The New Economics: Good Works - religious labour

I suggested two posts ago that I should look at the religious ideas of work that run concurrent with the political ones expressed.

Work has a bad start in the West. It is a punishment for the sin of Adam and Eve. Man once at leisure in the garden of Eden is banished to work the rest of his days in the fields. To me this is a myth that captures the unpleasant change in life that the farming revolution brought about. As Jesus says look how God feeds the birds. Looking at nature mankind would not have seen many animals working. Perhaps the bees and the birds making nests, but for the most part animals forage from a table laid by God. This is who paleolithic man would have lived, foraging from the bounty of nature. Since then man began the back breaking job of farming. This lifestyle afforded him more calories than his hunter-gatherer lifestyle and populations grew, but the diet was much less varied and more unhealthy. And the worst part was defending the farms. It was in this period where the ideas of property began. What has been possession for the paleolithic, like the San people in my first blog of this New Economics series, became property.

Surpluses were created and stored, tools were amassed, land was distributed. It was the age of accounting, the advent of mathematics and the start of real trade. And it was the age when war began. Before farming there was no point in war. What you wanted was give by God (most probably something like Mother Nature) why fight your neighbour? After farming began and people started to work to create produce, then the easiest way to get produce started to become theft and war. Laziness starts to enter the picture. Why work a field yourself when you can capture a slave to do it for you? This simple idea comes all the way up to the modern age where if we can afford it we use employment to get people to work for us rather than do it our self. Although it is also true that there is a mutuality here because people who do not have land, may willingly work as a means of getting food. As populations grew and land became scare ownership became the means by which society was ordered, with those with land allowing those without land to work for them. But if such people were not forth coming warfare and slavery was the other option. We can imagine that the neolithic farming world transitioned extremely quickly from the original economics to the "old" economics we have today.

One part of this I like to speculate was the creation of public/private realms of society. In Japanese this is well codified as Uchi and Soto. With ownership came the private world. The family retreated into the domestic realm at the heart of the property. Outside the private property was the public realm of everything that was not owned. This was split into those things owned by others and then the natural world. It was this division more than anything some 6000 years ago that set the mindset for global destruction. The respect for the Mother than the San people had, lost now to a sense that Nature was just what hadn't get been tamed and brought under ownership. The New Economics needs to find way to resolve the conflict between public/private and natural. Just as it needs to resolve the conflict between those that own and those that do not own.

Some idea from the Paleolithic remain but seem oddly out of place in the modern world. One such idea is that everything was created by God and so belongs to God. This is present both in the Bible and in Hindu thinking and presumably throughout the world. When the San people are saying thank you for the gift of a Kudu they are aware that they are taking it from the world that was made by hands other than their own. It is a miraculous gift from who knows where, that they must be sure they are taking rightfully and which has been given before they take it. How can we reconcile such an ancient view with the Neolithic view that with my hands I have worked and created this harvest.

And so comes about the idea of "work" that is given as a sacrifice for God. Yes I have made this harvest, but with your willing and with these hands that were given to me by nature. I therefore offer this harvest back to God before I myself take from it. Even today many around the world still say a grace before they eat in common with the nomadic tribes people like the San in order to remember the gift the world has granted them in having food to eat.

I have not researched in much depth and there is a huge amount more to say here. A key feature of what we do is whether it is "good". This has many meanings. A good musician is a different use of the word compared with a good Samaritan. However at root it is the same word: one might call it skillful. In Hebrew the opposite is Sin meaning of an archer that they missed the mark. Likewise in Buddhism the word is Kusala meaning unskillful. Good works possibly derives from a view of work as a craft. This predates the neolithic obviously as craft was needed as much then as after. A good maker of arrows or bows would be well sort after. The cost of bad works was debt. The balance of good and bad works became the measure of how our life was and what after life we could expect. Clearly this idea arose around the neolithic as property developed. Throughout Asia ones good and bad deeds became accounted in a ledger in heaven. Even in Buddhism with its empty metaphysics the idea of karma is central to the cause and effect. The impact of what we do creates our future. And where our life is bad we look to past bad actions. I suppose this well precedes the neolithic. If the San people suddenly found themselves in a drought they would consider that their rituals of thanks had not been properly performed. It is not fanciful. The world is potentially facing the biggest drought in its history because mankind has not been performing his rituals properly. This sense is very much the cause of this outpouring of hurried blog posts.

Through its relationship with sacrifice and offering to God "work" has a religious meaning. In the Protestant Era after the renaissance in Europe Good Works became important as a means of repentance and correcting ones relationship with God. By offering hard labour we might purify our souls. Obviously this idea existed before as labour for penance, pilgrimages and various other labours and mortifications have always been done to purify the soul. The Good Christian could improve his relationship with God through sacrificial labour.

Now Nietzschean sceptics will say that this is perfect slave consciousness. The ruling classes enjoying the fruits of slave labour would welcome a way of thinking in the slaves that glorified such subservient labour. Such a view would also say that Individual Ego is the true state of Man and the idea that our labour belongs to God is just part of slave mentality. You own what you make for Nietzsche, or better if you have the power steal someone elses.

I won't pursue this any further today. But how work and production have changed meaning over time from a curse, to a means of being closer to God. The New Economics will have to unravel this!