It would be obvious to expect that what Kathleen Gerson calls “Contending Visions of Manhood” would also be visible in the work domain. First of, what are those contending visions? Most obviously it is the vision of a man as the sole provider for a household, a vision that is, more than ever, in competition with other visions of men. Men might choose to share household obligations and provider obligations with their partner. Men might also choose not to work at all and rely on their partner to provide for them. Another group of men might choose only to provide for themselves and live without the responsibility of a family and dependents. Gerson’s contention is that as men face these different visions of themselves in the work and social world, they are more likely than not to act diversely in response. Gerson argues convincingly that men are less and less likely to simply emulate the jobs and employment situations they witnessed in their parents. Rather, what they saw in their childhoods is merely a “point of departure” for complex and ever-changing attitude towards work.
Men’s Changing Commitments to Work
In her book No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Work Gerson gives an account of how men’s attitudes towards work have changed since the rise of feminism and women’s increasing presence as part of the work-force. One of Gerson’s central themes is the so-called “decline” of the so-called “provider ethic”.
To make sense of men’s lives, we first need to lay some myths to rest. Consider the belief that breadwinning is a traditional or natural pattern with a long legacy. In fact, men’s behavior and our wider cultural ideals about manhood have not consistently conformed to this model throughout American history. To the contrary, the idea that men should provide sole or primary economic support for their households in lieu of participating in domestic work did not develop until the emergence of industrial capitalism and only gradually came to describe the behavior of most men. However much some may mourn its decline, the good-provider ethic has not been a continuous historical pattern. It was the product of social forces that converged in one fleeting era, and its reign as a predominant form of behavior and a prevailing cultural ethic has been relatively short-lived.
Gerson finds that how men work and what their commitments to their work are, is a complicated process not easily understood by way of reference to a cultural stereotype like the good-provider ethic. She criticizes the more causally oriented developmental scenarios of psychoanalytic and social learning theories for being unable to “understand the degree of contradiction in the socialization context of little boys, for not adequately distinguishing between the context and the child’s reaction this context and for overlooking the possibility of change in adulthood.
I am convinced that Gerson’s argument is correct. Men have not only begun to diversify their work-choices, they are also much more willing to consider jobs that bring less of an income (as long as their spouse can provide what they cannot). However, Gerson’s argument does not convince me that men’s attitudes towards work itself have changed. In other words, men’s sense of self and self-worth continues to be wrapped up with the work they do in ways that elude our grasp, if we only look at the different work-choices they make. Yet in other words, men continue to have a hard time with not working. It is difficult for them to take a break. If they do, they are socially ousted as lazy, good-for nothing and generally worthless.
What does Work Mean to Boys?
I am not sure I can answer this question in the general way I have asked it. However, with some individuals in mind, I believe I can answer it more specifically. Given the attitudes towards work of boys I see in my practice and in my own family, I believe that it is possible to make two general distinctions: There is the kind of work boys choose for themselves and there is the work we ask them to do. We normally don’t call the former work, rather we call it play. In this area a boy might choose to build a fort, saw apart a few old chairs and make them into a table, glue together a bunch of plastic-bottles to create his own unique robots. In the latter area we’re more concerned with parental ideas and expectations—rather than choices—of “work” their children should do (chores, errands, etc.).
Here is an exchange with my son about this issue:
M: Remember the time you built all those robots from plastic bottles?
J: Yes, that was fun!
M: Yeah, it was. Do you remember what the most important thing was for you when they were done? Do you remember what you expected from us?
J: (Thinks for a moment) That you wouldn’t just say “put them away.”
M: Right, you had them all displayed in the kitchen for a few weeks before we put them
away because they started to stink.
J: Oh, I had forgotten about that.
M: Do you think you also expected us to say how great those robots were and how well you put them together?
J: (Hesitates for a moment) Not really; perhaps a little. But the most important thing is that they could be there for a while.
M: So, what is the difference between that kind of work you did and when I ask you to do something like picking up all the sticks on the lawn so I can mow?
J: The first one is my choice, the second you tell me to do it.
M: Right and what do you expect from me when you’re done picking up the sticks?
J: I expect you to praise (loben) me.
M: Oh, I see. That’s quite different isn’t it?
