Summary of John Hughes 'The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism'

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Summary of John Hughes 'The End of Work: Theological Critiques of Capitalism'

September 8, 2018

Within this video, I discuss John Hughes' exceedingly stimulating book, 'The End of Work'. I highly recommend that you get your hands on a copy: https://amzn.to/2wVyjPk

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Transcript

Welcome back. In today's video, I'm going to give a lengthy discussion of this book by John Hughes, who was the Dean of Chapel in Jesus College, Cambridge, until his tragic death at the age of 35 in a car accident in 2014. This book was written in 2007 and is one of the most thoughtful books that I've read on the subject of work.

There's been a lot written on the subject from a theological perspective that doesn't really get into the sort of depths that Hughes does here. So I'm going to give a lengthy summary of the book, the argument of the book, chapter by chapter, and hopefully encourage some of you to get the book and to engage with some of its arguments, which, though having their flaws, are really worth thinking about. So it begins with the discussion of a number of theologians and thinking about their approach to work from a theological perspective.

So Karl Barth, Marie-Dominique Chenu, John Paul II, and Miroslav Vov. And so he talks about Barth's discussion of work as service and the way that work is placed within the realm of creation in distinction from the realm of redemption. And this gives work a sort of autonomy that encourages inadvertently the secularization of work.

For Chenu, work is a means by which humans humanize the cosmos. And he sees it in a very, quite an extreme sense with incorporating spirit into matter and being very critical about theologians who are overly vocal about work. He believes that it requires its own scientific autonomy and he largely dismisses the critical work of the tradition, the theological tradition on the subject of work for this reason.

John Paul II argues for the distinctiveness of work to humankind and its purpose, threefold purpose of provision, transformation of nature and the production of culture. And he's appreciative of the danger of technology undermining its proper ordering. The way that work is supposed to be about can so often be unraveled or entangled by technology.

But he emphasizes the subjective dimension of work and that's the proper concern of theologians. But yet this problem, the problem with this personalist approach is that it leaves work too natural. And it doesn't really allow us to have a critique of the idolatry of work and the objective formal work and the problems that there might exist with that.

Miroslav Volf frames the discussion of work by the eschaton. And so human persons are formed by labor, lasting realities are formed and all is going to be tested by divine judgment. But the problem is his actual proposals when it comes down to it are fairly disappointing, tend to fall back into fairly naturalistic humanism.

And there's no real deep theological account of the transformation of work. And so all of these writers, Hughes argues, fail and fall short in presenting a properly theological account and critique of work. Then he moves on to deal with one of what is perhaps one of the most significant theses within the history of reflection upon capitalism, which is the Weber thesis in the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism.

And within this, Weber argues that there was a transformation in the way that labor was understood. Whereas labor was previously understood within the context of juxtaposition with contemplation and only secondarily against laziness. The life of labor increasingly comes to be seen not just as an unfortunate necessity, but as a noble obligation for all people.

And labor replaces contemplation as the highest form of life, while contemplation is gradually demoted and identified with sloth. And so Weber explores the way that this shift occurred, the shift from labor being associated with necessity and obligation and these sorts of things and becoming associated with virtue and nobility. And for the Puritans, very much, he argues that their emphasis upon avoiding idleness led to the stigmatization of activities that lacked purposes beyond themselves.

And so very much an emphasis upon working for certain ends. And so Weber writes, labor came to be understood, considered in itself the end of life, ordained as such by God. Unwillingness to work is symptomatic of the lack of grace.

And so the spread of the language of vocation, work is worthwhile in itself, not just for the sake of something else, is important within this context. And Protestants will often celebrate this without actually thinking about what it can lead to. So he characterizes modern capitalist labor under four different categories.

Active instrumentalist, transcendental rational formalism, unnatural and anti-eudaimonist, asceticism and anti-traditionalism. And those aren't the most friendly terms, but it's worth unpacking what he's saying with this. So anti-active instrumentalist, labor is instrumentalized and technologized rather than merely concerned with subsistence.

And so labor becomes mobilized for some greater end than just providing for our immediate needs. It becomes an instrument to transform things on some greater level. Transcendental rational formalism is characterized by planning and organization, strategies of profit maximization rather than just risk taking adventure capitalism, which there's always been.

It's far more of a strategic approach. It's value free and it's purely instrumentalized. It's concerned not with the best serving of specific ends, but with utility as such, with the pursuit of profit for its own sake.

And so means are detached from ends in this respect. And unnatural and anti-eudaimonist asceticism, capitalism is characterized by a spirit of restriction, frugality and resistance to luxury and pleasure as wasteful. But this is a radical change from past societies.

But as this spreads, it originally finds its root within a certain sort of Protestantism, but it spreads and takes on a life of its own and develops its own momentum. But then there's a contrast between this and different sorts of asceticism. So on the one hand, there's a sort of otherworldly asceticism, world denyingness that's ordered towards an otherworldliness.

And then there's a world denyingness that's a very this world world denyingness. And that, Weber argues, is the world denyingness of the Puritans that's very much rooted within this particular context. And so the Puritan spirit actually tends to lead to a focus upon world mastery.

And so he talks about. He talks about the way that Christian asceticism. Strode into the marketplace of life, slammed the door of the monastery behind it and undertook to penetrate just that daily routine of life with its methodicalness to fashion it into a life in the world, but neither of nor of nor for this world.

And then finally, anti-traditionalism, rationally organized labor is in contrast to the spontaneity, the customs and traditions, the disorganization, the idleness, the adventurism, all these things that characterize traditional society. And so the rational pursuit of profit becomes an end in itself in a way that wipes out all these traditional ways of life and gradually erodes them. And so we live increasingly under the tyranny of the clock and under principles of profit maximization that don't really have much of a relationship to traditional modes of life.

And so this is seen in part what Weber's work is, in part, an anti-Marxist vision. It's an anti-Marxist historical work in the sense that it gives a lot of weight to ideas and culture and these factors of human agency, not just a sort of materialistic account of what's taking place. And so the superstructure of ideas and culture and these sorts of things are not allowed to become, are taken far more seriously than they would within a Marxist approach, where these are often seen as primarily reacting to the materialistic, technological, economic and other developments that are the real forces that shape human history in a Marxist approach.

