Nice posting.
Tom Walker wrote:
[snip]
> The logical flaws in the
> conviction are immense and relate to the conflation of paid employment with
> "work" and the failure to distinguish between superficial appearances and
> the real relationships they are supposed to represent. Strictly speaking, it
> is not the Protestant work ethic but a Gradgrind modification made to
*********
What is "Gradgrind"? It sounds like a word we all should know, but I
don't recognize it unless it's how "grade grind" --> the pedagogical
avatar of "long working hours" is really spelled.
As for the religion of long working hours:
(1) On Friday, I ovferheard 2 coworkers boasting to each
other about how long hours they work. I figured they had
to try to make something they could feel good about themselves
about out of the matter (this points to the issue of "mythos",
of course!).
(2) Someone told me that, back in the old days (ca. 1980?), when
this person worked at Digital Equipment Corporation, they had
a slogan:
If you are working overtime, your manager isn't doing his job.
> operationalize the ethic in terms of observable inputs (as opposed to
> unknowable intentions and uncertain outcomes).
>
> Lest attitudes that Dickens satirized in the middle of the 19th century
> sound too archaic, let me mention the recent re-authorization by the U.S.
> House of Representatives of the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families. The
> House bill extended the work requirement for welfare eligibility from 30
> hours a week to 40 hours. The increased requirement was rationalized -- nay,
> eulogized -- by House Speaker Hastert in the following terms:
>
> "Part of what made this reform so successful was that it helped to put
> people back to work - earning a paycheck, giving them greater self-esteem,
> and independence. Helping them become better role models for their children.
[snip]
> If _requiring_ people
> to work more hours is good for them, then _limiting_ the amount of time they
> work must be bad. This is not to say that people who _voluntarily_ work
> fewer hours than the norm are necessarily evil -- just a bit suspicious; not
> your one hundred percent red-blooded, whole-hearted, god-fearing,
> team-playing, family-providing, estate-building all out patriotic
> go-getters. They're, shall we say, "holding something back".
This is why it is so important to get a good education, come from
a good background, etc.: So that one's 60 hours will be ornamented
by 2 martini lunches and golf -- all to more astutely make
decisions critical to the future of the whole enterprise, of
course --, instead of just with "more of the same" stamping
wiudgets on digits or whatever the mythos is.
>
> The myth that hard work builds character, that more hours of work are the
> outward sign of inward fealty to the work ethic and that gainful employment
> is the sine qua non of work is more powerful than any demonstration that
> reduced work time may be more productive and may contribute to
> better-rounded social involvement. Goethe once remarked, "Nemo contra deum
> nisi deus ipse", which translates as "against a god only a god". Hans
> Blumenberg discusses the Goethe phrase for about 300 pages in his _Arbeit am
> Mythos_. One could paraphrase the Goethe expression, "against a myth, only a
> myth."
I have not read this part of Blumenberg's writings, but I do think
a useful difference can be made *between* nattative and myth (or
between nattative as a broad category and myth as one particular
instantiation of it). I define "narrative" as a story which
may or may not inspire us to live our lives in a certain way.
I define "myth" as a narrative the message of which is
obfuscated and mystified, so that persons don't recognize
what they are doing in relating to the myth. One good way
to begin to innoculate oneself against mythic mystification
is to convert the mythical dynamic into an observation:
What we observe here is an instance of a [whatever, e.g.,
an exhortation for persons to die for their social
group of inclusion, e.g., "Dulce et decorum est pro
patria mori", or: "Jihad, now!", or "I take work home with
me every weekend..."....].
Put "the flag" under "the microscope"! (<-- I like that:
It almost sounds like an exhortation for young persons
to study hard so they won't be as likely to fill
body bags during their early adulthood. And this is not
"just selfish": The person who invented radar really did do more
and more irreplacable for his country than 10,000
infantry casualties.)
>
> By myth, I don't mean simply a lie or a superstition but a narrative that
> coheres and has emotional resonance, regardless of its factual content or
> lack thereof. The work myth resonates with experiences that we have daily
> throughout our lives. These may be experiences, for example, that make us
> feel guilty or anxious about being absent from or late to school, work or an
> appointment without a good excuse.
I have long considered punctyality a sign of low breeding, since those
"above" are in a poosition to make those "below" *wait* -- and,
here again, making the persons below wait may be wntirely
selflessly altruistic, as when the patient has to wait because
the doctor is delayed in surgery.
> One way to avoid those anxieties is to
> "be there" as early and as much as we can or at the very least to strive for
> "normal" attendance. If my peers are working 40 hours, I'm likely to feel
> anxious about choosing to work only 35.
My concern is that I will lose my job, and that an ambivalent
situation will be replaced by a more purely dreadful one.
> I may feel proud about putting in a
> few extra hours. And by opposing the myth with a myth, I'm thinking of
> something more grandiose than simply producing pleasing success story
> vignettes of positive alternatives. What I have in mind is an account of
> character-building that confronts the emotional underpinning of the
> conventional myth, that exposes the falsehoods and traps in it and that
> leaves the old myth untenable. That is, it is a comprehensive counter-myth,
> not a mere alternative scenario that blythely accepts the conventional
> myth's terms of reference.
I came to figure this out a while ago (with no help from
the social milieu which the myth infests): Take myths *seriously*!
Take every word *literally*! Don't be like that Dept of Agriculture
official who, when Mohammed Atta threatened to kill her in an
interview a year before his epochal civil aviation accomplishment,
the official whoi said about that interview: "Nobody could have
imagined...." Nobody? You mean: No believer in the myths!
>
> How do we describe or invent such a counter-myth? I would say the first step
> is to get the conventional myth down cold -- define it. What are its
> essential components? What are the emotional buttons it pushes? How has it
> evolved through history? What are its variations and disguises? How are its
> inconsistencies glossed over? How do its erstwhile radical critics
> unwittingly participate in perpetuating it? This may sound like a lot of
> work, but much of it has already been done
[snip]
(Much has perhaps been done, but not so much of it *WIDELY
POPULARIZED*!)
This is surely one of the few tasks worth "working overtime" on -->
a task where the results of the work make the work
itself invogorating and not draining.
>
> The second step, then, would be to compose (or retrieve) counter-narratives
> that contain just slight modifications of the conventional myth but that
> make all the difference in the world. I think of this step as adding bas
> relief to the myth through contrast.
[snip]
This seems to me the semiotic analogy of the development of
vaccines in bodily medicine. (And this sounds like an
appealing narrative, to me!)
Language is a virus from outer space.
(--William S. Burroughs)
> Character, character, character... Where do I keep hearing that word lately?
> Oh yeah, in the stories about the accounting scandals and CEO malfeasance at
> Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and the rest. CEOs are famous for putting in long
> hours at work. It's a truism. So it seems working long hours isn't
> necessarily an outward sign of inner character (although I'm sure even
> honest CEOs work long hours).
I would, once again, recommend the fine film about all this:
Alain Resnais' "Mon Oncle d'Amerique" (generally available at
your local Blockbuster).
Laborare est orare. ("Ojala!")
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)
Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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