Editorial
Tyrrell, R. Emmett Jr.
"Editorial" Honeyfogling Inflation IT IS WITH A NAGGING sadness that I witness the slow sepulchering of historic England. Sadness because I revere the patrimony that Churchill's island...
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...Today the American work ethic is roughly akin to the work ethic of, say, Guatemala, an unfortunate situation, no doubt, and it is a situation that could well evolve into a disaster...
...These esoteric woes are often nothing more than the historic distempers of people who sit on their hands or of people who want to sit on their hands...
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...This idea has always been one of the utopians' most reliable pieces of cheese...
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...Now that only a handful of American economists, businessmen, and labor leaders have a good word for work strikes me as significant...
...Well then I suggest that their only honorable recourse is to follow the logic of their beliefs and to exit from their meaningless lives post haste, decorously, and without depositing those maudlin going-away cards that are so popular with the suicide set...
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...It is the obsession of every revolutionary...
...It tells us something about the low-grade quality of many of our leaders...
...For years the utopian intellectuals have argued, in their art and in their political diatribes, the meaninglessness of bourgeois life...
...one colour, gray, fits all...
...So I shall focus on merely one of the most annoying of these ideas: to wit, the idea that work is an unnecessary misfortune...
...Further, it is not as though work has been bereft of polemicists in the past...
...They have wobbled on, and today, after all these years of scholarly disquisition, what these pernicious ideas essentially boil down to is the metaphysical observation that life—that painful sequence of years so unevenly distributed by the Almighty to the likes of Adam, Moses, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Cleatus the Lame, Christopher Columbus, Philip the Mad, George III, Napoleon Bonaparte, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Janis Joplin, and Richard Nixon—life, can be just a bowl of cherries...
...Believing an intellectual's generalizations about work is about as dubious as believing Gore Vidal's generalizations about Mother's Day...
...For while the average Guatemalan is content to gnaw on roots and to shuffle around his dusty olden in baggy pajamas the Americano, even when he lives in New York City, expects better of life...
...Though Americans are no longer encouraged to be energetic workers they are still the world's most energetic consumers, and therein reside the ingredients for catastrophe...
...Ford's economic worthies gotten together and discussed the urgent application of technological improvements to Santa Claus' sleigh...
...It could be refuted by any bum from skid row, assuming that he could stop laughing at it long enough to impale it with a syllogism...
...Certainly work would be no more than a mild poultice for the aches and pains of inflation...
...It often enchants college girls, usually during their dementia praecox phase, and it has had a powerful effect on many of the intelligentsia, notwithstanding the fact that as ideas go it is at one with the notion that a horsehair, when placed in a jar, can cure cancer or, for that matter, the idea that gorging oneself with vitamin C will render one invincible to the common cold...
...We have become a nation that not only does not like to work but does not believe in the usefulness of work...
...but I do know that diligent work, if it brings with it no other blessing, brings an end to boredom, and it is boredom that underlies so many of our national problems...
...The relationship to work of these supposedly modern woes was remarked upon by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, when he wrote that "Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair . . . all these like helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of . . . every man: but he bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their caves...
...But a more thoughtful respect for and execution of one's work would certainly have a salubrious effect on many other modern problems, especially the aforementioned distempers of the spirit which we engaud in such sociological and psychological hocus pocus...
...Mr...
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...What is more, every sensible person understands that those who polemicize against work are often the very people who become so feverish about alienation, dehumanization, anomie, meaninglessness, and so forth...
...Now among these pernicious ideas are ideas marked by differing degrees of complexity, stupidity, and peril...
...If more Americans would assiduously devote themselves to their labors, I guarantee that the scowls would abscond from their faces, the public discourse would advance from crisis and anguish to flowers and sunshine, and—most wondrous of all—the utopian intellectuals would be unemployed...
...And many labor leaders are plainly appalled by the injustice of any form of toil whatsoever...
...Nonetheless even the confirmed second-raters who walk through' the corridors of power should know better than to take such patter seriously...
...This series of economic seminars would have been no more ridiculous had Mr...
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...Many of the businessmen dozing through these inflation powwows seem to take it for granted that work is a discomfiting encumbrance to the modern life style...
...Our life activities have become plastic, vicarious, and false to our genuine needs, activities fabricated by others and forced upon us...
...Whether it is because so many of them spend so much of their time talking for a living or because of other more abstruse reasons I cannot be certain, but assuredly very few influential Americans actually believe economic output or living standards depend on anything as mundane as work...
