The Gamer Ethos?

Virtue, Work, and Play

Jennifer Baker

Do we live to work? Or do we only work to live? We have debated this issue since Plato, varying what counts as work and what counts as living. Still no consensus has emerged. Parents continue to rehearse Ben Franklin's public philosophy to their children, repeating cheery bromides about early birds and worms. Yet consider that if there is a generally better-regarded American figure than Ben Franklin, it might be Huck Finn, who, as Michael Oriard tells us, stands "outside the dominant emphasis of American culture but in tune with a counter-cultural rejection of work as men's purpose." And others we admire have knocked the very idea of a Ben Franklin. "Franklin's man is a frugal, inoffensive, thrifty citizen, but savors of nothing heroic," wrote Emerson. D. H. Lawrence's most biting scorn is leveled against Franklin, as a man's soul is not in his "purse or his pocketbook." Yet economic historian Deirdre McCloskey has recently argued that without the Franklinian ethos, we would not have experienced the vast increases in general welfare we have. She wants to ask: what is there to knock?

The degree of disagreement is surely a sign of how confounding the issues of work and life continue to be. Those who sing the praises of a life organized around work are still glad that our work lives have improved, that we put in fewer hours and have more leisure than could be imagined in earlier years, before the "era of five-day weeks, paid holidays for everybody," and what an editorial writer in 1952 called "the recent abatement of extreme poverty." And the great defenders of leisure, staunch advocates for the liberal arts, meditative religious theorists on the Sabbath? They still compliment leisure on how it revives us for work. It is not that we lack a set of decent definitions of work, leisure, and play. We have been given those through the years. In this chapter I would like to suggest that what we lack are the underlying accounts that are necessary for usefully applying these definitions to the vexing issue of balancing work and life. We need reasonable, modern, testable accounts of not just work, leisure, and play, but also of the good life (including an idea of what we should contribute to others). Even religions are shy on this last issue. Yet without a standard for a good life, we are certain to be dumbfounded by rapid changes in the role that work plays in our lives. Clearly, in the age of globalization these changes are already afoot.

I. THE TEST CASE

In the United States we are seeing unprecedented numbers of young men opting out of the work force. We can consider it an "opting out" because these men are not disabled or making use of direct social services. They report not being in school or planning to attend it. We are experiencing very low levels of unemployment as well. Yet in studies on our use of time, young men without college educations are reporting unprecedented levels of what economists call "under-employment" or "nonparticipation." When asked "How many weeks did you work last year?" An astounding 18 percent of men ages twenty-one to thirty answered "zero." This percentage has more than doubled since 2000, when it was just 8 percent of similarly positioned men. So its growth predated and outlasted the recession. Not only are nearly a fifth of young men living what we might call idle lives, this trend is growing. Do we know why?

The White House Council of Economic Advisors, in its report "The Long-Term Decline in Prime Age Male Labor Force Participation," gives us some explanation. They write, "The largest difference in how men in and out of the labor force spend their time is in time spent on leisure activities — socializing, relaxing and leisure, with nonparticipating men spending almost twice as much time on these activities than those prime-age men overall, and more than twice as much time watching television." The Council concludes that "these patterns suggest that men are, on average, not dropping out of the labor force to specialize in home production or to invest in skills to improve their future labor market opportunities." It seems that a large swath of our young men have become rather full-time consumers of media, especially video games and online gaming.

An economist, of course, will be interested in the impact this trend might have on the rest of us. And she will assume that, if there really are no unrecognized bars to employment, these men are making a choice that must be in some way rational, given their preferences. She would suggest that these young men must be happier living (we presume) at home with their parents. The task of an economist would be to figure out what it is about work life that is unappealing. Perhaps work life was always engaged in as a form of providing for a family, and these young men are not having children and so lack that inspiration, for example.

