In 1726, 20-year-old Benjamin Franklin was finally sailing back to Philadelphia after being stranded in London for two years. His hopes for establishing a business enterprise were dashed when the loan he was expecting failed to come through.
The American founders considered industry a republican virtue because it enables a person to attain economic independence, a preliminary condition for practicing self-government. A nation of debtors—like a fiefdom of serfs—can’t be free.
“Preserve your freedom,” he wrote, “and maintain your independency: be industrious and free; be frugal and free.”
The virtue of industry includes both physical exertion—a willingness to work—and spirited stick-to-itiveness—a capacity to sustain concentration. The 21st century has brought particular challenges to both of these components of the virtue of industry.
The Threat of Distraction
Effort and focus have never been easy to sustain, but in a world where we use computers and smartphones for both work and amusement, it is especially difficult. The line between leisure and labor is often easily blurred.Dissolution of Inducements to Industry
For the past several decades, we’ve swallowed the idea that the pursuit of happiness now requires and thus entitles everyone to attain a college degree and get a job somewhere on the good side of Easy Street. We forgot that Easy Street still needs street-sweepers and road repairmen.We’ve taken on back-breaking levels of debt to achieve this particular pursuit of happiness, as though that plan were a guaranteed “project of growing suddenly rich.” We’ve abandoned Franklin’s advice and accepted its antithesis: We eagerly put on the chain of debt in order to avoid a job that might require we actually work hard.
“The day you passed that act,” he wrote, “you took away from before their eyes the greatest of all inducements to industry, frugality, and sobriety, by giving them a dependence on somewhat else. ... You offered a premium for the encouragement of idleness, and you should not now wonder that it has had its effect in the increase of poverty.”
First, the tech giants of Silicon Valley have helped encourage innovation over imitation, such that fewer young people are interested in mastering one of the old trades, even though those skills are just as necessary for modern life as they ever were.
Second, the fashion purveyors of Madison Avenue have tried to sell an image of the good life as one in which one works as little as possible and all work is undesirable.
Third, the culture architects of Hollywood have done their level best to denigrate blue-collar workers in films and on TV.
Altogether, these sources of influence have formed society’s perception of working-class jobs as undesirable and unrespectable. “We’ve declared war on work as a society,” Rowe concluded.
I had the privilege of apprenticing for three years in a small cabinet shop in the Bronx under the guidance of a master woodworker. He was to me a sage, who possessed knowledge of an ancient art that could only be learned through hands calloused by thousands of hours of careful labor in a dusty woodshop. Such men deserve our respect, all the more since their skills are learned through their own exercise of industry.
To practice self-government, we must first free ourselves from our financial chains by applying ourselves industriously to whatever business we take in hand. Slaves aren’t free to participate in the conversation about the common good; they are free only to vote for food to fill their starving bellies.
As Franklin advised, “Be industrious and free; be frugal and free.”
