The Walk Ethic
How distraction frees the mind
An idiom, once in daily usage, can be very hard to dislodge. Permanence lends it authority, rendering any challenge churlish, contrarian, and dismissible out of hand. Such is the case — wait for it — with the much regurgitated term work ethic. Recrimination to the slothful, the somnolent, the goofers-around, the procrastinators, and confreres similarly shy of conscious effort, work ethic is the mantra of those seen to combine success with moral rectitude, or at least who understand themselves to be en route to such Olympian heights. But what, I ask — and here I risk being churlish, contrarian, and dismissible out of hand — does work have to do with ethics? Josef Goebbels worked hard, didn’t he? Was he ethical? The English “Great Train Robbers” worked hard at planning their heist, seriously bludgeoning a railway guard in the course of its execution. Were they ethical? Kierkegaard, ever sustenance to the circumspect, wrote: Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy — to be a man who is brisk about his food and his work. Setting aside that first activity — even if digestion might in a figurative sense be what I’m talking about — the Scandinavian sage, for me, nails it.
But before we go further, let’s consider the meaning of the second word ethic first, or more usefully, what it’s come to mean. A while ago, the novelist Saul Bellow said that in America, ethics relate to money. Morality on the other hand, he maintained, relates to sex. In the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (what more addictive an app could you wish for?), the two terms are pretty much synonymous. Not so for Bellow and America… nor for what surely was the Puritan mindset from which such a distinction is derived, in which sex, anyway you look at it, think about it, do it (perish the thought), is about immorality, while making a buck, still more a chunk of change, at least when achieved without recourse to blatant criminality, enshrines the height of rectitude. The impoverished deserve everything they get, the dictum goes, while the one per cent revel not only in their dosh but in the satisfaction, in their eyes, of knowing their upper echelon comprises the very best people on the planet. In this sense then, the word work may indeed be seen to relate to the word ethic (not saying one hundred per cent of that one per cent actually work for their money). Work hard and you reap the rewards. Slouch around the apartment and you’ll end up out on the street. Is such an ethic ethical? Can an ethic then, be unethical? Wouldn’t it be an unethic? And wouldn’t the more appropriate term then become — work unethic?
Easy to purloin a word, once you’ve jettisoned the concept behind it. Who talks about ethics these days? What about integrity? Virtue? There’s a word hardly ever used, consigned to the retirement home for quaint notions long since obsolete. Now, one aspires not to virtue but to be a badass, to kick ass, kill it, crush it. Ethics be blowed. The metaphors, claiming reverse meaning, reveal matching meaning. And it’s not pretty, this paradigm of violence. Weren’t the Great Train Robbers badass. Didn’t they kill it, not to mention that unfortunate railway guard — at least until, years later, they were caught. (One of them, Bruce Reynolds the name, had been in class with my father at a South London elementary school — I’m happy to say Dad by contrast managed to avoid robbery on the tracks or indeed anywhere else.) So much for ethics and their singular, betraying palimpsest ethic.
Now for the first word of the dynamic duo — work. Hard work, we are given to believe, is an activity within the domain of the worthy. When I lived in London, my hometown, packed with the ghosts of ancestors from whom I’ve fled, I was one day negotiating the underpasses at Hyde Park Corner, a labyrinth of damp and tenebrous passageways that always seems to reek of something dubious, probably organic, maybe living, probably in the later stages of decay. You dreaded the catabasis of descent while longing for the resurrectional anabasis of ascent to follow, too many minutes later. On that day, as on most days, I passed one of the souls populating that oppressive maze, a young man sitting against the wall — its dripping tiles weeping for the residents who no longer could — legs crossed, palm outstretched, eyes imploring. I gave nothing. My bad. Although circumstances were lean, I surely could have afforded a couple of bob. But the individual who came after, something of a giant — in physique, if not intellect — rendered me a saint by comparison. “Get up off your bum and graft, you lazy bugger! Graft!” he spat, the artillery of his voice echoing off the discolored glaze running the length and breath of the subterranean warren. “You can’t say that! You don’t know his circumstances!”, I, turning, somewhat unwisely commented, noting after I had spoken the gargantuan dimensions of my by now potential nemesis. “Graft! You have to graft! I grafted! He needs to bloody well graft! Graft is what it’s all about!” the minotaur responded. Loathe to entertain the notion of furthering the interlocution, and deserting the unfortunate young man to the succeeding reprimands of his chastiser, I made my swift escape. I’ve never been able to scarper from his words though — not only that, but I’ve encountered them in one form or another over and again. At an institution I taught in, for example (which would presumably have offered a warm welcome to the man-monolith of the Hyde Park Corner warren), hard work was stated as a core value. A value? Graft a value? What about reflection? What about thought? Playfulness? Insight? What about consideration, standing back to assimilate, taking a pause, a nap, allowing the mind to function of its own accord? What about incorporating one’s pursuits into the fabric of one’s life, not siloing them to some cell of self-flagellation? It’s that Puritan thing. Graft as virtue. Work for the sake of work, the pain of it our redemption, the pointlessness the point. Not an ethic, not morality, not a function — but a fetish.