J: Yeah, that’s quite different.
Granted, this is but an exchange with my own nine-year old son. Eluding all concerns about scientific validity, I conclude from it nevertheless: praise serves to stabilize and reinforce labor done in response to external expectations of others. Praise is not a necessary ingredient of a self-chosen work process. Rather, in such a process, the emphasis is on acceptance and tolerance of the product. I further conclude that the idea that we need to initiate our sons into a system of praise means that we are in the process of preparing them for a life of labor and work that is not self-chosen in the way the tasks of play are chosen. Praise, like money, can be a bait that serves to keep others doing what they’re doing because it serves me.
My Introduction to Work.
I am the son of a sole-provider father. Yes, it is true, when I was only seven and my sister five, my mother did go back to work. She trained as a nurse and began working over-night shifts at a hospital 30 minutes away from our house. Her income was insignificant on the large scale of our family needs, however, and so, my father’s income from being first a teacher and later a principal always had the weight and import of that of a sole-provider income. My mother, I believe, very much felt how little her income seemed to matter and she liked to point out how her income (which she saved not in a bank-account, but in a small box in her wardrobe) had bought us a new couch or new carpeting for the living-room.
My mother has always worked hard, my father did not work, he taught and was a principal. He was, as I said, a sole-provider, but you might have noticed, I didn’t say he worked. I said he was a teacher. My mother was the one who worked. This is not a spoof on teachers and how they don’t work. It is also not a reckoning with my father’s work-ethic. Rather, it is to say that as a man, the son of my parents, I have to say that I did not learn much about work from my father. Most of it came from watching my mother.
My father would leave the house every morning at around 7:25am and return by 2pm. He would have lunch and then take a 1-2 hour nap. After his nap he would sometimes go grocery shopping or mow the lawn. Often he would just make himself a cup of coffee and read the paper or a book. Sometimes, while he was still mostly teaching, he would have a set of exams to read through in the evenings. But that was rare. He never rushed.
My mother, on the other hand, always seemed rushed. She would take short breaks between work at home and work at the hospital. I remember her sighing and moaning often when she was doing house-work. She always said she didn’t like her house-work and did whatever she could to reduce it to a minimum (short of hiring someone to do it for her).
Interestingly, 12 years ago my father was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer. He almost died from it. He was stressed, despite his “easy” life as a principal. We always knew he was. Managing a group of up to 40 teachers, dealing with their fears and differing senses of fairness was not easy for him. He hated their in-fighting and their need for him to be their mediator. As a family we had shared stories about hearing my father grinding his teeth in his sleep. It was an eerie sound as if the whole house was creaking and shifting. And, perhaps, in a way of speaking, it was. When he took as many naps as he did and seemed to stop working at 2pm, he simply tried to balance his life with extreme measures of stress-reduction when he wasn’t at school.
My mother, hard-working in a different way, found her balance in taking smoking breaks and later also taking short breaks for a “vino” a glass of wine or sherry. I consider both my parents victims of their attitudes towards work and their powerlessness to control the way work worked its way into their lives.
Work: The Mystical Place
I’d be curious to know from you what images the title of this month’s lecture brings to mind. If you are like me, you are imagining men who go to work. You are thinking of men who travel a short or long distance to get to their place of employment. You are thinking, too, of men who are spending a significant amount of time at this place of employment every day. You might also be imagining them in a place strangely forbidding to other family members. When the man leaves the home to go to work invisible doors close behind him through which only faint noises and sketchy images come back to tell us about his work.
More often than not you will also imagine this man at work as someone who is somehow accountable and responsible for someone else. His work is not just for him. It is a service of some kind. He is expected to give himself to and for this service. When the doors of this strange place called work open again, the man you imagine might come out hungry, grumpy, with a head-ache, a problem face or simply exhausted. You might imagine him pouring himself a drink, reading the paper, watching television or even playing with the children or talking to his partner. But he just doesn’t seem the same man that he was over the weekend. Or worse: He doesn’t seem to be himself ever.
Work has done it again: It has taken him away from himself, unable, it seems, to give him back to himself at the end of the day.
Let’s talk about some things you’re not imagining as you think about the title.
