TOIL AND TROUBLE

Published in The Idler, Issue 23 June-July 1998; what follows is a shortened version. The full article is available for

download here.

It was the 19th-century Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who said that the more insane and irrational a proposition

the more faith is required to believe it, and the more effort required to prop up that belief. He was, as the forerunner of

existentialist philosophy in an era dominated by the established church, referring to the Christian doctrine. But we might

make a similar critique today of the Labour government's ideology of work.

The parallel with religion is worth remembering. I am surely not the only person to recognise in the zeal with which Blair

intones the virtues of work, the rhetorical intensity of the lay preacher. This should be no surprise. According to Dod's

Guide to the New House of Commons several of the authors of the Labour government's forced work policy are themselves

the products of strongly religious families. Gordon Brown's father was a minister of the Church of Scotland, an institution

strongly influenced by the anti-pleasure doctrines of Calvin. The novelist Sir Walter Scott tells a story of a meal of plain

soup Calvin enjoyed with his father. When he commented that the soup tasted good his father, a staunch Calvinist, threw

some cold water into it lest he should be tempted to enjoy some pleasure of the flesh!

According to the 17th Century theologians, to question one's position in life, particularly one's work-station, was to

question God's plan, and hence blasphemous. This was the ideological justification for the creation of disciplined workers,

but the weapon that was used to achieve it was fear. Success in one's allotted station was taken as a sign of being favoured

by God, and so increased one's likelihood of finding a place in heaven after death. People's energy and time was to be

stolen here on earth in return for a promise of eternal life. No wonder Thomas Paine wrote that: 

"Of all the tyrannies that affect mankind, tyranny in religion is the worst; every other tyranny is limited to the world we

live in; but this attempts to stride beyond the grave and seeks to pursue us into eternity."

As I sit patiently at my postmodernised "work-station", watching my life tick away on the office clock, I think venomously

of this crusade for jobs. And I wonder what sort of Golden Jerusalem Labour has in mind for us all.