In his weekly Angelus message Wednesday, Pope Francis praised the value of hard work and a willingness to do one’s part for the common good rather than freeloading off society.
Citing Saint Paul, Francis said that “anyone unwilling to work should not eat” and added that being called a hard worker is the highest form of praise for a “serious, honest person.”
To call someone a worker, the Pope said, means that he is a member of the community who does his part and doesn’t “live off others.” [posted at breitbart.com 8/19/15]
This will not sit well with the Bernie Sanders and other socialist supporters who recently have praised the Pope for his attacks on capitalism, technology and the United States in particular.
However, is the Pope right that hard work is the essence of virtue?
I say no. Not because hard work is a bad thing. Quite the contrary; hard work is a totally admirable activity — when done in the service of a purposeful goal that you developed with your mind.
Work is not an end in itself, or a value in itself. Work has to be connected to something to make it purposeful, meaningful and actually productive.
If you walked out into the world and randomly began to plant a garden, or pick vegetables, or replace a roof — without any reference to thought, to what makes rational sense, and how best to accomplish the task — we would not call this admirable. We’d call it foolish, stupid and arbitrary. Clearly, hard work matters. But it depends on something more basic: The use of your conceptual, intelligent and purposeful mind.
Work is not the root of all good. The rational, thinking mind is the root of all good. Without that mind, work has no point or purpose, as essential as hard work is.
Like a lot of moralists, the Pope overlooks the crucial and fundamental importance of the reasoning, thinking and conceptual mind when defining virtue.
Interestingly, Marxists and socialists make this mistake on a very large scale. Marx, and people with similar socialist/labor views, subscribe to the labor theory of value. The labor theory of value holds that productivity is measured by work, not by the mind. This explains why Marxists hate capitalism. Capitalism certainly depends on labor — the willing labor of voluntary, self-interested participants in a labor force — but labor is merely a means to an end. Under capitalism, the most basic element of society is the human mind.
The creative and innovative geniuses — those who think, not just labor — are the ones who move the world. Ayn Rand’s powerful novel, Atlas Shrugged, is based on a projection of what would happen if the “men of the mind” (men like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Thomas Jefferson) went on strike. Her novel illustrates what would happen in a society where people continue to labor, under the directives of government, labor unions and anti-capitalist academics; but the best and brightest, the ones who actually create all the jobs and the businesses, and who provide the scientific and intellectual atmosphere where brainpower may flourish, slowly withdraw from the society. What happens? Innovation stops and stagnation creeps in.
Kind of like what’s happening in America, right now. Atlas Shrugged is a fictional projection; but there’s nothing whatsoever fictional about it.
Economic growth barely registers anymore. What is it — 1 to 2 percent tops? To hear Obama supporters talk, we’re in the middle of a boom. But a boom used to be considered 4-5 percent growth a year — or, in earlier eras, way more than that. We’re considered out of recession and in “recovery” only by hooking unprecedented numbers of people on food stamps and unemployment/Obamacare/welfare, while ignoring statistics about people simply giving up on employment, thereby not being counted as unemployed. Even if you engage in these statistical evasions, and accept the official figures, the American economy is growing at an anemic rate compared to how it did during even the 1980s and 1990s — to stay nothing of how it grew in its most inventive and productive era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The Pope is right that hard work is a good thing. But it’s not everything. And it’s not the main thing. People labor and work to the bone in Communist or other totalitarian societies, and it gets them nowhere. Work is not what makes the world go around — not primarily. It’s the human mind, human ingenuity, innovation, free trade and constant progress inspired by private property and capitalism.
The Pope is also wrong to imply that the central purpose of work is to “not live off others.” While productive self-responsibility does, in fact, result in not living off others, that is not its central purpose. The reason for making a living is to serve your own interests. The most basic interest is survival, i.e. paying the rent and putting food on the table, for yourself and any dependents/children you willingly and responsibly choose to produce. Once these tasks are accomplished, the goal becomes maintaining survival and expanding it into more fulfilling and meaningful ventures, either in one’s career or outside it (pursuing enjoyable hobbies or other purposeful activity with the fruits of one’s labor).
By the way, it’s not automatically and always wrong to accept help from others, either. The help should always be voluntary, and it should never enable or foster dependence or destruction, as “help” done in families so often is (and by government, virtually always is). I have helped people I selfishly consider good investments of my time, money or energy; and I have been helped by people who felt (correctly) the same about me. Rational help is not wrong, and it’s actually a virtue.
On the surface, the Pope sounds like an old fashioned “bootstrap” moralist who — with these comments — will make many Obama-loving progressives annoyed and some conservatives happy.
But the real issue missed by both sides, as usual, is the one that matters most of all. Each individual’s life is an end in itself. Nobody’s life is a means to the end of others. We do not work, and should not work, for the sake of “society.” We should work for the sake of ourselves, and (with any surplus) feel free to share with whomever we wish, reinvest, or simply save.
Productivity involves the union of mind and body — thought and labor. Without the first, the second is a tragic waste of time.
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