What we've been up to

Web Features: We're thinking about work again this week—what it's for and how it's abused to the detriment of ourselves and the world. IASC senior fellow and Baylor University honors professor Alan Jacobs has a response to Jonathan Malesic's recent New York Times op-ed on why overloading our jobs with meaning and insisting that we always be passionate about our work can lead to burnout, among other things. Jacobs also considers a recent New Yorker piece by Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor, who lauds the social transformations wrought by productivity—which is one word Jacobs has a few questions about:

"The question begged here is, clearly, increased productivity of what? How is it possible to consider productivity as either a good or bad thing unless you know what is being produced?"

In "The Problem of Productivity and the Good Work of Love," Jacobs suggests that a more fundamental inquiry into work—antecedent to the problem of setting boundaries and more significant than the imperative of maximizing productivity—pertains to this question: "What is work for?"

"It seems to me that most of us have a stronger and clearer sense of what we ought not be doing in our work than of what we ought to do. When I attempt to articulate a vision of good work that does the double job of setting limits and envisioning hope, I find myself beginning with the phrase itself: 'good work.' It's a phrase that Wendell Berry taught me to use, and while his best articulations of it arise from a Christian context, I think his core commitments are transferable to other contexts as well. I think his language helps us avoid Newport's narrow and numbing productivity talk, and also begin to flesh out some of the necessary virtues that Malesic points to."

While it's still out from the paywall, read from our latest issue:

"Too Many Doctors in the House" by Ronald W. Dworkin.

Ronald Aronson reviews The Upswing by Robert D. Putnam with Shaylyn Romney Garrett.

"Performative" by Wilfred M. McClay.

Kyle Edward Williams reviews The Battle of the Classics by Eric Adler and Permanent Crisis by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon.

"A Different Sense of Privilege" by Steve Lagerfeld.

Charlie Tyson reviews The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter.

"The Problem of Perishable Progress" by Stuart Whatley and Nicholas Agar.

Shamus Khan on the limits and burdens of cultural capital.

"Is There a Place for Utopia?" by S.D. Chrostowska.

Mark Dunbar takes on the problem of identity tethering in our symbolic politics.

"Democracy's Thorn: The Mob and the Voice of the People" by Nancy Isenberg.

Becca Rothfeld reviews The Subversive Simone Weil by Robert Zaretsky.

"The Endless Pursuit of Better" by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett.

Philip S. Gorski on the transformation of culture wars into culture clashes.

Jackson Arn reviews The Free World by Louis Menand.

Recommended Reading

From the archives: Once more, on work. From our spring 2016 issue on the precarious economy, Philip Lorish, former IASC doctoral fellow and scholar of religion, writes about the transformation of working life wrought by the entrepreneurial ambitions of Silicon Valley. All too often, behind the rhetoric of making the world a better place, the actual businesses and strategies that Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, et al. have developed undermine the humanity of workers. As Lorish writes in "Vocation in the Valley," tech barons have helped to create an entrepreneurial culture that entices people to accept precarious conditions in exchange for the fleeting promise of wealth and—on a qualitatively grander note—technological progress itself.

"In these Silicon Valley communities, the fidelity of workers to the corporation was always nested within a grander fidelity to an idealized version of that company. Whether you were an entrepreneur, developer, programmer, investor, or secretary, the skills you developed and monetized were always in the service of an overarching social objective—hence, as Wolfe noted back in 1983, the repeated statements by Silicon Valley CEOs that a corporation was not a corporation, but rather a culture, or a society. A given company's assets 'aren't hardware,' [Tom] Wolfe wrote, paraphrasing his unnamed subjects, 'they're the software of the three thousand souls who work here.' Such idealism has, if anything, grown with time, sometimes almost comically obscuring the powerful profit motive behind all the disruption and creative destruction that—lest we forget—have left so many industries downsized and so many people jobless or underemployed."

From further afield:

At The Spectator, James Mumford weighs in on the meaning of dignity in debates over assisted suicide.

Park MacDougald writes at Unherd about Philip Rieff and his theory of the "anti-culture."

Freddie deBoer considers Norm Macdonald and why there is no such thing as "punching up" or "punching down."

At The Drift, Sophie Haigney writes about the unbearable didacticism of Chelsea Clinton's She Persisted and other liberal children's books.

Twenty years of The Hedgehog Review, now in one volume! The Hedgehog Review Reader includes selections of our finest essays from our first two decades from James Davison Hunter, Jackson Lears, John Owen, Seyla Benhabib, Talbot Brewer, Helen Andrews, Alan Jacobs, Becca Rothfeld, Eugene McCarraher and many more.