Work (A Sermon)

WORK

Graduating from college I was genuinely excited to enter the workforce. Many liberal arts students study a little of this and a little of that, feeling around to find their interests (and here I’m talking about academic classes as well as sextra-curricular activities). But I’d arrived on campus, day one, knowing exactly what I wanted to do and then put in four straight years of near-monastic devotion, long nights at the desk, working toward my dream career: to be Snodgrass, for a living – I was going to be a celebrity. A brand, a monopoly, dispensing precious nuggets from my personal stash of Snodgrass. Many would imitate, attempting to synthesize generic equivalents (“I can’t believe it’s not Snodgrass!”), but only I would control access to the real thing.

“When I grow up I’m gonna be Snodgrass.” Of course now I realize that, for a kid without rich parents and industry connections, I might as well have said “When I grow up I’m gonna be Gandalf.” Which would actually have sounded a little less ridiculous, because at least someone did get to be Gandalf for a living.

I spent my first two years out of college working at a bookstore, which, being a writer… I might as well have been a trained nutritionist pushing a snow-cone cart. Five years and seven jobs later I was cleaning public bathrooms in New York City, and felt that I was moving up – at the end of scrubbing toilets I would feel like there was less crap in the world. Dispensing spy-thrillers and sex-memoirs had made me feel like I was spreading more crap around. And my father would find me in Yonkers, in Milwaukee, in Virginia and say “Join the middle class – it is your destiny.” But I refused to have a job that came with homework, because I was still secretly spending my nights writing. Besides, entry into the middle class would have cost me my single greatest financial asset: the ability to defer my student loan payments. Academic debt is our modern form of indentured servitude, meaning you’ll be in dentures before it’s paid off.

Surveys and statistics suggest that your average Millennial will hold fifteen to twenty-five different jobs in a fifty-year period. But I don’t believe that any kid out there is really walking around saying “When I grow up I’m gonna be a projectionist, rock-wall builder, sales clerk, canvasser, do some daycare and construction work, wash windows and public bathrooms, become an adjunct professor.” If a third-grader said that on career day, they’d medicate him – until he really did think he was Gandalf.

John Steinbeck said, “the [American] poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” We’re all superstars – just some of us haven’t attained liftoff yet. The energetic young job-hopper is a frog prince, leaping from pad to pad until a kiss of success magically transforms him into a corporate king. Or they can move into their parents’ attic where alcohol and mood pills turn them into Sleeping Beauty – “Wake me up when the prince gets here and I become tabloid royalty.” “Um, sorry – the prince is raising six kids with Angelina Jolie, your love-life will be a series of seven financial dwarfs.” “Will Gandalf be leading any of these dwarfs to treasure?” “No, Gandalf is just a side-effect of the medication.”

There’s a scene in Disney’s Cinderella… I hate the Cinderella story – Sarah says “Daddy will you put on Cinderella?” “Aw, sorry I can’t find that disc right now – how about Pocahontas? Or Mulan?” I didn’t name my daughter after Sarah Connor so she could learn that singing songs through oppression and exploitation might just turn you into a millionaire. Anyway there’s a scene where the Fairy Godmother is getting Cinderella ready for the ball and she says “I know what we need…a pumpkin!” Cinderella is confused, but it eventually makes a…Disney sort of sense. Well right now we need a pumpkin in this sermon, and our pumpkin is a brief recap of the Agricultural Revolution and quick review of Max Weber’s thrilling page-turner, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It might get confusing, but then by a series of mysterious incantations I plan to transform this pumpkin into a vehicle that will transport us to… Well we’ll see when we get there, but have faith in the pumpkin.

A GIST OF THE GEIST

About three million years ago there was a new kid in town with simian good looks and limitless potential. What’s got two thumbs and a sense of cause and effect? The human being. Of course we didn’t just jump into the middle class, we didn’t get jobs at all until about ten thousand years ago. You could call it a long adolescence, the human species spent about three million years wandering from site to site, trying this and that, migratory foragers saying “eh, this looks good enough. For now.” And if someone said “Son, why don’t you get a haircut? Mow the lawn? Take over the world?” He’d say, “Nyeh, sounds good pops, but I just found this bone. Gonna gnaw on it for a while. Just saw a dog doing it, he looked happy enough.”

