Since I’m a lazy gal who’s not so keen on work in general, Curtis White’s ideas instantly beckon me into contemplation. Arguing that work, as we know it, devalues humanity, Curtis writes in “The Ecology of Work,” published in Orion magazine (I briefly wrote about the first part of Curtis’ essay, “The Idols of Environmentalism,” here):

Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble (“supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices”) when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons.

Curtis’ rhetoric gets rather heavy-handed at times, but his overall argument — that we need to abandon capitalism as an organizing principle for our society — is certainly one that strikes a chord with me. Curtis argues that capitalism can’t be greened because “It’s not in its nature to think nature.”

Instead of trying to reform capitalism, we need to replace it, according to Curtis. Quoting Marx, Curtis argues that people won’t knowingly hurt nature, but “The division of labor not only has the consequence of making labor maximally productive, it also hides from workers the real consequences of their work.”

So what to do? This is the part where Curtis’ arguments get murky and nebulous, because he calls for “spirit,” and goes into a rather odd, anti-science-type rant. WTF is spirit? That’s unclear, but Curtis does give some ideas of what he’d like to see:

We need to insist on work that is not destructive, that deepens the worker, that encourages her creativity…. It means leaving a culture based on the idea of success as the accumulation of wealth-as-money. In its place we need a culture that understands success as life.

That sounds lovely. Really, it does. And I’d even argue that a growing number of people are opting out of the “wealth = success” mentality in the pursuit of the happiness that comes from relationships, community, etc.

But what Curtis doesn’t address is the more pragmatic issue, which is: I still need to pay rent somehow. That, in general, means taking on a job, usually more to get a paycheck than to fulfill one’s soul.

Certainly, we could work to shift the balance further toward the soul and a little away from a monomaniacal pursuit of a bigger paycheck. We could opt for a humble salary from, say, Heal the Bay, instead of making a killing at Exxon.

But rebalancing is just that — a rebalancing, NOT a complete undoing, of capitalism. We’re all aware of the failed social experiments of communism-in-practice (vs. in theory), even while an increasing number of us would like to divorce ourselves from capitalism-in-practice today.

Which — to take things back to a personal note — still makes me feel that even in Curtis’ world, I’ll still experience alienation from the work I’ll have to do to make money, though that alienation’s likely to be less severe than what I might feel if I bought into corporate capitalism wholesale. I won’t be able to escape capitalism, though I’ll opt out of its worst tendencies.

And of course at this point, I start feeling very guilty about the fact that I have the time and leisure to contemplate what sort of work might alienate me less. The vast majority of the people in the world, it seems, don’t have this luxury; they take what work they can get, cuz they’re starving and they’ve got no other options. Preoccupation with the “meaning of life” or the “meaning of work” becomes, in many ways, a very bourgeois pasttime.

Off to do more bourgeois thinking.

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