Anyone with more ethical inclinations will want to weigh in more generally. Of course, we want to do this with caution. In the early twentieth century, editorialists were panicked about the "new leisure" of the young. The ability for teenagers to hang out in public, with no obvious need to be employed, was considered a threat to social order. It is hard to relate to those critics today (and easier, perhaps, to regard full-time gamers with wonder rather than fear). Yet why wouldn't we want to think about the type of life we lead if we avoid paid work and lean on family for financial support? Aristotle warned us of "slack lives"; Thomas Aquinas worried over the vice of acedia or "listlessness." Are underemployed young men meeting these standards? Or are they merely "living the dream" of life without work? Are they engaging in the type of leisure that Seneca describes as letting us "maintain what pleases us once and for all, where no one interrupts," where life can "go forward with one even steady tenor"?

I will consider our ability to provide some answers with the help of virtue ethics. Most obviously, these young men run afoul of our current "work ethic" in that they do not participate in productive activities typically associated with the labor market. I look to Max Weber's account of the work ethic, modifying it to provide a realistic account of what many of us still believe to be true about work. I then contrast this work ethic to a "gamer's ethic" like that associated with young men who are opting out of work, relying on virtue theory to evaluate both. Finally, I conclude with some observations that are most characteristic of traditional virtue ethics: ethics can only recommend lives lived for the sake of virtue, not for the sake of work, nor leisure, nor some proper balance of the two. I hope I am able to encourage the use of virtue ethics to provide a framework for evaluating the range of views we encounter when it comes to the role work ought to play in our lives. These views, whatever one's take on Poor Richard, may have more in common than we have been led to believe.

II. THE WORK ETHIC

The economist Virgil Storr argues that of five major theses maintained by Max Weber in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, only one turned out to be accurate: capitalism can take many forms. Weber's casual explanation of capitalism, which relies on his diagnosis and set of predictions about what he called our "work ethic," cannot be considered plausible. For example, one of the ways in which Weber has been disputed is that capitalism is now said to have arisen in France, and French Catholics could not have partaken in the "work ethic" as Weber so describes it. While I am mindful of this, I also readily acknowledge that we cannot extract his more general account from his presentation of the "work ethic." As he puts it:

The idea of duty in one's calling prowls about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious beliefs. Where the fulfillment of the calling cannot directly be related to the highest spiritual and cultural values, or when, on the other hand, it need not be felt simply as economic compulsion, the individual generally abandons the attempt to justify it at all. In the field of its highest development, in the United States, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its religious and ethical meaning, tends to become associated with purely mundane passions, which often actually give it the character of sport. ... No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the last stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: "Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved."

Weber's concern was that many of us had inherited the "spirit of capitalism" through the influence of the nonreligious content of ascetic Protestantism. For example, Ben Franklin was not an ascetic Protestant, yet he exemplified the influence of their work ethic. To a believer, sense can be made of the idea that we have a duty and calling to work. The idea of being committed to a job beyond what it pays is due to God's observation of your effort. The calling to do the work you have found, if you are Presbyterian, comes from God.

According to Weber, ascetic Protestantism can be described by the following tenets, some of which are certainly influential in the lives of nonreligious as well.

1. It turns with "all its force against one thing: the spontaneous enjoyment of life and all it had to offer."

2. "The idea of a man's duty to his possessions to which he subordinates himself as an obedient steward, or even as an acquisitive machine, bears with chilling weight on his life."

3. A preference for "sober simplicity, they set the clean and solid comfort of the middle-class home as an ideal."

4. A compulsion to save.

5. The recognition that labor is an approved aesthetic technique, a way of purifying one's intentions and even soul.

6. The "comforting assurance that the unequal distribution of the goods of this world was a special dispensation of Divine Providence, which in these differences, as in particular grace, pursued secret ends unknown to men."

Even when borrowed by the nonbeliever, this ethos encourages some behavior that we are comfortable considering ethical. The condemnation of "dishonesty and impulsive avarice" is one example. The recognition of a sort of moral equality in all occupations, as long as the work is done honestly and well, grants a kind of democratic respect for others is another such example. Yet its other influences seem more pernicious, or more difficult to promote as salutary. What is the basis for a suspicion of "spontaneous enjoyment of life" without there being religious doctrine behind it? Why have a "duty" to our possessions? Is it rational to choose to save for consumer items that might limit our freedom? Finally, a measure of political quietism will result from believing that "the unequal distribution of the goods of this world" was considered to be efficacious for reasons mere humans could not access. Once we have internalized the "ghosts of dead religious beliefs," we live lives we can explain and work for reasons we cannot easily muster. When we do not know why we are working so hard, making money will merely become "like a sport" with no actual rationale. He describes us as being trapped by the importance we attribute to materialistic things, and unable to get out from under the idea that material possessions define our worth. In other words, we work for the sake of paying for an expensive car and big house — things that are not really enjoyable and that (even if they were) we do not have time to enjoy, because we are always working.