And so Weber gives a lot more thought to ideas and culture and these sorts of factors. It's a more modest thesis and one that is often misunderstood, Hughes argues. It takes the contingency of history very seriously.

The Protestant work ethic isn't sufficient to produce capitalism, nor is it about capitalism as such. Rather, his concern is with historical causation. It's about the spirit of capitalism as an ideal type.

It's a sort of family, set of family resemblances. It's a caricature that you should recognize. It's a caricature that is accurate enough that you'd recognize this person if it walked by you on the street.

And so that's the sort of portrayal of capitalism that he's trying to give. It's an extrapolation and a recognizable set of beliefs and attitudes. And he sees these as very much related to a certain sort of Protestantism.

It's more about the success of the spirit than its invention. So there was always this spirit around in some form or other, the spirit of utility. But it's the congruence and the affinity between capitalism and a certain type of Protestantism that catalyzes its growth and its explosion that is really of interest to Weber.

How did the ethos that allowed capitalism to flourish emerge? So we have all these similar developments in other parts of the world, but it never actually takes off. What is it, that secret ingredient, that ethos that gives it the fuel to truly take off that we don't really have in somewhere like China, for instance, even though many of the same technological developments had occurred? And so the thesis doesn't, as many people think, hinge upon predestination, proof and calling, which is what many people understand by the Weber thesis. Rather, it's also opposed to the scientific theses of Adam Smith and the theories of political economy.

And so he writes, The true people that he's challenging are the political arithmeticians, the name given to the first advocates of the new science of economics, supposedly purely rational and value free, modelled on the physical sciences. It becomes evident that Weber's spirit of capitalism is simply another way of talking about homo economicus. Man and woman is dominated by considerations of self-interest and completely absorbed in the pursuit of material gain.

The key point of Weber's thesis is to take the standard account of the spirit of capitalism in political economy and to reject the traditional elements of self-interest, material greed and desire for leisure, which were all essential for such writers as Smith, offering instead an account that linked this spirit, at least in its point of origin, with an entirely different aesthetic spirit. And then Hughes goes on, Weber does seem to believe, even in his early writings, that the advance of modernity in the West is best characterised as an increasing rationalisation across many diverse areas of life. Yet, on the other hand, he does not seem to envisage this as the necessary outworking of a grand historical process in the manner of Hegel, the emergence of reason in history.

So he's not taking the account of Hegel or Marx that see this very much as the deterministic, whether idealist or materialist, outworking of historical process. Rather, there's contingency in history that's very much at root here. This could have gone very differently, but there are certain factors that led to the arising of a certain sort of capitalism.

It could have been different, but this arose out of these specific historical factors. And so in this respect, he's challenging the political economists, people like Smith and Ricardo and others, who are presenting an understanding of capitalism, that presents it as natural, as something that's based upon the natural form of human anthropology. What he's pointing to is that there were certain political, social factors that led to the rise of this.

And there's also a really weird dialectic that takes place between asceticism and the excess of hedonism that we often tend to think about capitalism rooted in greed and gain and profit and self-interest. But he points out that there's also this other spirit that's involved at its root. And if you look at the significance of Puritanism and Protestantism at the root of the rise of capitalism, what you see is a very different sort of spirit.

A world denying spirit that is very much a this worldly spirit at the same time. So it's a world denying spirit taken out into the world in an ascetic manner that seeks to act in a way within the world that brings it under the sway of a disciplined human life. And so it's a very, it's an approach that challenges the naturalizing of this process, as we see within the political economists.

And it also challenges the necessary outworking of historical process that you see within Marx or Hegel in different forms. He pays a lot more attention to the superstructure of ideas and culture and these sorts of things than Marx does. But at the same time, he's concerned with recognizing the contingency of all of this against the political economists, Adam Smith and others.

And so the ahistorical principles that ground the account of the political economists have a specific historical genesis. And he's trying to draw attention to that. And so it's more about indifference, Hughes argues, as he moves through his discussion of this than about asceticism.

The point of the Protestant spirit, the spirit of capitalism, is not so much asceticism as indifference. A detachment of this world from certain ends and a denial of its proper relationship to those ends. And that indifference in the relationship between means and ends and that sort of thing is far more at root here than the sort of account that Weber gives.

Weber is explaining some part of it, but the deeper influence lies elsewhere. And he pushes back, Hughes pushes back against the emphasis upon the Puritans, which seems a bit strange. I mean, why would you focus this upon the Puritans? So he points out a few points here.

Would it not be more consistent to say that the spirit of utility and its transcendental formalism is utterly indifferent to the realm of nature, to self-interest or its absence, as in country and ethics? And then he points out the fact that the real point of change, the real change that we should be paying attention to, is not so much the point that the Puritans represent. The Puritans' production remained as much constrained and ordered by greater substantive accounts of human flourishing, such as rest, justice, charity and worship, as that of the religious houses. Rather, the real break comes when the formal spirit of utility ceases to be subordinate to any such substantive traditions of rationality, sets itself against these traditions and substitutes itself for them as a value-free, finely authoritative science of reality and action.

Formal rationality comes to replace substantive teleology. And so he argues then that this virus-like, Promethean, iconoclastic hostility to traditions is so important for understanding the role of this spirit of modernity, something which was already manifest in the anti-sacramentalism Puritans, but only later reached its logical conclusion in the political economists and utilitarians. And then he argues that there's a close relationship between this and secularism, more close than Weber would probably believe.

Perhaps one of the most interesting chapters within this book is the third one, which is on the subject of Marx. And so he points out that at the heart of Marx's original protest against capitalism was an aesthetic critique. And so he writes that it was the mode in which the critique remained somehow suspended from transcendence, while simultaneously historically deconstructing all false abstractions and essentialisms.

