Why Must Man Work?

Last year, in the office of the Detroit-based Guadalupe Workers, I was talking to an abortion-minded woman, trying to redirect her thoughts about the appointment she had for the following week. She kept mentioning the necessity of being a “productive” person, saying that as long as she was encumbered by several children, and soon a newborn child, she would never be “productive.” Eventually, I launched into my standard speech about how the value of human life is not connected to human productivity, pointing out that since productivity is different for each individual, and the valued objects of production vary from era to era, human value consequently varies from person to person and age to age. Her boyfriend, nodding his head vigorously, said, “I get you, man.” She, though, appeared a little lost, as though she had just encountered something completely new and unexpected. As is true to some extent for all of us, a mechanistic mode of thought had infected not only her own sense of self-worth but her sense of all human value.

Hers is not the only case of what I call value despair. I encounter it many times each week. It manifests in a form of depression, in a mother’s sense that she can’t contribute anything to society, that therefore she’s worthless, and her child, too, is worthless. So off she goes to the abortion clinic.

You wouldn’t think the dry stuff in economics textbooks is connected to the personal tragedies I hear every week. Yet these mothers have somehow absorbed the notion that life is about output, and the more significant the output, the more significant the life. They have heard clichés about “making something of yourself”; they have heard that with a lot of hard work, they can “be somebody.” Or maybe they have simply driven past The Home Depot, where “doers get more done.” It is a vain effort, certainly, to search the historical record to try to identify any specific thing as the cause for this widespread belief. However, we may point to particular influences on the output mode of thought that now infects so many lost souls.

The young lady’s anxiety about not being a productive person shadows 18th-century English economist Thomas Malthus’s emphasis on production and survival. The extent to which Malthus stressed the importance of human production is obvious in his comments about “nonproductive” human endeavor. The lacemaker “will have added nothing to the gross produce of the land,” he wrote in An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), but has consumed a “portion of this gross produce” and has merely “left a bit of lace in return.” Work, in Malthus’s mind, is merely a means to get food; therefore, any work that doesn’t contribute to the societal food supply is worthless. A person’s work “does not perfect him,” Malthus said of the commoner. “Rather, it is an unpleasant necessity as the only way to obtain the means of life.”