The Last Word
Dension, Dave A.
THE LAST WORD Dave A. Denison Time of Your Life There I was, urgently rustling around under an apple tree in New Hampshire, a bucket hanging from my shoulders like a tin drum. I was in a race...
...Amid such contradictory signals, it's small wonder that politicians feel compelled to exhort faith in productivity and traditional work values...
...People in line to buy lottery tickets say they'll quit work and retire if they win the big money...
...Weber, I suspect, never picked a Golden Delicious, but he did produce, early in his Dave A. Denison, a former editorial intern at The Progressive, was, when last heard from, unemployed...
...I hear the thundering voices of Weber's Puritans: Time is precious, labor is prayer...
...The next day, my timepiece stayed in my pocket and I reverted (some would say regressed) to the attitude toward the work that came naturally—the attitude that prevailed, according to Weber, before the Protestant Reformation: a preference for less work and more leisurely work rhythms, even if it meant less pay...
...Ambivalence about work runs deep...
...Time magazine worried in 1972 that the work ethic was "going out of style...
...But there is much real work to be done, and my inner clock tells me there's no time to lose, m...
...But as the countercul-turalists grew older, most learned to set their alarm clocks, some embraced the compulsive energies typified by Nader's Raiders, and the new "burn-outs" were set reeling not by drugs but by work...
...But he and other radical unionists relied on the rhetoric of the work ethic in praising the worker and dismissing the rich as idle leeches...
...A great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work," wrote Bertrand Russell in a 1932 essay for Harper's entitled "In Praise of Idleness...
...People on the unemployment lines say any work is better than none...
...Though my flirtation with Taylorism and Max Weber's "spirit of capitalism" produced some fifty bushels of apples, I held on to the title of Slowest Picker in the Orchard...
...Henry Ward Beecher, one of the most popular American work-ethicists of the Nineteenth Century, discovered that he could best enjoy middle age while flat on his back in the clover fields of his farm...
...That was enough motivation, one day last October, to send me scrambling about beneath the Golden Delicious like Charlie Chaplin in the factory of Modern Times...
...I didn't...
...But certainly Russell was no idler...
...He made the deadline for this article with tenths of a second to spare...
...At optimum speed, I managed to fill the bucket in 2:30:7 minutes...
...In New England, where the American work ethic first took root, I was communing with its most obsessive energies...
...a satisfaction with modest earnings...
...Similar experiments in productivity were conducted in New England factories at the dawn of the industrial age...
...American radicals have also been of two minds on the question of work...
...career, a 900-page volume on rural labor...
...I was in a race against the clock...
...To reject the work ethic today is to hold fast to the hope of satisfying and rewarding employment, to believe that zeal can be an inspiration and not a ruse...
...Weber's was no leisurely endeavor...
...Certainly we can reject the Horatio Alger notion that any ragged child can climb the rungs of success, or the Puritan dread of sociability and "salacious daydreams" spun by idleness...
...Aristotle, a hard-working philosopher, believed that "all paid employments absorb and degrade the mind," and he upheld the life of leisure and contemplation—a life made possible by the labor of slaves...
...Produce...
...At the touch of a button, time is made to fly by in digitalized tenths of a second, so swiftly that the eye cannot distinguish one number from the next...
...he is said to have adopted "systematic study habits" at age fourteen and later wrote of his "need to feel crushed under the load of work...
...Inspired by the flickering diodes, I attacked the tree with manic zeal, arms flailing, straining for two or even three apples in one grasp, sending twigs and leaves flying...
...They are deadwood because they've nourished a system of demeaning, destructive, and alienating work, in which one's job is usually a sorry sacrifice for survival, a "daily humiliation," as Studs Terkel put it...
...my timepiece sat nearby on the corner of a big wooden bin, capacity twenty-one bushels of hard-won hand-picked apples...
...Beecher preached that "men who love leisure can never understand what God means, who loves occupation," but cautioned just as earnestly against the hyperactivity of his compatriots: "I plead for having more leisure...
...I plead for having more rest...
...But is it desirable or even possible to reject those values in the 1980s...
...The bin would bring home almost $200 for the man who owns the trees, and about twelve of those dollars, sixty-six cents a bushel, would be my share...
...Nineteenth Century managers, inspired by the time-and-mo-tion studies of Frederick Taylor, tried to apply "scientific management"—and liked the results...
...Produce...
...My timepiece, tailor-made for modern times, is a slim pocket calculator with a stopwatch function...
...What we need to do, it seems to me, is find a way of embracing the essential tenet of the work ethic—that work is central to human life and happiness—without perpetuating the corrupt myths that have been devised to rationalize the greed of some and the exploitation of others...
...The logic of piecework is simple, and time-honored in these parts: The more you produce, the more you earn...
...Describing the New Left, The Humanist observed in 1971, "Certainly the so-called revolt of radical youth also entails a revolt against the work ethic...
...The world will get along, if need be, without a few bushels of Golden Delicious...
...Bill Haywood of the Industrial Workers of the World offered as a motto for the working class, "The less work the better...
...The assertion that someone without a job does not want to work is an affront, yet millions on the job say they'd rather not be working...
...Most of those branches of the traditional work ethic are badly in need of pruning...
...And I am inspired—not to pick more apples but to work hard at work that is my own, the fruits of which would belong to me...
...He advocated a four-hour workday because "the road to happiness and prosperity lies in the organized diminution of work...
...I don't really regret the motions I wasted in the orchards of New Hampshire...
...My own rural labor be damned—I envy him the output of his prolific pen...
...his prodigious output testified to that...
Vol. 47 • July 1977 • No. 7
