On Work

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Back-to-back programs on public TV last night (Ape Genius, How Smart Are Animals) featured studies on animal intelligence suggesting that the animals studied had abilities that lay at the heart of what we think of a “culture” among human beings e.g. communal rituals, memories, technology, etc. I’ll set aside thoughts about culture for future examination and today concentrate on what I consider a feature of human intelligence, purposefulness of activity, a feature of what ordinarily we call “work.”

Work or contributing to the Gross Domestic Product of the country is such an integral part of being a member of society that we often don’t tease it out for specific (i.e. species-focused) examination. Everyone simply assumes that as long as you’re able (unless you “retired”), you have to work unless there is something wrong with you—you’re disabled or, worse, lazy or a “burden on society.”

As a social construct, work is any activity involving physical or mental effort (maybe even spiritual effort although here we enter into theoretical controversy depending on our understanding of spirit and spirituality) to achieve a purpose or result. Effort is part of its definition along with purposefulness.

In normal usage (by which I mean thoughtless, unmindful or conventional usage), effort is struggle. It denotes what in Buddhism is called dukkha, suffering. It does not come easily, as, for instance, thoughtless, unmindful or conventional thinking or activity. Effort implies attention and the focusing of energies whether physical or mental in deliberate or intentional awareness resulting in action.

Culture is often created with the same deliberateness and effort although in modern times and in the so-called industrialized countries, with the overwhelming choices around us, poorly examined or intentioned contributions to culture are increasingly the norm. Someone initiates an action or idea and with the 100th monkey it enters into the lexicon of general culture and everybody takes it for granted i.e. automatically includes it in any unmindful iteration of commonplace phenomenon (i.e. the norm).

I often conceptualize work employing the definition of mechanical work in physics (the study of physical energy and matter). work is the distance (and direction) that energy travels. More accurately, work is the distance (and direction, which is purpose or intent) created by energy focused and utilized to create it. To me therefore work involves space, energy, time (the occasion of applying energy and the succeeding occasions that display the resul) and consciousness (both awareness and intent).

Stated this way, work equals being alive. To be alive is to labor, as suggested in Bereshit, the first and pivotal book of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis 3:17-19):

• Because you listened to your wife and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’
• Curse be the ground because of you.
• By toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life.
• Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you
• And your food shall be the grasses of the field.
• By the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat
• Until you return to the ground—for from it you were taken;
• For dust you are and to dust you shall return.

According to Divine Revelation in the Jewish tradition, to work is inherent in being human. From this derives the metaphor of man and woman coming from the dust of the earth, the earth cursed by its Creator (Father) that they must cultivate it with the sweat of their brows to bring forth what the need to nourish and sustain life. Life is hard because to live means to labor to sustain it.

YHWH, of course, didn’t content with human ingenuity. Maybe Adam and Eve ate not of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil but of the Tree of Knowledge period. Maybe knowledge has no inherent morality or being good or evil, morality created as Buddhists believe, in the motivation for its use or the activity it inspires. The Creator didn’t anticipate (so much for omniscience forward into finite time) that humans would discover agriculture and, even more powerfully arguing against their eternal dependence on YHWH, husbandry for humans learned they could get more highly concentrated “energy-for-life” by eating the flesh or synthesized products of other animals.

Animals process life source into denser forms of energy, not through the primary action of the sun and other celestial lights that YHWH created but through the “learned” secondary action of life itself—biochemical reactions—and someday we we may even be able to create energy from submolecular activity since we learned to split the atom and access energy like to that of the sun!

Already in the West we are redefining work. Some may wish for manufacturing work to return to North America but it is more likely that increasingly the work we shall be doing in industrialized countries will be through mental effort. Land was “real” property when manual labor was the norm. Now intellectual property is the source of Western wealth and power.

No matter. Work is still intentional i.e. directed or focused energy or effort resulting in the desired result. (Desire is a whole new field of inquiry which must wait for another day.) If it were just effort or suffering, we would not be so inclined (some of us even “addicted”) but there’s a silver lining to work. Through work we get rewards, again of two kinds (three if we invoke spiritual work): material or psychic reward (which latter falls into the same realm as desire, of which as I wrote I shall later explore).

Christian monasticism (largely absent in the Muslim and Jewish religious traditions) prescribed manual labor as part of the monk’s day. There is good reason for this. Physically moving the body is itself work but work that activates the body’s capacity to use energy.

If this is confusing, it is confusing because we rationally divide a seamless reality into categories like matter, energy, spirit. But in our conventional world we live conventional lives i.e. lives according to conventions. Language itself is convention so I have to be satisfied with what language can achieve, itself a kind of work, but here work of delight!