...I would not go so far as to say that work alone can cure all that troubles us today...
...Nonetheless, that it is more robust today than ever before I have no doubt...
...They work with their books, their typewriters, their private thoughts, and, too often, their fantasies...
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...Life can be just a bowl of cherries (Prunus cerasus), and if most of our bowls are empty or full of worms it is only because of the foul depradations of civilization and twelve Jewish bankers barricaded somewhere in the Alps...
...P-41P' '•^ ^IPP" `1•P' ^111^–^ The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 31...
...I do not share the view held by men like Carlyle that work is prayer and that work is sanctifying...
...They have been elucidated and analyzed...
...What troubles us are a congeries of pernicious ideas unveiled around the time of the French Revolution and borne into our present time by mountebanks and by those remarkable intellectuals whose earnest endeavors have always placed them in danger of being known to history as lunatics...
...to convince the college-educated we might even have to call in a rock singer or a preacher of Eastern gibberish...
...It is the breeding ground for all those pernicious ideas that, in two generations and Winston Churchill notwithstanding, have turned one of history's grandest nations into an Albania...
...This is the fundamental insight that be-gleams the eye of every reformer...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr...
...Sadness because I revere the patrimony that Churchill's island race has bequeathed our civilization, and sadness because the fever that has withered England is but an advanced case of what troubles us...
...After all, the intellectual's work is about as similar to the work of the American as hair remover is to hair tonic...
...It is not the common man who hunkers away from the necessity of work...
...Are we to believe that the second-rate leadership of this .great bourgeois country has immersed itself so deeply in the sophistries of the utopian intellectuals that it too believes in the meaninglessness of life...
...why should they not find bourgeois work meaningless also...
...Much the opposite, work's uselessness seems to have become a matter of dogma amongst economists like John Kenneth Galbraith, James Tobin, and other members of economics' romantic movement...
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...Its American champions were so numerous they became a bore, and its European advocates have been as illustrious and diverse as Voltaire and Carlyle...
...To refute them all would demand many acres of print and the counsel of many wise men...
...Reich delivered up that judgment in 1970, and to this very day such notions seem to have a powerful magic on the hearts of the empty-headed...
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...The riveting fact is that American output per man-hour is now the lowest of any industrial country in the world...
...After reading the garrulous reports from these hollow confabulations it has become depressingly obvious that very few American policy makers, and not many businessmen or labor leaders, see any value in working for a living...
...In all their harangues about inflation hardly anyone paused to mention the value of work...
...That is the Rousseauian insight...
...Consider the recent series of government-sponsored inflation powwows...
...America is one of the few nations on earth to actually have had a work ethic woven into its national fiber, and most historians and sociologists agree that the American regard for work was one of America's most useful assets in trimming the wilderness and ushering us into the late age of affluence...
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...The country will be better off without them...
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...In most of the intellectual struggles of the last two or three hundred years these pernicious ideas have at once served as the battle-axes of one side and the laughingstocks of the other side...
...No sensible person takes any utopian intellectual seriously when he launches his declarations about work...
...America can never become a Guatemala, but it might yet go the way of England...
...Their work is creative and free from external authorities...
...Intellectuals work alone, on their own schedules, free of practically any out(continued on page 31) 4 The Alternative: An American Spectator December 1974 EDITORIAL (continued from page 4) side commitments...
...they have been exhorted and hooted at...
...It is the empty-headed leader, the oaf who took a utopian like Charles Reich seriously when he published a book abounding with such economic wisdom as the following: "Work and living have become more and more pointless and empty...
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...But of course it is not the common man who is afflicting us with inflationary monetary policies, followed by idiotic economic harangues, and a chaser of government spending...
...The idea that work is unnecessary and unfortunate is, then, absurd...
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...That is it...
...What is more the common man still realizes work's value, though at times his faith must be sorely tried by yokels like Senator Kennedy, who recently experienced a revelation concerning its crushing drear and immediately vowed to solve the whole problem by holding congressional hearings on how to make work a joyous occasion...
...For most Americans, work is mindless, exhausting, boring, servile, and hateful...
...They were held all over the Republic, and what they told us about the stewards of our economy was embarrassing...
...Let us roll up our sleeves, bend over our workbenches, and put the merchants of misery to flight...
Vol. 8 • December 1974 • No. 3