When you hear the title “men and work” you are likely not imagining a man who goes grocery-shopping. You’re also not imagining a man who is doing yard-work. You don’t bring up images of a man who fixes up the house, you are not thinking of a man as working when he interacts with the children, fixes their bikes or dinner for them. And while you would readily concede that all these things could be called work, you wouldn’t call them “working”. If someone called for this man and you picked up the phone, you wouldn’t say “he is working” or even “he is at work” you would say “he is mowing the lawn” “playing with the kids”, etc..
This is not to even mention the things you don’t imagine at all like a man changing diapers, scrubbing the kitchen floor or buying clothes for and with the children.
The Double Standard of Work: What is and what is not work
American men and women (and with them likely most industrialized nations in the West) have managed to divide work neatly into a set of activities they call work and another set they do not call work. However, while women, largely through the forces of feminism, have been able to claim house-hold related activities as work, men have not been able to claim the same title for the things they do in the house. It is not so much that men don’t work at home. Rather, it is that their home-activities lack the status of “work”.
To say that a man is working or at work is, it seems to me, to say that he is engaged in something larger than himself. He is in a way moving the world, making the world a better place and, in so doing, bringing home the sustenance that is necessary for his family to survive. This is another way of saying that a man who just works for himself (i.e., who produces things that are simply for his own consumption) or a man whose work productivity does not benefit a family or similar group, that such a man really is not working at all.
There is an underlying mythic component to work. Work must not be for itself,i.e., for the man who is doing it; rather, it must be for a purpose outside of himself.
Listen to John Eldridge as he describes this point:
The way a man’s life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen, selling shoes at the mall, meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world—where the majority of American men live and die—requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: To harness a man to the plough and make him produce.
Eldridge continues to say that ultimately a man’s soul refuses to be harnessed in this way. Men, he believes, will realize that they are not a “mechanism” or cog in an apparatus from which they cannot escape. While I believe that men certainly have the potential to realize these things and while I believe that it is within their power to disconnect themselves from merely being seen as mechanisms, I cannot be as optimistic as Eldridge I believe that men are deeply “hooked” into this way of thinking. Without some serious re-thinking of their own role and aspirations, of their values and things they might heretofore have considered as virtues, they will not be able to distance themselves enough to become free.
The Lure of Work
Why is it that men seem so easily drawn and hooked by work? Why is it that men seem to have a hard time imagining themselves in a place of rest and comfort, perhaps a hammock in the summer or a comfortable chair or couch in the winter? What happens when men just sit, by themselves or with other men, to their sense of well-being and self-worth? Somehow the promise of work must succeed in convincing men that it is worth their while to sacrifice themselves to it. Work promises, I believe, what men look for so desperately, a sense of pride, worth, being a hero showing endurance, skill and capability. Work for men is a rite of passage and a daily ritual without which they will never be seen or valued as real men.
I know very few men who know how to be lazy. It is almost as if laziness is an art, a skill which to accomplish is a lofty, if not impossible, goal. Of course, I wish there were a better word for it. Lazy sounds so . . . well, lazy!
This may be hard to understand. Aren’t there plenty of men whose spouses complain about their men’s laziness? Aren’t there enough men who seem to avoid tasks at home and at work that seem to hard, too complicated, too demanding? Yes, there are plenty of those. However, I tend to think of their alleged laziness not so much as the kind I have in mind here. Their’s is a kind of reaction formation. A rebellion of sorts against the relentlessness of work itself. The laziness I have in mind is the kind that might be called joyful and rich inactivity.
The Silence about Work
Most of the men who come to talk to me don’t talk about their work. Of those who do talk about their work only a small percentage will talk about content issues: problems with colleagues or a boss, not being able to meet a dead-line, competition with others. Most will let things suffice by mentioning what it is they’re doing. No one, so far, has ever talked to me about not wanting to work. No one has ever said to me “all I want to do is go on a long vacation”. Similarly, no one has mentioned anything about lounging around on a weekend or holiday, wanting to be lazy or needing to forget work. As one of my clients put it:
“Not wanting to go to work tells the whole world I am depressed. But I don’t want the whole world to know this. So I keep working, I might even work more just to hide how I’m really doing. ”
At the same, not talking about their work also means that few people have talked to me about how passionate they are about their work. I am waiting still for the man who will come to my office and tell me he is energized and rejuvenated by his work; a man who will say my work makes me a better husband, partner and father. This would also be a man who can say “my work is meaningful beyond the income I receive from it. It is meaningful not only because it and the income it receives serve others, but also—and most importantly—because it serves me.