When, however, he tried to make this logic of critique itself into an absolute, puritanically purging himself of any residue of the aesthetic and transcendence, and grounding his critique purely in the imminent laws of conflictual natural development, he merely made utility an end in itself, another naturalized false essence, restoring the very rational instrumentalism he had originally attacked, yet now restored without even serving any higher good other than anarchic irrational desire. So Marx, challenging the political economists, again people like Adam Smith and others, chastened an abstract anthropology by recognition of the contingency of economic relationships. So, and the way that we are formed by our times, we are not just abstract human beings that just so happen to live in a particular point in history and we're not really touched by our times and our nature is indifferent to the times in which we live.

Rather, human nature and its relations and all of these things are deeply bound up within the economic system, within the social and cultural systems of which we are part. We are grounded in history, we are historical beings. And so there is a limited anthropology here, an anthropology that's arguing that we are historical beings, not beings that can be abstracted and disentangled from history to kind of stand above it.

Labour is at the heart of Marx's anthropology and so we come to be through our labour, that's how we realise ourselves, and we form ourselves and our society and the world through our labour. And so an example of this is the way that we hone our senses. As we engage with the world, we train our ear to listen to music, we gain skill in our hands to participate in certain forms of labour, we learn to read, we learn to use our eyes and our brains, we learn to use our mouths and our tongues in a way that is skilful, to sing, to speak and to act within the world in ways that are effective.

And these are all ways of forming ourselves through our labour. The labour that he has in mind primarily is free, creative labour. Human beings are distinct from other animals.

Other animals are primarily just bound up with the concerns of their subsistence. And yet human beings are different. Human beings create the surplus value of beauty.

We create songs, we create art, we create theological reflection, we create all these different things that are beyond just the ends of subsistence. Labour isn't merely working towards some other end, but the exercise of our senses and our capacities is an end in itself. And so we transcend subsistence, but yet that surplus value, those things that enable us, the character of human labour as something that exceeds mere subsistence, is what makes us vulnerable to alienation.

So we assert ourselves in the creation of beauty, in the engagement in labour that is truly free and creative, but yet under capitalism, the worker can be alienated from his labour, which is owned and disposed of by another. So I sell my agency to my boss and I work for my boss and he disposes of my labour, he disposes of my creative activity and there's a sense in which that's not mine anymore. I've been robbed of something that's a full flourishing of my humanity.

I've been robbed of that capacity. And so there's an aesthetic critique here. The problem for Marx is that his aesthetic vision of labour depends upon claims about the true nature of human labour, for which he has questionable or no grounds, especially in a world where labour is characterised wherever you look by alienation and toil.

And this is one of the points that Hughes is pushing on throughout the book. Marx looks to, because he doesn't have a transcendent value structure to challenge with, he looks to the imminent dialectics of history. And so the tensions and the working out of history over time, the different processes that lead us from a very basic sort of subsistence society to feudalism to capitalism and then on to the socialist society.

These are the sorts of processes that he's focusing upon. And so the movement of these dialectical processes of history towards a communist society is the basis of his judgement. The communist society of the future will be one in which the alienation of human labour is overcome and art and work will become one.

Like the writer or the artist, man's work will be an end in itself, not just a means. Now, the person who's truly the free writer is writing to express themselves, to express something that they believe, something that they think is true, something that they think is beautiful. And they are not just doing that to gain a wage.

That would be an alienation of what they're doing. Rather, they're expressing themselves freely and creatively. And ideally, in the future, the artist and the writer will be more paradigmatic of human labour more generally.

And so we won't just be slaves working for a wage. We'll be people truly expressing ourselves and growing through our labour and becoming more fruitful and more full human beings who rise to our fullest stature. The problem that Marx faces is that human labour is always characterised by toil.

You can't just eliminate that element of it. And his ambitions over time become more modest for this reason. Labour cannot be completely detached from toil.

Freedom must ultimately have the necessity of toil as its basis. If you're going to be free, you actually have to toil a bit first. And it needs to be founded upon that basis.

And his critique is levelled against the absolute elevation of utility over all else, including our humanity. The human being can't be reduced to a commodity and dehumanised in the process. And so he challenges the way that the political economists fancy themselves to be engaged in something akin to the natural sciences, that they see themselves just to be describing the way that humankind really is, without recognising that they are engaged in a moral activity and that their account of human nature is in a sense what he would term a science of asceticism.

The problem, though, for Marx is that he lacks any sort of footing for the sort of value judgments that he wants to make. Rather, he's smuggling in this aesthetic reference point, which is ultimately a quasi-theological transcendent, which he's inherited from the tradition, but he hasn't really grounded himself. And so this produces a situation where his critique ends up eroding the basis of his own value judgments.

It's seeking after freedom beyond the instrumental manipulations of imminent power. And so his critique turns in upon itself. It destroys the value system against which he wants to claim the freedom, against which he wants to claim the slavery and the lack of freedom, the alienation of human labour.

That value system actually gets eaten away by the imminence of his whole system. He ultimately loses that foundation. And so his suspicion undermines not just the basis of beauty, but also unsettles truth, because this truth needs to have some sort of disinterested freedom and existence, unless, because if it doesn't have that, it just gets eroded and it becomes purely about self-interest.

And so he writes, Marx has moved from denying transcendence and autonomy to ideas, to denying them any agency and finally denying them any real existence as anything more than bubble blowing. His new science that emerges after the evacuation of any transcendence from truth is a purely pragmatic instrumental knowledge to be used in action. While for Marx this is knowledge as revolutionary action, it seems difficult to deny that this instrumentalisation of truth can leave nothing beyond relativistic pragmatism and egoistic calculation.

The materialist, naturalistic denial of transcendence reduces beauty and truth to mere tools, which crucially destroys their critical power. Both have become forms of utility. It's a very powerful critique that I think Hughes has here.

It's an important one. And it's one of the reasons why we see within the modern situation a lot of Marxist forms of thought that have been influenced by Marxism end up reducing truth to the mere operation of power, because there's no transcendence to truth. Truth and beauty and goodness have been denied as transcendentals and as a result it just becomes the operation of power with nothing of, no value system to truly judge that.

And so the transcendental of the good faces similar mistreatments at Marx's hand. And at the end, Marx is just left overly dependent upon a supposed future to justify his judgments and his projects. And it produces what Hughes describes as a sort of inverted platonic cave, where all these ideas and other things are just the reflections of the shadow, flickering shadows of materialist realities that are playing at the world.