For how many years did Marcel Proust languish in bed? Ten? And how many volumes are there in In Search of Lost Time, one of the greatest, if not the greatest work of fiction of the 20th century? Seven? He may not have made a ton of money, but he was more productive than most of us who have ever slaved away for more than one day in an office or on the roads (I have, though not for long, I’ll admit) or anywhere else. Proust was perhaps an exemplifier of the mysterious process that another novelist V. S. Pritchett described as “productive indolence”. What would be the reaction, I wonder, were we to tell someone not that we have a work ethic but that we are assiduous in practicing such a depraved non-activity? The consternation. The horror. The contempt. We would render ourselves lost causes. Consigned to the garbage heap of lazybones good for nothing but castigation by the working ethical.
If one were to do absolutely nothing the entire time of course, the indolence might not prove productive so much as boring. It’s in doing nothing as an aspect of process that productiveness follows. So you sit your desk for an hour, take a break, make a coffee, and a thought hits you, the thought that’s been evading you, that never occurred to you with your nose to the grindstone, or if not that, your MacBook Pro. You drink your coffee and the implications of your new epiphany dawn on you. You sit at your desk noting your new revelations and this moves you on another hour or two. Time to take a walk now, on which new thoughts arise. It’s not about work so much as process, evolution, not graft so much as the fabric of your day. You allow your mind its multiplicity of functions and mischief. You allow it to breathe. You allow it to see. Admittedly there isn’t the holier-than-thou gratification you get from slaving away for hours on end. Worse, on the days in which you make negligible progress, — and they come with stubborn insistence — you feel inconsolable. Despair not. Try taking a shower. Luxuriate! You might find another flow concomitant with your comforting deluge. Craft, not graft, is the key, the craft of process, of your day. Hard work has been replaced by integrated work, distraction, alternative activity, and yes — bouts of indolence. The so-called ethic has been replaced by acceptance — process acceptance.
There is, on the other hand, indeed a place where work and ethics conjoin, and it’s become apparent under present circumstances in ways that haven’t been so noticeable to many before. Risking their own health and lives, frontline health workers choose to care for others among us. Not graft exactly, although it has to be hard, often unimaginably and unbearably so, so much as devotional endeavor, a work of humanity. It’s ethical in a sense I’ve never emulated. Not suggesting that anyone else who works in order to support themselves and their family meanwhile, rather than condemning all-concerned to the gutter, can afford to chill, to hang. Just observing that such labor — the activity practiced by most — might be thought of as work necessity, not work ethic. Yes, it affords dignity. Yes, it’s a right. Yes, I couldn’t survive myself, without applying myself to my tasks seven days a week. But this is something most of us — if we are not incapacitated in any way, and even if we are — do. It isn’t an ethic. It doesn’t, or shouldn’t be substituted for empathy, mutuality, kindness, for contemplation, or for realization.
Over 1600 words now, and the idiom remains. What can I say? Only to let it be known I do not myself have a work ethic. I am obsessive, lazy, dedicated, doubting, motivated, bewildered, driven, hesitant, energized, faltering, excited, saddened, extroverted, reclusive, questioning, knowing, shamed, proud, English, American, male in my soul, female in my soul, patient, short-tempered, busy, leisured, but I will not subscribe to that faux “value” — there’s too much going on.
Peter Markham November 2020
Author: What’s the Story? The Director Meets Their Screenplay. (Focal Press/Routledge) 9/20
