture can be infected by that idea that work is a drudgery,” he said in the interview. “The best thing you can possibly do is just win the lottery and just go to a beach and sit there for the rest of your life — that work is a necessary evil.”
Dr. Keller argues for a centrist understanding of work as calling — work that lends life meaning but doesn’t monopolize it, work that is performed not for personal glory but in service of others. He challenges the idea, as he puts it in the book, that “work is a curse and that something else (leisure, family, or even ‘spiritual’ pursuits) is the only way to find meaning in life”; and he criticizes “the opposite mistake, namely, that work is the only important human activity and that rest is a necessary evil — something we do strictly to ‘recharge our batteries’ in order to continue to work.”
The other great schism in perceptions of work is, of course, between the political left and right. Dr. Keller considers himself a moderate whose views about work alienate him from both camps. He said he wants to rescue work from the belief, prevalent among many on the right, that there are no excuses — not even the worst childhood — for failing to succeed; and from the belief, prevalent among many on the left, that wealth creation is somehow tawdry.
Those on the right, he said, undermine their ideas about work and self-reliance by failing to recognize how social context can limit — or enable — a person’s life chances. Social Darwinism, in Dr. Keller’s telling, ignores how “the fittest will keep on making enough money to put their kids in the right sorts of schools and right sorts of processes to stay the fittest.”
“On the other hand,” he said, turning his attention, “there’s almost a sense in which people who have made money through their hard work and ingenuity are almost guilty till proven innocent on the left.”
The pastor insists that God is a centrist on the question of work. “When I read my own religious texts and the Scripture,” he said, “I see warrant for both the suspicion of capital and the celebration of work and wealth creation. I see them both in the Bible.”
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Currents: Keeping One's Work in Perspective
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Currents: Keeping One's Work in Perspective
