We don’t have a state religion in the U.S. But if we did, it would probably be the Protestant Work Ethic. Or so Max Weber would argue. Most Americans think they should work hard to succeed, even if they don’t. And yet there’s an alternative attitude from within the same Christian traditions. We can find it in the Bible, in the Garden of Eden story.
For the Love of Work
Everything about America tells us we should love work. As long as we’re not in some sort of allegedly retrograde industry – like academia – we’re supposed to find joy, in part, in the corporate hierarchy and our place in it. Not explicitly, of course. Rather, we’re supposed to do something we love, at which point our concerns about social ownership or control simply melt away. And even in academia, this sentiment is increasingly de rigeur.
Many of us have forgotten how weird all this is. The process of industrialization – from the earliest stages of primitive accumulation through the creation of a proletariat – were uniquely miserable for most people. We know – or should know – work shapes who we are, and it’s not often for the better. And the modern company creates layers of miscommunication – even to the point of outright bullshit jobs – in order to prevent us from asserting control over the workplace.
Alternative leftist traditions remind us of all this. Newer forms of work – like coworking and the gig economy – are still new enough and shitty enough that people still resist them as a matter of course. And we’ve long had an implicitly or even explicitly anti-work tradition within leftist movements. Its calling card is, e.g., the short work week or the UBI program.
Garden of Eden
I’m not a biblical scholar. Far from it. But as I was reading the latest issue of Current Affairs, I noticed a little article called In Defense of Laziness by Joshua Cho. Cho starts from the idea that the Bible presents – to at least some readers – an anti-work tradition in the form of the punishment God hands out to Adam and Eve for eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Admittedly curious, I picked up my copy of the Bible and re-read the story. The story itself seems straightforward enough to us non-scholars. God creates Adam and Eve. He provides for all their basic needs. And the only catch is that they don’t eat from the tree in the middle of the garden: the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, and perhaps also the tree of life.
It turns out there’s a lot of theological squabbling over whether these are two separate trees or the same tree. And – even more so – over whether the tree of life confers powers upon Adam before he eats the fruit from the other tree or only after eating it. I’ll set most of that aside. What’s uncontroversial is that God does not want Adam to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
Does not want it one bit.
Of course, they eat the forbidden fruit anyway and God punishes them. He kicks them out of the Garden of Eden.
The Text of Genesis
But he doesn’t just kick them out of the Garden of Eden. First, he makes them work. Here’s the text.
To the man he said: ‘Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree of which I had forbidden you to eat,
“Cursed be the ground because of you!
In toil shall you eat its yield all the days of your life.
Thorns and thistles shall it bring forth to you,
as you eat of the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
shall you get bread to eat,
Until you return to the ground,
from which you were taken;
For you are dirt,
and to dirt you shall return.”
So, he makes them work. Work serves as punishment for seeking godlike status. The Garden of Eden was a place where our basic needs were provided for, and the punishment is the requirement to work for those needs. And not only is work a bad thing, it was an unnecessary thing. Things wouldn’t have gone badly had we not – as the lesson seems to be – fucked it up!
Why is Work so Bad?
As an aside, there are probably some historical reasons why the ‘work is bad’ message resonated so well at the time the Bible was written. As societies switched from hunter-gatherer forms to agricultural forms, they gained a lot. They could feed far more people and build intricate, large cities and social systems. On the other hand, disease grew and life expectancy declined. That part isn’t so great.
While he’s no biblical scholar either, Isaac Asimov wrote about this aspect in his Guide to the Bible. If not for textual interpretation, I’d recommend checking it out for historical context.
Postscript: The Ending
It’s not as though I could write this post without saying something controversial, right? Probably the most interesting thing I find about Genesis Chapter 3 is the way it ends. God doesn’t just punish Adam and Eve. He also provides a curious justification for it. Here it is in full:
Then the Lord God said: “See! The man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad! Therefore, he must not be allowed to put out his hand to take fruit from the tree of life also, and thus eat of it and live forever. The Lord God therefore banished him from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he had been taken. When he expelled the man, he settled him east of the garden of Eden; and he stationed the cherubim and the fiery revolving sword, to guard the way to the tree of life.
God seems might itchy that Adam, Eve, and their descendants not regain access to the Garden of Eden. And unless God loves the royal we, what we have here is clearly a polytheistic worldview.
It makes one wonder – perhaps – what we have to gain through conquering work and re-establishing a life of leisure.
N.B.
For the Bible quotes above, I used the New American version, i.e., the Catholic Bible. What can I say? I grew up Catholic. It’s the one I know best.