And so the whole superstructure is just a mirage. All the culture, all the art, all the ideas, these are just bubble blowing. There's nothing real to them.

And so there's a huge danger in this immanentized transcendent, because it does not hold. It ends up collapsing. And when things are removed from any end beyond themselves, they are robbed of their dignity and subjected to the tyranny of utility.

Without a transcendent good to which things are ordered and from which they receive their own integrity and worth as themselves, utility can only be about usefulness for me in the satisfaction of my supposedly natural desires. It seems Marx has succumbed to the same basic perspective as his original opponents, the champions of capitalism, the political economists. Marx cannot see that utility and imminence are not incidental to capitalism, but rather, as Zizek puts it, instrumental reason as such is capitalist.

And so he tried to think beyond capitalism while retaining its essential spirit. Instead, we might claim capitalism and nature contain no imminent dialectical critique. A different practice of desire is needed.

And so he moves on in the fourth chapter to a discussion of John Ruskin and William Morris. And Ruskin is someone I really enjoy reading. He's eccentric, very eccentric and quixotic, but he's often deeply insightful.

And his strength is found in emphasizing the value and moral laden character of the economy against, again, the political economists, people like Mill, particularly in Ruskin's case, in his challenge to John Stuart Mill in Unto This Last is very important. And so he historicizes and denaturalizes capitalism, but he also emphasizes that any economy is based upon value, upon morals, upon norms and these sorts of things. And so he challenges political economy as a sort of veiled ideology.

It thinks that it's natural. It says that it's natural, but really it's hiding at its heart an ideology that it's not truly acknowledging. The importance for Ruskin of political economy to this situation lies in its role as the official ideology of this mammonism, justifying its crimes through a purportedly value free science of labour and economic relations, which conceals what is actually an extraordinary reversal of values, the suppression of justice and charity and the exaltation of greed.

Ruskin is quite clear that this new science is actually the assertion of a new anti-Christian morality. I know no previous instance in history of a nation's establishing a system systematic disobedience to the first principles of its professed religion. And so he challenges the idea for the political economists, particularly people like Adam Smith, that self-interest is the foundation of a well-ordered society.

This in many senses makes vice the basis and treats virtues as accidental. And his discussion of virtue in this regard is very illuminating, I find. He talks about the business of being moral is not just about whether or not to obey one's desires, but actually what one is to learn to desire.

Most of the world's demands are romantic in the sense of being vision, idealism, hope and affections, so that good economy for Ruskin begins in the regulation of the imagination and the heart. Nevertheless, because virtuous desires point towards transcendent values and life, they are qualitatively different from vicious desires. Vices and virtues are therefore not just motions of a similar nature, as they might appear to the materialist who could at least admit the existence of the latter.

Virtues, Ruskin tells us, alter the essence of the creature under examination the moment they are added. They operate not mathematically, but chemically, introducing conditions which render all our previous knowledge unavailable. And so the emphasis of the political economists is upon the fundamental reality of self-interest and also a very static and inert principle of possession.

And Ruskin challenges this in quite striking ways, presenting possessions very much as like water flowing, the movement from capital to actual consumption and these sorts of things. In Unto This Last, he's very much talking about the movement of wealth and not just inert possessions. So the idea of having, it's not necessarily, doesn't necessarily involve competition.

You can have something in a way that serves others, in a way that shares with others, and in a way that is a deeper sort of possession of a reality. And so he challenges many of the ideas that are presumed. And for possession to be meaningful, we have to be able to use it.

And so possession depends upon things in us. I can't truly possess a piano in the way that the virtuoso musician can possess that piano. I just have it as an object.

That musician can have it as something that he's deeply united with, that is part of an extension of his personality, an extension of his powers and his agency. And these, he talks about the way that competition is not necessarily more natural to human nature than cooperation. And the idea that we should just buy in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest, regardless of other concerns, is something that he finds quite reprehensible.

Now it's worth thinking about this. When we think about people involved in the marketplace, Adam Smith and others would present it as very much a matter of self-interest. But if you think about what people are doing within the marketplace, they are seeking a face within the community.

They are seeking dignity in their work. Maybe they are inheriting a trade from their parents. Maybe they are lovingly providing security for their families.

Maybe they take particular pride in being able to push forward the quality of work within their particular form of labour. Maybe they find a sense of belonging within the guild of workers within that context. All these different things are taking place, but yet the political economists would reduce it to self-interest and our desire for profit.

And that is a denial of the true reality of human nature. There is an attenuation of what a true anthropology would have to say about us. And so competition is not natural, necessary and unavoidable.

And it's not as basic to human nature as cooperation. And so there's also a reprioritisation of consumption over capital and exchange. And so capital and exchange, as they become raised up, there's a sort of inversion of means and ends that ultimately the point becomes profit, this sort of abstract value that's detached from any service.

And yet for Ruskin, the point again and again and again is that value is found in life and what serves life. And so what builds up life is where value is truly to be found, not in terms of the abstraction of money and wealth. And that wealth, he challenges that term.

We talk about wealth in terms of abstract money, things that can be measured by money. But yet wealth comes from wealth, the well-being-ness, as it were. That is what's truly to be measured, the measure of life that we are able to enjoy.

And so that measure of life can be seen in the way that we can spread ourselves and give life to others. It can be seen in the way that we enjoy a true realm where we are at home, a place of familial love. It can be seen in all these different things.

And that's ultimately what wealth is. It's not easily measured by money. And yet a lot of the that we'd consider profit, he talks about as ilth, things that aren't actually bringing well-being, but quite the opposite.

When we invest large amounts of money in gun sales, for instance, and selling arms to other countries, that's not actually increasing wealth. It's increasing ilth. It's not.

There is a value that is related to things. And so we can't just purely subjectivise value. Now, if you reduce everything to means, then you will have in the manner of the many capitalist economists, for instance, in the Austrian school, an emphasis upon subjective economics, that what gives value is what value we ascribe to things, what value we impute to things.

But yet he emphasises that there are inherent values to things. There are things that are inherently wrong, things that are inherently not profitable. No matter how much money we can make from them, they are not in themselves profitable.

