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The Gospel of Work—better known as the Work Ethic—is the feature of our culture that most needs to be countered, and Christians should join William Morris in recognizing that Carlyle's evangel is "a semi-theological dogma, that all labour, under any circumstances, is a blessing to the labourer." Like the author of "Useful Work versus Useless Toil," Christians should demand for everyone their triune birthright of "hope of rest, hope of product, hope of pleasure in the work itself"—not the hopeless and infernal world of the capitalist round-the-clock workhouse.
So close the book on Steven Covey and those Seven Habits of Highly Effective People; spread the good news of Wallace Stevens and "the pleasures of merely circulating." If you're the sort who thinks that the Parable of the Talents is a primer for smart investing, you need reminding that its teller also beckoned to the lesson we should learn from the flowers. "Consider the lilies," Jesus says. "They neither toil nor spin, yet not even Solomon was arrayed like one of these." Draped in the sober raiment of industry, the Work Ethic's boss is Mammon, a deity more demanding and less forgiving than the God who adorns the idle.
Like reports of Mark Twain's death, announcements of the impending demise of the Work Ethic have been greatly exaggerated. Fifty years ago, David Riesman feared that Americans were about to be buried beneath "a dangerous avalanche of leisure." Thirty years ago, surveying the "cultural contradictions of capitalism," Daniel Bell worried that a militant hedonism unleashed by the 1960s was eroding the personal discipline necessary for production. Apparently undermined by the very material abundance it created, the Work Ethic receded as the primary focus of cultural criticism. As Vance Packard put it, "consumerism," not incessant labor, was "the great moral issue of our time."
Thanks to Packard and his neo-Puritan descendants, "consumerism" has obscured the persistence and intensification of the Work Ethic. For two generations, the trashy delirium of consumer culture has been a welcome foil for would-be prophets, offering abundant opportunity for displays of impeccable righteousness and taste. But anti-consumerist cultural criticism has grown ever more facile and tiresome, and the fatigue stems, I think, from the shopworn and misleading moralism that condemns consumer "pleasure." For one thing, despite furrowed brows about "instant gratification," modern hedonism, as Colin Campbell has pointed out, looks a lot like delayed gratification. We window-shop, entertaining fantasies about numerous commodities that we never purchase or even touch. Like the "sex in the head" that bothered D. H. Lawrence, "consumption in the head" is a defining feature of the modern individual. As the vanity fair of the modern imagination, the consumer sensibility is a factory of idols producing at maximum velocity.
Thus, as the contemplative mysticism of commodity culture, consumerism is also a form of imaginative labor that fuels the political economy of accumulation. Conservative moralists in particular don't like to acknowledge that the accumulation of capital requires the proliferation of consumer desires. We must spend money, we must enjoy ourselves, lest the whole apparatus of production and employment totter and collapse through attrition. Ask President Bush, whose clarion call to a stalwart citizenry after September 11 was—shop, travel, treat yourselves. (Cincinattus, drop that plough and pick up your Visa card.) So why not refer to our "free market" system as a command economy of pleasure? The transformation of leisure into commodities mandates an enormous expenditure of energy in product investigation; in keeping abreast of changes in brands and technologies; in the ambulatory and cognitive labor of shopping.
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