Looking at how these primitive people acquired their food, anthropologists have designated them “Hunter/Gatherers.” This label is misleading in two significant ways: first of all it gives the impression that gaining enough calories for survival was a full-time job. But observers of primitive cultures have seen that this is not the case – acquiring daily food could be done in under an hour as long as everyone was helping. A second misconception stems from the sequence of the term “Hunter/Gatherer”: actually it was gathering that brought in the majority, 60-80% of the calories. “Bringing home the bacon” is a lot dicier in the wild than bringing home the rutabaga. It would have made far more sense to call these cultures “Gatherer/Hunters,” but most of the gathering was done by women, and most early anthropology books were written by men.

Hunting satisfies a natural male instinct to sit around together and not say anything for a long time, often followed by an opportunity to satisfy that urge to say “Did you see that? Did you see that? Did you see that?” Gathering, on the other hand, allows you to have long conversations that would scare off rabbits, but rutabaga won’t go scampering off when they hear you coming. It’s always ‘bring your baby to work day,’ also the female of the human species has a more detailed sense of color and smell (really important when you’ve got to distinguish an edible berry from poison).

When it’s time to dress the kids I’ll go stalking through a room, zoom in on something, sniff at it and my brain will say: “Shirt: clean.” And from all the way across the house I’ll hear Elizabeth saying “Don’t put her in that shirt again, it’s filthy – and she can’t wear it with those shorts anyway.” And I’ll try to reason with her: “Shirt clean,” but it’s no use, she goes into a long speech about teachers calling child protective services and I think, “Yes, our education system needs more male teachers who smoke, so they won’t notice how you dress your kids or how they smell by Wednesday.” But I don’t say that, instead I repeat the two-word mantra of every married man who wishes to have a sex-life: “You’re right.” And she is right, because for millions of years she and women like her have been honing their sense of color and smell.

After about three million years of the freewheeling gatherer-hunter lifestyle, some tribe in the Ancient Near East settled by a river and experimented with a new way of life, cultivating certain edible plants and animals, exterminating the dangerous or extraneous ones. This is called the “Agricultural Revolution,” and when learning about it we hear a lot about the tools that were developed: the hoe and plow and so forth. But the rise of Agriculture produced other inventions, far more significant: a leisure class, and a working class.

For the first time, people had to be taught that some were made to stuff themselves and others were made to suffer – literally “made to suffer,” as we can see in ancient Babylonian creation stories, where humans originate as clay drones to farm the land and feed their heavenly (and earthly) superiors. And if the little people went on strike, the gods would retaliate with a series of natural disasters, plagues, famines and wash away the leftovers with a great flood. The moral of the story, the meaning of life was “Put up, shut up, pay up.” Another invention was the full-time job, since farming was full-time work and so was bullying unambitious teenagers to do it.

Babylon eventually fell – but not because it was a failure. Babylon was toppled by its own success: too much food, producing too many people, putting a greater demand on natural resources until the land was exhausted and the culture collapsed. But that flood story survived, the Greeks used it to terrorize their peasants into “Put up, shut up, pay up.” And when Greece exhausted itself, the Romans took it, and just when it seemed the Roman Empire would fall, they switched mascots and became the Holy Roman Empire, using that same basic narrative except with Jesus Christ on a pale horse slaughtering every peasant who didn’t pay their tithes and taxes. And in case it took him a few thousand years to show up, they invented Purgatory, where deadbeats would be held hostage until their relatives scraped together enough shekels to pay the ransom. As Indulgence Salesman John Tetzel said, “When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs.”

While inquisitors extracted confessions and ministers gave long torturous sermons about the doctrine of the Trinity, the Trinitarian economy for European peasants was “Put up, shut up, pay up.” A young German monk named Martin Luther would eventually lead the protest against this extortion racket of Jesus running a debtor’s prison, and so began the Protestant Reformation. In an effort to cut the Catholic priesthood down to size, Luther coined the expression we know as “the Calling.” This was a religious belief that each and every person (not just the priesthood) was called by God to do some job on earth, and because all “Callings” were equal in God’s eyes, one should not waste energy jockeying for position in a job market.

A generation later, John Calvin took this a step further with his doctrine of predestination. His primary aim was to prove that paying priests to perform hocus pocus rituals was not going to improve one’s chance of salvation – Calvin proposed that God had already chosen the elect for heaven. And one of the signs of this selection was that the person would be spared from scarcity and anxiety on earth – so the more wealth you possessed, the more certain you were of salvation. Calvin’s thesis was purely theological, and yet he unintentionally spread a belief that wealth was an indication of holiness. Of course worldly wealth wasn’t meant to be enjoyed, it should be saved and wisely invested so that God could multiply it into greater wealth, greater security, a surer sign of salvation.