And so then he brings in this moral critique upon this value neutralising form of capitalism and the theory of the political economists. And there are a lot of Christians that hold these value neutralising theories of economics that really need to think about this. This critique of capitalism and its theoreticians really needs to be taken seriously, because it's one thing to pay attention to the means.

It's another thing to detach those means from their proper ends and to think of them in an abstraction from that. And so he emphasises the way that, for instance, in the economy, we are invested in our labour. And so we're not just people working for a wage.

The true worker is someone that finds a sense of character, a sense of self within their labour. So the soldier will lay down his life rather than allow his country to be taken over. The person who's the priest will lay down his life rather than denying the true faith.

And these are the sorts of figures that he presents as these are models of labour. These are people that aren't just professionals working according to an abstract code who have their professional life and then their personal life here and the two never meet. Rather, their character is expressed within their labour.

Their self is not alienated within their labour. They are invested within their labour. And so as they are self-invested within their labour, their labour becomes an extension of themselves and a true flourishing of themselves.

But yet within many modern visions of labour, particularly by the political economists, who detach all value and detach means from ends, you end up with an understanding of the human being where there is not character invested in labour and professionalism unhooks us from that sort of thing. And so he sets forth the medieval artisan very much as an example of unalienated labour. Here's someone who was invested in producing beauty and beauty exceeded the need just for utility.

And so he celebrates the Gothic particularly. It has a resistance to the dehumanisation of the worker and the denial of the worker's self-investment and expression within the labour for the sake of utility. Hughes gets into Morris as well at this point.

And William Morris is someone who also emphasises the importance of integrating art and the ordinary forms of life. And he has a vision of ideal society in which all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful, yet all will be simple without any signs of waste, pomp or insolence and every man will have his share of the best. But yet Morris tried to address this with the arts and crafts movement but grew in pessimism as he realised that the things that they were producing were just going to rich people.

There wasn't actually this greater change of society that he'd been hoping for. And Morris equivocates on the standard, on the question of the standard by which true labour is to be judged. So is there a higher transcendent ideal or is there something that just naturally emerges? And at points Morris naively seems to believe that freed from coercion everyone would just naturally move forward to the ideal of true liberal labour, this labour that's truly free and not servile anymore.

But Ruskin, better than Morris, recognises that the ideal must be transcendent, something that stands above us as something that enables us to have a vantage point to think about the values of things because all labour involves a degree of toil and alienation and only God is truly free in his labour. And so Ruskin recognises the importance of a reordering of society depending in part upon a reordering of desire. This isn't just going to happen with a changing of economic conditions.

He can be naive about this that if you just teach people in slightly different ways it will come about far more easily but he does have a recognition of the importance of changing people's desires. And both of Ruskin and Morris recognise implicitly the significance of theology. The values that they are putting forward are values that are theologically freighted.

Values like art, the aesthetic, beauty and goodness and these sorts of things are all things that are laden with theological weight. And so from this discussion of Ruskin and Morris he moves on in the fifth chapter to the Frankfurt School with Adorno and Horkheimer and he presents this as an example of the Marxist tradition taking the realm of the aesthetic more seriously. That human nature won't just work out its own freedom.

There needs to be art has some part to play but unfortunately art can only enact a negative utopianism. It can represent the untruthfulness and the ugliness of the status quo but it can't actually present us with a true sign of the goodness and truth and beauty of something beyond that. Within the Frankfurt School there's a highlighting of the dialectical relation between the Kant's categorical imperative, the sort of law unto man's law unto himself, that's the absolute law that you can form from the categorical imperative.

And then that scientific reason and then how this leads into a Nietzschean and Sadian will to power and domination that you end up detaching things from value, means from ends. And there's a similar dialectic here to the dialectic of thrift and hyper consumption that characterises the discussion of Weber's thesis that there is this indifference to values, a detachment of means from ends and this asceticism that's taken towards the means allows us to be indifferent towards the ends. Whether that's being used for the sake of serving the kingdom of God or whether it's being used to just throw huge parties at the weekend it doesn't really matter because all we care are focused on other means and we've detached them from ultimate value.

And so this has a great similarity to the tension between or the relationship between the seemingly contrary figures of Kant and Nietzsche and the sort of Sadian vision as well, that all of these things are actually closer together than it first might appear. Similarly we noted in Weber and Marx the ambiguous mixture of asceticism and hedonism in the spirit of capitalism, the tendency for thrift, planning and modesty to transform into extravagance, hyper consumption and sport. Yet in neither is the relationship made so clear as in the coupling of Kant and Sade in dialectic of enlightenment.

And so there is this relationship between these two figures. They seem to be opposed to each other but they're actually bound together as two swings of the pendulum that can't be avoided. Yet there's a suspicion about theology because it can be, on the one hand they have some degree of a welcome of theology.

So this is Horkheimer, he talks about the believers who cling to the thought of something other than the world, something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom have no dominion. They might actually be able to offer some resistance to the world of docile masses governed by clocks. And so this challenge that theology can present is because it has a sense of something beyond the mere realm of the imminent that is controlled by clocks, that is controlled by the end of utility and efficiency and all these concerns, over concerns with means and a value that's unhooked from anything transcendent.

And yet at the same time theology is always in danger of prematurely resolving things, the tensions of reality. And so the problem for Adorno and Horkheimer that ultimately they're faced with, they're trapped in a negative transcendent but it can't actually exceed. It's constantly trapped in the terms of that which it negates.

So it can say not this, not this, but it can't actually point forward to anything else in a positive sense. And so it's again there's the problem of value system, there's a problem with the transcendent within their approach. Finally he gets into a discussion of Catholic thinkers and teleology coming into the forefront, things of value and purpose and the proper end of things.

Gets into Joseph Piper that he talks about not just as many of the other people we've been looking at have thought, let's try and think about work in terms of relating it to themes of rest, relating it to themes of art, relating it to themes of beauty and overcoming the mere realm of utilitarianism within our work itself. Whereas Piper is a bit more suspicious of that tendency because it could end up leaving us as people who are working seven days a week in so-called beautiful work but that aren't truly resting at all. So what he's trying to recover is the distinction of the Sabbath, that the Sabbath is a separate time, a time, heterochronic time, something that stands over against ordinary time and enables us to, first of all, it enables us to look at that world of work in a different way.

