Of course, you probably will say no, until I change the question to “ready for the holidays?” Back in August, Mike Metzger wrote an insightful blog post on this very point…that in the past two decades, Americans have shifted in their values. He references Charles Murray who noted that the Founders had four virtues, one of which was industriousness. We’ve lost that.
Of course, if you’ve been reading along with me for a while, you know that I have been hammering this point for a while. After my 2014 mission trip to Mexico, I really saw it more clearly that our nation has become addicted to ease and to luxury. I was actually more harsh then saying we had a disease…the disease of gluttony. We do not know how to be content with what we have, and our shift to being a consumer nation (which started first in the 1920s, but really hit high gear in the 1950s) has ruined us to the point that even people who make over $200,000 will claim to NOT BE RICH.
How this happened to us is that we also lost another of the founder’s virtues—faith or connection to Christianity. It is this thing, this Christianity, that was the counterbalance to our capitalism which is where our consumerism comes from…the lust for more and more.
I see this, as do many educators, in our students. No longer are the majority of our students interested in work that is important or gives them a sense of accomplishment…instead, a majority of students simply want to have a job that produces high wages with shorter and shorter working hours. I know this as I watch more and more students blanche in the face of my audacity to expect them to read and write, to put in any effort to the work.
Metzger reports it this way:
In Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010, Charles Murray recites the founding fathers’ four virtues (industriousness, honesty, marriage, and religion). They’re in steep decline, however, especially over the last 10 years. Industriousness was a “bone-deep American assumption that life is to be spent getting ahead through hard work, making a better life for oneself and one’s children.” That’s less the case today.
Beginning in 1973, General Social Survey researchers asked a large sampling of workers to look at a card and tell them which one thing on a list you would most prefer in a job. The card had five choices: High income; No danger of being fired; Chances for advancement; Working hours are short—lots of free time; Work that’s important and gives a feeling of accomplishment. Between 1973 and 1994, prime-age white workers’ first choice was always work that “gives a feeling of accomplishment.” The two least-chosen first choices were always short hours and no danger of being fired. Because of this boring consistency, the GSS dropped the survey for the next 12 years.
In 2006, the survey was resurrected. The results are startling. As millennials join the workforce, US workers indicate less interest in meaningful work and more interest in secure jobs with short working hours. Maybe it’s a reaction to the Great Recession, but America is becoming European. Americans now seek escape from work.
This is one reason why I keep hammering the point that our problem is a spiritual one, an issue of morals and virtues. We were founded with core virtues or values. We’ve abandoned most of them. We cannot continue to believe that we can maintain whatever level of excellence the country has achieved, or even return to whatever level that was, without at least going back to the very values or mores that were crucial to the start of the excellence in the first place.
If we don’t, look for us to forget even more that a holiday means holy day, and the idea of a holy day connects first to the Sabbath, or to rest. God never meant rest to mean that work was simply evil or something to be avoided or escaped. Our jobs are not chores or evils to be endured; instead, as a Christian, I work as unto the Lord and that work, whatever it may be (and I have been in elevated places such as speaking to thousands and I have worked in humbling places such as digging ditches and sweeping the homes of rich people)…that work is holy work. Work I enjoy…and then I get to have a holy day of rest before excitedly returning yet again to the work.