Moreover, the influence of this ethos extends to how others regard us. Weber tells us that "the Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so" (to do our work as if it were a calling). We are still expected to be reliable, honest, and punctual for our bosses, even though we might not think this can be related to the glory of God. When we are asked why we are reliable, honest, and punctual in our business jobs, we will not have any good explanation. This is what Weber writes is "seen from the view-point of personal happiness" so "irrational about this sort of life, where a man exists for the sake of his business, instead of the reverse."

Consider Sinclair Lewis's bestseller Babbitt (1922). He could not have written a more apt representation of this ethos. George Babbitt, one of the more prosperous citizens of a small Midwestern city, never questioned what merited his station. He is an aesthete of a sort, a middle-class sort, and he is conscious of what he has decided to wear throughout his day. Lewis portrays him as seeking nothing other than to fit in with those who are in the business establishment (not happiness, not rebellion, not rest). As Lewis writes, "his motor car was poetry and tragedy, love and heroism. The office was his pirate ship but the car his perilous excursion ashore." And then, as a talent like Lewis can, the metaphors end, and the car truly becomes the focus.

Among the tremendous crises of each day none was more dramatic than starting the engine. It was slow on cold mornings; there was the long, anxious whirr of the starter; and sometimes he had to drip ether into the cocks of the cylinders, which was so very interesting that at lunch he would chronicle it drop by drop, and orally calculate how much each drop had cost him.

Further parallels with Weber's diagnosis include that "Babbitt admitted that he beheld his way of life as incredibly mechanical. Mechanical business, a brisk selling of badly built houses. Mechanical religion, a dry hard church shut off from the real life on the streets. Mechanical golf and dinner parties and bridge and conversation. Mechanical friendships, back-slapping and jocular, never daring to essay the test of quietness." Lewis is not shy about making the tribute to Weber's account explicit. He writes

Just as he was an Elk, a Booster, and a member of the chamber of Commerce, just as the priests of the Presbyterian Church determined his every religious belief ... so did the national advertisers fix the surface of his life, fix what he believed to be his individuality. These standard advertised wares — toothpastes, socks, tires, cameras, instantaneous hot water heaters — were his symbols and proofs of excellence; at first the signs, and then the substitution for joy and passion and wisdom.

H. L. Mencken, a vocal fan of Lewis's Babbitt as a sharp rebuke to what he saw as a growing trend, had this to say about those afflicted with "Babbitry": "It is not what he feels and aspires that moves him primarily; it is what the folks about him will think of him. His politics is communal politics, mob politics, herd politics; his religion is a public rite wholly without subjective significance." However, it is easy to accuse views unlike your own (or unlike your perception of your own) of being harmful and lacking value. In Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World (2016), McCloskey points out that elites have always recoiled at the choices of those who work.

What do defenders of the work ethic have to say? McCloskey rejects Weber's account, or at least his general description of capitalism as a matter of endless and mindless accumulation for the sake of conformity. She emphasizes the great creativity involved in living what she calls a bourgeois life. The middle-class commitments decried by Weber, Lewis, and Mencken would never have worked, she explains, to bring about the innovations that continue to occur in our market system. The massive, thirty-fold change in general affluence has resulted in more happiness than could have ever been brought about in any other way. In her view, Ben Franklin is no villain but a person par excellence: an exciting, ribald, friendly, retired-from-business-atfortythree scientist and philosopher. He was innovative and full-of-life as anyone we can name in history. He may even have been joking with much of the Poor Richard business. Weber could not discern this with his "humorlessness and literal" reading of Franklin's Autobiography. McCloskey would also want us to put the character of Babbitt in perspective. Though he could not be called a hero, she would want to point out that, among our options, what she calls the bourgeois virtues are not the worst.