So there's some degree of resistance, a barrier against the overtaking of all of our lives by work. And so rational utility is the foundation of a world of work. It's the foundational principle of this total world of work and no useless activities can be tolerated.

And so he looks to the realm of thought as a particular example worth examining. When we look at the world of thought, there is, it's not just, we talk about mental labour and academic labour. There is a certain sort of academic labour which could be the filling out of forms and other things like that but true mental labour is not properly called labour.

It's a form of contemplation. It's something distinct from the sort of toil that you're engaged in when you're fixing your car or something like that, when it's broken down. It's a very different sort of thing.

And so the liberal arts traditionally were valued for their own sake, not just as means to another end that we often have today. People will try and sell the liberal arts that you should be studying these philosophy for instance because it will help you to be a better businessman. No, it's more akin to vision.

You do this philosophy for its own sake ideally. And there's a distinction between the honorarium and the wage that the honorarium is given in response to something that is seen as services given. That they're not given for a wage but they're given in a far freer manner, in a way that's the expression of the person's labour and the honorarium supports them in their vocation and their free action.

And that's a distinction that's quite important. And so you're not going to ultimately mean create a situation whereas for Ruskin everyone being paid an honorarium but you are going to, I mean that's just unrealistic within our current situation. But there is a recognition of that, there's an importance of that distinction.

Leisure is not just for an end. I mean we talk about you have leisure so that you can recharge and as you recharge you can plug yourself back into the world of work or it can be for some other end along those lines that the person who has more leisure is a better worker. Or that's just not correct, that's just not a helpful way to look at things.

It's a way that makes work the ultimate end of everything. Leisure is not the absence of activity either, it's not idleness. We're not thinking in terms of an active inactive opposition here.

And so Piper talks a lot about festival as orientation to worship. Leisure can't be instrumentalized as worship can't be instrumentalized. Worship is about a greater end but it's something that's an end in itself and it's about the worship of God that is something beyond any of our utilitarian purposes that we have.

And so it's always oriented to something that can't be reduced to just a means to another end, it's oriented towards God. Then he gets into a discussion of Eric Gill who's a very unpleasant character in many respects but on this he's very clear-eyed. He sees, Gill sees capitalism as involving a sort of slavery.

So he describes it as slavery is defined as the loss of freedom and responsibility for one's actions through subjection to the will of others while freedom is not opposed to discipline as in decadent accounts of freedom as arbitrariness but only to irresponsibility. Diminished responsibility is an inevitable consequence of capitalism and industrialism, most particularly in the worker but also in the capitalist. And so he writes this question of diminished responsibility is a matter of life and death as Gill affirms, quoting Saint Thomas, Hence a man insofar as he is a slave is a veritable image of death.

And so again he's thinking about the need to create unalienated human beings, beings who have true possession of their labour, true possession of the fruits of their labour, true connection between their selves and what they produce and that these things won't be torn apart within a structure of owning that we have, the sort of structure of owning that we have within capitalism but that people would own those things that should be true to them, proper to them. And so the contrasting figure to the slave is the free workman who freely expresses himself, is responsible for what he creates and takes delight in his work. And he speaks about the divorce of man from being.

So man becomes critic when formerly he had been creator, rooted in creation and creating within that but now as a result of that standing over against nature and detaching from nature and taking the position of the critic, man risks being reduced to a tool himself, separated from creation and seeking dominance over it. And this is reminiscent in part of something like C.S. Lewis's discussion in The Abolition of Man, that the more that we try and control nature and the more that we try and reduce different parts of our humanity to nature, the more that we end up just in a world of pure human will, a human will that is arbitrary, that's just basic human instinct, uncultivated and untrained and uncultured. Gill doesn't harbour illusions about the possibility of reforming society through a revival of the arts.

He believes that our society will come to a natural end because it's founded upon an unnatural condition and it can't last forever. Ultimately it will have to fail but this isn't going to be precipitated ultimately by the work of artists and the work of other people who are criticising this process. Rather those actions will only have limited effect.

We have to be patient and these things will work themselves out in time. However it's important for him that workmen are owners of their own labour, its products, their trade and the means of their production and this is expressed in the sort of communities that he tried to form. And so his critique of capitalism is based upon its undermining of the truth of humanity.

I think that's important within his approach. Capitalism stands under judgement because it is fundamentally opposed to the truth about humanity as revealed by Catholic Christianity and he, as soon as one bases critiques upon the more profound level of distinguishing between true and false desires and demands, a claim is being made that cannot be demonstrated on purely empirical grounds and this thus embodies some implicit supernatural metaphysical view of humanity in the world. The same metaphysical claim is the basis for Gill's confidence that the current civilisation must ultimately self-destruct without the intervention of artists or revolutionaries.

The present civilisation is founded upon an unnatural condition and will come to a natural end. And so within the society of capitalism we can often be dulled to our true end. We can be dulled to what we should truly desire and Gill is aware of this and alert to it that our appetites can atrophy.

We become consumed with consumption. We want to consume things and yet we fail to realise that we're creatures that are ultimately ordered towards contemplation and the consumption and our distractions and our constant wanting something new is an attempt to fill something, a void that cannot be filled ultimately by it. The surplus value that Marx highlights, man's capacity for creating beauty is for Gill a result of man's need for God and so a recovery of beauty must involve a recovery of God.

In some sense art is our response that art is the peculiar and appropriative activity of man as the lover of God. Art at its most profound level, art for Gill, at its most profound level, art for Gill like leisure for Piper is rooted in worship. It is fundamentally liturgical.

It is only because art is at the root liturgical that it is able to transcend the order of utility and this reveals its necessarily theological nature. Beauty is ultimately simply the love of God and his praise and worship sensible in the work of men's hands. He stresses the point that's beautiful and the useful can't be neatly divided from each other and he challenges the distinction between the fine and the servile arts.

Neither beauty nor utility and labour are to be disregarded though. These things are connected in different ways. So if the creation of beauty is intrinsic to all human work then the properly subordinate role of utility and labour should not be scorned either.

