“Deprived of meaningful work, men and women lose their reason for existence; they go stark, raving mad.” Fyodor Dostoevsky
When God put Adam in the Garden, he did a remarkable thing: he set him to work. This fact is even more remarkable when we remember that Eden was a paradise. There was lots of food (Gen. 2:18), rivers (Gen. 2:10), and gold (Moses was even careful to mention that the gold was good — no residual dragon curses). There were no weeds to pull, no graves to dig, and no swords to sharpen. In one sense, everything was already done. Everything was good — very good.
And yet Adam was given instructions to “cultivate and keep” the garden.
This is important.
It tells us that the first human being wasn’t created simply to enjoy the beauty of Eden, but to work towards its further beautification. Adam was employed to be an active agent of dominion in this new world; arranging and rearranging the raw goodness around him by means of his own creative labor. This tells us something else important: work wasn’t an intrusion. Futility was the intrusion (Gen. 3:19). Work has been God’s idea from the beginning right up to the present day. This is clear from passages like 2 Thessalonians 6:10-12:
For even when we were with you, we would give you this command: If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat. For we hear that some among you walk in idleness, not busy at work, but busybodies. Now such persons we command and encourage in the Lord Jesus Christ to do their work quietly and to earn their own living.
Paul’s command to the Thesseloninans is a call back to the Genesis mandate. He is reminding them (especially the busybodies) that work is the sphere in which men and women are tasked to occupy the majority of their lives — pouring foundations, changing diapers, hoeing beets, teaching math, generating spreadsheets. Though the task of dominion is a more daunting prospect than it was in Eden, it remains a distinctly human commission.
Not only is it reasonable to expect a laboring people to follow in the footsteps of a laboring God, we are told it is also necessary. It is through investing one’s own labor that each person is able to “earn their own living.” “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground.” Sweat equity is the original and best kind of equity. Lincoln had it right here:
Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.
For those who consider work above, beneath, or beyond them, the verdict is clear: let him (or her) not eat. If you don’t sow beet seeds in the spring, you shouldn’t expect to be eating pickled beets with cheese and beer in the fall. In the words of a famous ex-nun — “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”
The gift of labor also preserves us from the dehumanizing effects of idleness. Idleness — the state of NOT being busy at work — is fertile ground for sin. This shouldn’t surprise us; not should it surprise that entrenched welfare states are also rife with crime. The less people are busy at work, the more time they have “to lie on their beds and make evil plans” (Micah 2:1).
Though all of this may seem like common sense (and it is) we also live at a time where all sense everywhere has become critically endangered. Increasingly in our day, work is at best viewed as optional. At worst a curse to escape. We believe that if anyone is unwilling to work, he should be given food anyway.
As with the forbidden fruit in the garden we have the offer of an appealing lie: “Think how much nicer it would be if you didn’t have to work for a living.”
What’s left out is the death that follows.
A Post-Work World is a Post-Human World
Because there’s no higher ethical structure in a secular system such as Canada, we’re left to navigate questions of right and wrong with only the crude tools of utilitarianism. Thus, the drive behind most technological innovation today isn’t so much a passion to improve human wellbeing as a passion to advance human comfort — which is not the same thing. In other words, whatever makes life easier must be progress.
Underneath this is the assumption that work must be something to escape; to outsource; to drop-kick off a short dock. At the end, we’re left with a “paradise” bereft of work and therefore an environment unfit for man. If Josef Pieper’s fear was that man would lose his soul in a world of total work, our danger today is that man will lose his soul in a machine of a different kind. A world of total indolence.
At first it might seem difficult to imagine how a workless world could benefit the state. But keep in mind that it isn’t labor or the production of goods in itself that the state hates. Rather, the state dislikes anything that allows citizens a greater measure of independance from itself. At the end of the day, it resents independent labor for the same reason it resents private religion, health, or education — the leviathan hates having one less arm to meddle with. A person who owns his own business, can fix his own car, or grows his own beets, is a dangerous and unpredictable liability.
One way the state tries to force citizens back into line is by strangling them into complience through crippling taxes, sprawling beaurocracies, and unaffordable commodities.
I’ll leave you to make the connections on your own.
The Slavery of Free Money
If we’ve bought into the premise that paradise is a world without work, then our responsibility becomes to use all available means to move towards such world. The state, it claims, can help us get there. Again, without understanding the principle of sphere authority, this offer may seem entirely reasonable. With all the means at its disposal, why shouldn’t the state function as a giant benefactor? What could possibly go wrong?
What could (and will) go wrong is the codependancy which often develops in an unbalanced relationship. Where one party, powerful but insecure, joins with a weaker party who is happy for the immediate advantages such a relationship seems to offer (money, emotional support, protection, etc.). The more needs the powerful party moves in to meet, the more power they are able exert and the more enslaved the weaker party becomes. Eventually the powerful party works to actively oppose the dependant from any attempt at gaining independence, in turn re-enforcing to the dependent how helpless they are apart from their support.
It isn’t about love.
It isn’t about health.
It’s about control.
In this way, Covid provided a unique opportunity for such a relationship to develop between the state and its citizens. In Canada, those who weren’t officially let go from their jobs were offered a sizeable monthly payment to just stay home. Not only did they not have to work (many employees were making more staying home than working) but they could be hailed as heroes for “stopping the spread.” Many small business owners were forced to accept paltry state bailouts or face closure — and tens of thousands did.
Now we are faced with widespread labor shortage in Canada, presumably because citizens have happily adjusted to the lie of not having to work for a living. Now discussion regarding Basic Income – though never successful in any country that has attempted it – is again being actively considered.
What we’ve forgotten is that what may be good for government will be terrible for man. With no garden to cultivate, not only is their no work for man, but no living for man either. But no fear! The state can supply both — both the free money, and the free access to mind-numbing pharmaceuticals in the absence of actual purpose.
Can you smell it? We’re closing in on paradise.
The End of the Matter
There is nothing better for a person than that he should eat and drink and find enjoyment in his toil. This also, I saw, is from the hand of God, for apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment? Ecclesiastes 2: 24, 25
Solomon presents us with the sum total of human existence — to eat, drink, work hard, and enjoy God. Pretty basic stuff. And don’t miss that last part: “For apart from him who can eat or who can have enjoyment?” Ultimately the good life won’t be realized without an encounter with our Creator. The best part of Adam’s life in the garden wasn’t inventing new espalier techniques for the pomegranates. It was that he could walk with God (Gen. 3:18) in the cool of the day.
It was the difference between just a beautiful garden and paradise.
Less dependance on the state means more independence, which leads to more liberty towards obedience to the Lord in every area of life. If our conscience convicts us in regards to a certain course of action, but we remain dependant on state systems, we will be tempted to ungodly compromise. The way forward to work as hard as we can, to be as independant as we can, to be as obedient as we can. This is God’s work of grace made manifest in the Christian life.
A word of caution. We are not advocating for the kind of self-sufficiency which amasses enough resources to keep its head down while the world burns around it. This isn’t Christian love and it isn’t healthy. In Ephesians 4:28, the recovering thief is instructed to start working hard not to furnish himself with all the luxuries he can afford but, “that he may have something to share with those in need.”
In a world increasingly estranged from labor, may Christians shine out as wonderful anomolies.