But I'm wondering whether this ethos is about to see a bit of a revival, in this new moment of crisis - and on whose terms it will revive.
In the Sunday Herald, DeBotton ties the work ethic to the European Enlightenment - and notes that the idea of the 'nobility of labour' emerged there at the same time as the idea of 'a marriage of love' (rather than of financial or procreative convenience):
We are the heirs of these two very ambitious beliefs: that you can be in love and married, and in a job and having a good time. It has become as impossible for us to think that you could be out of work and happy as it had once seemed impossible for Aristotle to think that you could be employed and human.
Peter Conrad in the Observer also cites the Greek disdain for work:
The 12 labours of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labour-saving gadgets - not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.
Much to chew on here, including this: Advocates of play have to grapple with the elitist, even aristocratic overtones of many self-consciously 'playful' or 'leisured' cultures of the past. This has the logic of evolution behind it. Play thrives for complex mammals in zones where scarcity or danger is held well distant from daily life. And in terms of adult play, beyond its compulsiveness in youth, it's only been aristocracies and elites who have had (or commanded to themselves) the resources to enable that. The servant class is usually presumed.
But I've always questioned myself: do contemporary play advocates sometimes substitute automation and networks for slaves and homesteads? I was noticing this morning, while re-reading my Play Ethic book, that so much of its argument depends on an assumption that Westerners already live in an environment of technology-and-science-enabled plenitude. The target of much of my critique is against the Puritan (and Enlightenment) 'work ethic': after William Blake, I claim in the book that the work ethic is a 'mind-forg'd manacle' which ties us to hierarchy and conformity in overly disciplinary organisations.
A 'play ethic' might allow us to think anew about our social order, if we presumed (as a player does) that our true 'human nature' loves self-expression, self-realisation and invention more than the dullness of routine. Applying a play ethic might help us to identify jobs, occupations and services that we don't really need to do, and imagine and forge new purposes and practices that better express our creative human nature.
All this presumes a society of excess resources - where productive technology gives us enough material surplus to be able to make those choices. This is one of the oldest "modern" stories. For 150 years, one strand of the labour movement has argued that productivity gains should result in shorter working weeks for constant wages. This fulfills Marx's idea (and socialism's idea generally) that humans come into their own when they move beyond the 'realm of necessity'. And what did the Left imagine those workers would do with their 'realm of freedom'? Sometimes that's a horrific answer. I prefer the Adolf Loos quote: "The difference between myself and a Bolshevik is that I want to turn everyone into an aristocrat whereas he wants to turn everyone into a proletarian."
Yet are we coming to the end an era where we blithely assume we have, literally, enough resources to play with? Not just in terms of the inevitable contractions and expansions of capitalism, but in terms of the looming horizon of ecological crisis?
I also noticed this morning that the index to the Play Ethic book doesn't contain the words 'green', 'ecology', 'environmental' or 'sustainability'. It's true that my focus – and this is a real blind-spot in the original book - has always been much more on technologies that enhance human autonomy, than on the planetary eco-system which grounds all these enterprises.
So should I get myself ready for the advent of a new "Green Work Ethic" (to match, as it were, the "Green New Deal"?) Not a befuddling morality that limits the political imagination of workers in terms of how they might benefit from technological productivity - but an environmentally-required austerity and self-restraint? One which ushers us all into an era of service (thank you, Obama) where we turn some of our energies away from excessive consumption, and towards civic participation?
As much as I enjoy the Obama phenomenon, some of us have been round this communitarian block before with New Labour in the UK. And in my head, some distant alarm bells are tolling.
To what extent would this new 'homo et femina ecologicus' be a cover for a kind of 'knuckle-down-and-shut-up' attitude among our governors and managers? You see glimmerings of this in the writings of dignity-of-work advocates like Richard Reeves, new director of Demos, who has been consistently disdainful of the ingrained British scepticism about work, the 'thank-God-it's-Friday' attitude (or my preference, POETS day - 'piss off early, tomorrow's Saturday').
His lifetime's ambition to conjure up dutiful and motivated souls for organisations could be about to get its biggest boost. What finer new ideology of work than the idea that we must act with a constant ecological mindfulness, in every dimension of our productive activity?
I'm not remotely saying that there's no link between a play ethic and environmental imperatives. Look at sites like WorldChanging, or listen to thinkers like Jamais Cascio, William MacDonough or Bruce Sterling, and you can easily see that climate change invites huge leaps of innovation, imagination and enterprise.
I'm also reminded of Michel Bauwens' axiom that "we regard what is truly scarce as plentiful [nature], and what is truly plentiful as scarce [information]". The lifestyle of interaction, creation and co-creation that Net culture engenders – where sharing material, or generating it in a pro-am way, or commemorating experience, is as compelling as the acquisition of new commodities – could indeed be our "new plenty".
And to that extent, the diversive explorations of play – in which the messy, the open-ended and the experimental wins over the finished, the sleek and the contained – might be the best mind-set for a world society facing much more limited physical-material options. We may need to learn how to "lego" with the materials at hand, than pine endlessly for the next replete and self-contained designer object.
Play might also revive as the decline of the centrality of work-and-consumption turns us towards relationships and family life, in which playfulness – among and between the generations – is surely something we all value.
But in general, whenever I hear paens to the meaning of work in our daily press, I reach for my complexifier (don't you have one?). Though the current upheaval will be brutal, like many I'm hoping we emerge with a new set of progressive values, rather than a resurgence of old conservatisms. I love Peter Conrad's closing quote, and I'll happily leave the last word to him:
For too long, we have been enslaved to an economy that exists to churn out superfluous wares and calls us redundant if we don't contribute to its self-defeating cycle of production and consumption, binge and bust. Marx told workers that they had nothing to lose but their chains. All that consumers have to lose is their artificially bloated appetites. The present emergency is our chance to think again about the significance of work and its centrality to our lives. Man the worker was supposed to be perfecting a world left unfinished and unfurnished by God the creator; instead, our industrial rapacity has come close to destroying that world. This alone is reason enough to down tools, whether we want to or not.
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