The curse of necessity haunts all work after Adam's fall according to Gill. People must labour in order to survive yet even such works of necessity can and perhaps as we shall consider shortly must in as much as they are human works exceed necessity and become the occasion of countless works of glory. True utility, labouring for food, shelter and survival has its role to play as what Gill calls an immediate or proximate end subordinate to the ultimate end which can never be utility but only ever God.

And so God alone as final end truly exceeds utility. However in the all ends are intrinsically related to God as the final end. There can be no autonomous realms but rather all activities are oriented towards God and the transcendence of utility by which they can also be judged.

And so there is no in a state of freedom there's no false necessities, no serving greed or injustice. He gets into at the end of the chapter David Jones, art is the distinguishing activity of the human that we are sacrament creators. It's a fundamentally religious activity that we're engaged in.

We are creating things that are meaningful that gesture towards a reality beyond the realm of utility and this is inescapable. We can't tidily dissolve divide the world into the useful and the sacramental. These things are bound up together in ways that we can't escape.

There can be no value free realm of facts insofar as art makes anything real. It makes something that is good in relationship to God therefore sacramental and not purely utile. Likewise a sign then must be significant of something hence of some reality so of something good so of something that is sacred.

Nothing signifies nothing. And so mere utility is ultimately impossible. It's not something that we can ever arrive at.

And then the conclusion of the book he talks about the exclusion of theology and the anti-theological impulse of Marx and his successors has led to a deep problem for the left. For ultimately the materialist naturalist rationalist worldview that the left has adopted cannot adequately account for the practice of social criticism to which they are in reality more fundamentally committed. This is not only a question of intellectual consistency for the problem is more acute.

There is at least significant evidence that this materialist worldview which has been adopted by the mainstream left is not simply an inadequate foundation for critique but that it is also in some way deeply allied to the very alienation of labour in the modern world which they have sought to oppose. Likewise if there is an anti-theological materialist heart to the problem of the alienation of labour under capitalism then theology far from being part of the problem might actually be the key to the solution. And so the critical project of Marx ultimately rests upon a vision of divine labour he inherited from the tradition but which he cannot account for himself and which he ultimately undermines because of his approach.

The spirit of utility is at the heart of this book discussing the spirit of utility and where it comes from. That various figures in philosophy and the arts loosely termed romantics notice similarities between these two phenomena a rational calculating quantifying spirit which seemed determinately destructive of traditional modes of thoughts and life with materialistic anti-theological prejudices levelling qualitative differences to one commensurable measurable scale bracketing out moral and theological concerns in order to occupy a neutral empirically describable terrain. And so whereas formerly utility had merely named usefulness and often been interchangeable with goodness now it dissolves to nothingness and whereas formerly it was related to beauty in a way that highlighted the other transcendentals now it becomes an impossible fiction that and this is very important to recognise that pure utility is impossible for in itself utility is simply nothing it is no accident that utility when separated from larger concerns and set up alone as supreme turns against itself for pure utility is an incoherent notion.

Utility properly means usefulness which always begs the question usefulness for what? Utility cannot escape the commitment to higher goods and when it attempts to do so by opposing itself to higher notions of goodness and claiming to be an end in itself it becomes nonsense. Utility cannot be made value free because questions of utility are always necessarily parasitic upon prior presumed values. Likewise it's hostility to traditions in the name of a supposed timeless human nature always merely conceals the particular traditions upon which it must depend.

As we saw in the discussion of Marx there is no extra cultural human nature which can be empirically invoked. All considerations of nature for humanity are necessarily culturally mediated and so nothing operates according to pure utility and criticism of our world of total labour requires a vision of the true the good and the beautiful and how those correspond to a certain form of labour and this can be seen in God whose doing isn't opposed to thinking or to being and even within God we see a certain form of art Hughes argues. The son is the image of the father and it's intrinsic to his very being and unlike Marx we don't trust in the materialist eschatology we don't harbour a vision of necessary antagonism and ontological violence at the heart of reality these tensions that are playing out in history that must be violently resolved nor do we have an idolatrous celebration of labour as the meaning of human life.

Human labour cannot unite rest and action and so we do not look to find our value within human labour itself but it can participate in divine action and so as we look to divine action we can find a measure. We are temporal creatures so the eternal unity of rest and action can only be figured for us through the diurnal alternation of rest and action and never entirely by their perfect unity in time. The distinctions between work and play rest or thought cannot be completely transcended this side of heaven and any attempts to impose such an abolition of distinction from without will probably be sinister as Piper feared yet with all these caveats we can still say that human labour is able to participate in divine labour precisely because there is an analogy between divine and human making.