The most extreme fanatical Calvinists were chased out of Europe (just like many of us today would happily invite our fanatical fundamentalists to go colonize Mars). So they brought their gloomy fatalism, ridiculous hats and air of superiority to New England where the grim weather suited their joyless disposition. “Methinks Plymouth Rock doth sound too festive, let us seek a name both ugly to the ear and difficult for the tongue…Massachusetts.”

Now we’re getting somewhere – Calvinist Puritans arrived on the shores of the American continent, where they could apply these Protestant doctrines to everyday community life. And while the theological underpinnings faded with time, the economic byproducts remained. From Luther and Calvin’s perspective, this would be “throwing out the baby and keeping the bathwater.” But the earthly afterthoughts of their theological speculations became the Protestant Work Ethic: a belief that every person is called to some career, the spiritually undeserving will be poor, God’s favorites will be rich (and vice versa: the rich are God’s favorites). Luther and Calvin would have been horrified to find that they’d accidentally spawned a Dharma system in which God’s grace was expressed in economic castes, complete with slaves imported to become the untouchables.

PROTESTANT WORK ETHIC

Though most of us in this room are not closet Presbyterians, many of us here have been shaped by the Protestant Work Ethic – choose your career and stick with it, every job is important, work hard and you’ll be fine, a penny saved is a penny earned. And we all know about the American caste system – upper class, lower class, this country even tried a hundred-year experiment with something called a “middle class” (write that down – it’ll be a vocabulary word on your grandchildrens’ history exam: “Middle class”). And then there are the bums. And everybody is where they are because that’s what they deserve – if everybody worked hard, everybody would succeed. And People Magazine would have 318 million faces on the cover each week. And we’d all ride in pumpkin coaches powered by enchanted mice.

And, though most of us in this room are not closet Presbyterians, many of us here are being led to fear the disintegration of traditional work values. But which traditions are collapsing?  Where did they come from, and how old are they, really? The Protestant Work Ethic is breaking down. We’re told to fear any deviation from the self-appointed “Greatest Generation,” the post World War 2 economy. Because they really knew the value of work – oh, except that only white men were allowed in the game, and their children wanted to flush all that so-called success down the toilet. I don’t see anybody here panicking about the collapse of Babylonian theocracy or Medieval feudalism (unless some of us are closet Evangelicals).

Time Magazine is shocked by this generation of job-hoppers, working in spurts at different locations – actually the strange thing is to imagine that someone would do the same task on the same assembly line for 35 years without going insane. And by ‘assembly line’ I don’t just mean industrial – I also mean food and data processing. And if a person said “I feel like a cog in a machine,” the machine would say “Puny human, you’re not part of me – my cogs are from Asia, they’re smarter than you, you’re just my personal assistant. Now clean out my inbox and get me a data-ccino. And laugh like I said something funny, I think the vacuum-cleaner’s looking.”

If we want to worry about losing “the way things have always been,” we should be thinking about the 99.7% of humanity’s time on earth when we were free-range migratory foragers. Living one day at a time, lacking the ambition to take over the world – who knows? Maybe it was a lack of ambition that kept us alive for so long. Because even those of us who might believe the “Greatest Generation” had the right idea about work…know deep in our hearts that it was not sustainable.

The other night I was walking past Hendersonville Middle School and it had turned “HMS” into a three word motto: “Honorable, Motivated, Successful.” And I wondered… What does “Successful” mean to a middle-school student today? Obviously “Success” doesn’t mean being a homeless pregnant forager, like our neolithic ancestors. And “Success” probably doesn’t mean fighting in a World War and then canning green beans for thirty-five years like it did in the “Greatest Generation.” No, if history teaches us anything, it’s that things are always changing – not only technologically but more important, ideologically – how do we measure “Success?” In terms of possessions? Salvation? Security? Happiness? I suppose I’d have to attend a middle-school graduation to find out, but since I hope never to sit through such a ridiculous thing I’ll close with what I imagine a middle-school graduation speech would sound like.

A wise man once said… Actually, I don’t think he was a man, anyway he didn’t exist… Anyway, Gandalf once said, “You will have to do without pocket handkerchiefs, and a great many other things, before we reach our journey’s end, Bilbo Baggins. You were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you, the world is ahead.”

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I gave this sermon this morning at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship in Black Mountain NC (there was also an amateur video, which maybe somehow I’ll figure out how to post).  Even after many, many hours of writing and rewriting, this is still a work in progress, but there were numerous requests that a transcript be posted, so here it is.

My deep thanks to the members of this Unitarian Fellowship for inviting me so many times to preach – I’d be a writer whether anybody listened or not, but knowing that there are people who want to listen to my writing makes it a LOT easier to explain to my relatives that I’m not crazy.