Dartmouth has shed a lot of its WASPiness in recent decades. By my calculations (and by "calculations," I mean flipping through a couple yearbooks from the 1950s), the student body is roughly 50 percent less white and Anglo-Saxon than it was 60 years ago. Plus, we've severed all ties to the Protestant faith. All official ties anyway.
As I see it, Dartmouth has one big Protestant holdover, and that's the so-called Protestant work ethic. The first person to put a name to this phenomenon was the German sociologist Max Weber in 1905. Weber observed that in the centuries since the Protestant Revolution, Protestant countries had gained a competitive edge over Catholic countries in the developing capitalist economy of the 18th and 19th centuries. He hypothesized that this phenomenon was connected to the Protestant notion of a "calling in life" that is, that each person had a specific task to accomplish on earth.
Both Martin Luther and John Calvin arguably the two most influential shapers of Protestantism had emphasized the idea that one's work, no matter what it was, had moral significance and purpose that went beyond providing material needs. This led to an emphasis on the act of working itself, so that people felt morally obligated to work more and to work harder, regardless of whether the work increased their personal well-being.
Work may no longer be motivated by the same sense of spiritual purpose, but the drive to work hard for the sake of working hard is alive and well at Dartmouth. For example, Ethan Wang's recent column presupposes that work is subject to reward and the greater the work, the greater the reward. He writes, "An advanced science class with lab requires much more work than an introductory course for non-majors, and the amount of credits given should reflect this fact" ("Credit Where It's Due," Feb. 3). In this model, work is treated as something intrinsically valuable a commodity that can be exchanged for some other good, like course credit. Note that the result of the work is immaterial to Wang's argument. He doesn't argue that there is a societal demand for students' coursework that has to be met, or that his hours in the lab are producing something for which there is an external demand. According to Wang, work is valuable not because of what it produces, but simply because he has done it.
While the so-called "Protestant work ethic" may have helped jumpstart modern civilization, here on the other side of the Industrial Revolution, it might be a good idea to live (and work) a little more reflectively. Treating work as intrinsically good is irrational. The mere act of working doesn't benefit anyone or anything, though we often rationalize our drive to work by focusing on what our strenuous efforts will secure for us. When we don't distinguish work that will help us attain our goals from work that we undertake merely for the sake of feeling productive, we end up feeling guilty for not working even when it's unlikely to seriously hamper our performance. We also tend to conceive of work in quantitative rather than qualitative terms. We're more concerned about how much work a class is than to what degree it improves our minds or refines our sensibilities. We rarely take time to reflect on what we are producing and why.
Anxiety about working hard is a disorder, and over time, competition normativizes these individual work disorders into something positive. We begin to think about performance in moral terms. Because someone works harder, produces more, participates in more activities, leads more organizations, stacks up more achievements, he or she is seen not only as more productive but somehow as a "better" person if not in traditional moral categories than at least in the normative system established by academic competition.
When confronted with someone "better" in this sense, we tend to either feel worse about ourselves or compelled to step up our own game. The work ethic becomes an arms race. But maybe it's time here at Dartmouth to build our work ethic around reflection, contentment and cooperation. This would require us to scrutinize our motivations for working the way we do and question which endeavors are truly worthwhile. Hopefully this process of reflection will enable us to decide when and where hard work is necessary and how we can expect to benefit from doing it.