We are still called to be perfect as our father in heaven is perfect and this in turn is related to grace that God has given us the sabbath and the life of faith writes live liturgically for the life of faith live liturgically everything is superfluity grace and yet when we have done everything offered all our work we must still say that we are unprofitable servants precisely because all true work in as much as it participates in God's work is not ours but is given to us. Likewise while we can have no control of the issue of our labour in this life cannot secure it against being thwarted nevertheless we trust in the hope of the resurrection that no good work will ultimately be lost. We should recognise that much of what we are looking for from a good form of labour is already rigid residually or vestigially present in our labour if we look closely we can see these aspects of a good form of labour those ways in which we are not alienated from our labour all of us have them in certain respects and so we should seek to extend those things we should also seek to recover an understanding of sabbath as something that gives meaning to every day as something that spreads its meaning into every day so every single day can to some extent become a participation in the sabbath and we need to bring an attention to ends back to our discourse to overcome the separation of means and ends and this will require we will require a lot of reflection upon the specific modes of work within our society things that are good things that aren't bad things that are bad and things that could be improved and so he talks at the very end of some of the ways we can think about this in relationship to static being static or mobile in the lives of individual workers it is often claimed that there has been a shift in recent years in the west from oppressive static models of labour one job for life with the same firm doing the same thing towards more liberating mobile forms of labour casual work frequent changes of job retraining etc yet neither staticness nor mobility are solutions in themselves for the latter can be as dehumanising de-skilled insecure as the former no freedom or flexibility variety and stability freedom and security need to be held together in working lives and so he points back to the romantic tradition as one guide at this point and to what flourishing might look like now there's a lot more that could be said about that this is a very long summary of the book and i don't want to get into it any further but just in conclusion i want to give a few comments of my thoughts about the book i thought the book was a very strong presentation of the importance of a transcendent value in order to give meaning to labour in order to maintain and sustain a critique of labour and how it can be distorted how it can be alienated i think it's also a good challenge to many people who have for instance been influenced by the austrian school of economics which has had quite an influence within certain schools of reform thought and there are ways in which the value neutralizing of the austrian school this reduction of everything towards means and subjective valuations ends up undermining the theological basis of work it ends up undermining our ability to talk truthfully about profit about things that are good about the ends of our labour and so i think we need to restore this connection between ends and means in our discourse now of course that has implications on the other side because there's a certain group of people a certain type of people that are very focused upon talking about the proper ends of labour and then they end up talking about means in ways that are deeply impractical deeply oblivious to the ways that things would actually be worked out and they can advocate counterproductive policies and all these sorts of things that really should be strongly resisted so we need to pay attention to the means as well and that's one area in which the sort of work that hughes and others are engaging in often can fall short the failure to truly prescribe prudent means for achieving the ends and many of the people that are described like to an extent people like gill and morris and ruskin all put forward some proposals and generally those proposals fell short of having the desired effects ruskin's actions were quite again a bit eccentric but they could maybe help to form individuals into a better form of desire better form of labour but they weren't going to make any deep social change likewise with morris morris would end up producing lots of things that would be bought by the rich but not actually achieve the sorts of social changes that he wanted we need to be far more shrewd far more prudent and for that we need to engage more with the thought of people who are acquainted with means people who are who consider those sorts of things and not use a discourse about ends in a way that presumes that the means follow easily from that rather there will need to be considerable reflection upon those subjects and that is one area where people who have been thinking about capitalism and socialism and the way that they work in reality for instance the critique of the communist model of not being able to distribute things well or something like von critique of bureaucracy these sorts of critiques are critiques primarily of means and as critiques of means they often have a lot going for them and they need to be taken seriously there are also a number of questionable claims about protestantism and i think i would like to see him engage more with the idea of works and grace and how that plays into this because you can talk about the significance of the notion of vocation and the this worldly way that that operates the way that it propels people into the world but often can lose the significance of contemplation as that which should orient our labour well and yet protestantism has a number of other things going for it and he brings out some of these at certain points for instance his emphasis upon grace towards the end he is an anglo-catholic so he does have protestant influences but he also has the somewhat lazy tendency of certain anglo-catholics to lay all sorts of blame at the feet of the reformation when really there's a lot more to be said was the work of people under a system that highlighted guilt one that was truly free did it truly encourage contemplation or did it end up creating a system where people's work they're engaging the work of the week and then press their nose up against the glass of something that they were not able to access on a sunday now i think we need to think seriously about that and much more could be said about the notion of property i would like to see him explore that a bit more particularly some of the themes that were raised within gill and ruskin there's a lot more that can be explored about that particularly the significance may be about the household or talking about the trade the way that the workers trade can be associated with his personhood his standing in his family fatherhood or place in the community all these sorts of things and seeing how these things work out within a broader system of labor i mean i find someone like um it looks very interesting on these sorts of issues where he talks about the relationship between an industrial capitalist society and the organic structures of gender within his book gender he talks about the way that the organic structures of society have been lost to a system ruled by technique and money and these sorts of structures around that have our natural anthropology and led us into a system which is alienated from our humanity in different respects and arguing for the significance of the household and other things like that that will once again ground our labor within our humanity and within the organic structure of human life and society most of all i would have liked to have seen a lot more engagement with the notion of sabbath because he engages with it at various points but sabbath is just such a central theme and it's one that needs to be thought about critically in the light of some of the themes that he's bringing out and i think this is also one that we can fruitfully start a conversation based on some of the things that he's exploring here this weakness in his approach is in part related to his failure to really get into depth in scripture like many books written on theology in this broader realm of philosophical reflection there just is not much scripture and the scripture that is used is often used in fairly questionable in idiosyncratic manners and so i would argue that the significance of sabbath could really be explored a lot more how does sabbath relate to the rest of the week how does our work relate to sabbath is sabbath something that gives an end to our work but is that something that can end up with sabbath being something that just pumps the blood of the work week around and ends up imitating the sabbath how can the sabbath be something that orders us towards contemplation relates our labor towards something that is has deep value and significance beyond the imminent realm of our lives and provides a principle of critique for it without at the same time being disconnected from it how can it provide for that bringing together of the transcendent and the imminent without the collapse of the transcendent into the imminent how can the sabbath not be reduced to another form of work where often the sort of a certain sort of sabbatarianism can create sabbath as another sort of work the same spirit that is identified with veber a very this worldly activist impulse where faithfulness is seen in a sort of asceticism that masters human engagement within the world and cuts ourselves off from these hedonistic practices it can be something that is bound up with the practice of the sabbath too the sabbath can become a sort of asceticism something that is more fast like than feast like and so how can we retain the festal character of the sabbath something that stands over against our labor but also gives us a position from which to judge it that i think is a very fruitful realm of reflection and one that will bring us into interesting questions of eschatology that sabbath is the day of the lord with a capital d as something that represents that coming day the coming judgment but it's also something into which our work is taken that we present the fruits of our labors that for instance bread and wine in which we know communion are things produced by human labor they don't occur naturally and that is significant we present our works on the basis of christ's prior sacrifice as well we present not just our bodies but the things that have been produced by our bodies and so a reflection upon this is one way in which i think we could move from hughes's discussion in a very fruitful direction anyway there's so much more i could say about this book i'd strongly recommend that you buy it i've summarized it at length but there's so much more within it if you have questions that you would like me to answer please leave them in my curious cat account if you would like to support these videos and future particularly future book reviews because these take longer to produce then please support my patreon account i'll leave the link for that below and hopefully have another book review next week at some point i've not decided what i'll review yet but we'll see and thank you very much for listening if you found it helpful please tell your friends and lord willing i'll be back again tomorrow god bless