Hard Work and Its Reward

“Hard work pays off.” my band director would say time and time again to us. “Hard work is its own reward,” my parents and grandparents would repeat over and over to me and my sisters. Even in our deeply Catholic community the remnants of the faith system of the Puritans who founded our city could be found in the mindset of nearly every adult I knew. Work hard, go to church, and enjoy your family were the shared values of our community and in spite of many of our best efforts it became part of our mentality as well.

Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism attempts to dig into why Capitalism had taken off more with Protestants than Catholics or other religious groups in the nineteenth century. His conclusion that it is the belief systems of Protestant that made them ideal counterparts to the growth of capitalism. The desire for progress, the love of hard work for its own sake, orderliness, and several other characteristics helped the Protestants of northwestern Europe and the Americas become successful. Along with these things came the reality that for many of them the money was not the purpose for work, it was rather the natural outcome of people dedicated (or called) to their work.

While I have no doubt that the Protestant work ethic played into the building of these economies, Polanyi’s points about markets and capitalism need to be weighed against Weber’s thesis. Polanyi saw the success of markets (and capitalism in general) as a false narrative propped up by those whose interests it served and did not think that religion played into it at all. As I am weighing the two views together it is almost as if the protestants were duped into working hard for those who were actually making all the money, which is pretty much what Marx saw when he looked at the same history as Weber. I am not about to argue that Marx was right that “religion is the opiate of the masses,” but it does seem that he was on to something there. To Weber’s point though, the protestants did not care if they were being duped, they were working to honor God and family and that work was a reward unto itself.

It seems that in my little community’s attitudes are shifting among those in the generation following mine. There is less of a sense that hard work is its own reward and more of a desire to find work that is rewarding and meaningful. This shift was starting to happen as I grew up, but it had not found a full footing in our working class town yet. Now that the mills have shutdown and the shipyard is hiring fewer people the work a person does seems less predestined and almost limitless. I wonder if the rise of decentralized work is going to see the demise of the part of protestant work ethic that caused us to value the work for itself and not its reward. The shift toward finding work that is fulfilling rather than just time consuming feels like an appropriate evolution of the protestant work ethic and probably where we should have headed a long time ago. Perhaps this is the direction the Pietists, Methodists, Puritans, and Calvinists were heading in the first place and it was simply not possible given the limited types of work available in a particular area. I do wonder what this means for how “grunt” work gets done, it is not really meaningful or rewarding, but it does need to be done.

Weber’s book more than anything fills me with questions about the past and the future and culture and how this works into our attitudes about each other. I have no answers, but life is found more in the questions than the answers and perhaps that is the real value of Weber’s work, at least for me right now.