Interestingly, too, it does not matter whether those men are single, married, in relationships, whether they have a traditional house-hold with strict role-divisions, whether they are single providers or part of a dual-provider household, it doesn’t matter, if they inherited a three-generation family business, worked their way up from washing dishes to being millionaires or if their work just fell into their lap by accident, white-collar, blue-collar, farmer, driver, industry worker, teacher, therapist. . . they don’t talk about it.
The phrases “he is at work” or “he is working” veil one of the best-kept secrets in this culture, it is the secret of how he might feel about his work. It also veils and hides from us his friends, relatives and extended family what he is doing and how he copes with what he is doing. The fact that we’re so clueless is only made worse by the fact that, should we ask a man this question—how he feels about his work—he will in all likelihood answer something along the lines of “oh, I love my work”. He will lie about it. Ask a man how his day at work has gone and he will most likely answer “great.”
Yes, in its most general form his love for his work might be true. But this generality serves only to disguise the details and the real dynamic of stress, hate, tiredness that accompany most men’s employment situations. The generality of a man’s love of his job and work serves to distract us from the reality of the drudgery, boredom and/or pressure he feels every day to succeed at his job. With the aide of such generality we can avoid seeing that many men feel like slaves at their jobs, incomes not withstanding, because, ultimately, how they work and what they produce is not for them.
Work as Alienation from Self
The economist Karl Marx recognized this over a hundred years ago when he began to articulate the consequences of a shift in labor and the need for laborers in an increasingly industrial society. He called what he saw the process of alienation or estrangement :
A worker becomes only poorer the more wealth he produces and the more power his productiveness attains. The worker himself turns into a good the more goods he produces. The more what he produces gains in value, the more he himself loses his value as a human being. Work produces not only goods, rather it produces itself and the worker as goods.
Marx continues saying:
That this doesn’t mean anything else but that the worker puts himself into his work and in the process encounters what he has produced as a strange, different from him, object which contains parts of him (because he produced it) that are now no longer accessible to him.[1]
Marx’s basic point: when we work we lose ourselves. Losing ourselves through work is something that is not easily retrievable, perhaps not at all retrievable.
Work as Moral Pressure
But this connection between work, objectification and loss of self is not even the only aspect of work that holds us captive to it. What is even worse are the moral aspects of work that have made us into slaves. The philosopher Nietzsche, almost a contemporary of Marx’ diagnosed with unwavering clarity the “breathless haste of work” which has spread among Americans not unlike their desire for gold during the times of the gold-rush. This haste has already infected Europe, he believes. One is now ashamed of long periods of rest. To be caught in thought ( rather than be productive) will cause a conflict of conscience; we live like people who feel they might constantly miss something. What suffers most from this haste and this urge to work and to still one’s conscience is our ability to simply be with others. “We don’t have time or energy” to pursue conversation and all otium (i.e., free-time, leisure, ease, peace, repose). The hours of repose are rare and when we are permitted to have them we want to simply stretch out and do nothing. When we think up ways in which to please ourselves we please ourselves like slaves, quickly and, preferably, without losing touch with our work. Nietzsche recognizes that already the inclination to be happy has changed to being called the “need for relaxation”. As it is becoming a need it is falling prey to a tendency to be ashamed of itself. It could be, Nietzsche muses, that we will no longer be able to enjoy our inclination towards a vita comtemplativa (i.e., a contemplative life) without a hefty amount of self-loathing and bad-conscience.
So far about Nietzsche. I would be surprised to know that there is anybody here that will not recognize himself (or herself) partially or entirely in these descriptions. Perhaps that recognition is less cognitive than it is emotional. We know something is off with the way we feel and go about working, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Doesn’t every body have to work? Nobody else seems to complain about their work, I must be wrong feeling the way I do. Perhaps I need another job, one that helps me make even more money, to feel better about myself. Perhaps, I need to sell my soul completely to feel successful?
Work and Addiction
In my opinion, men are highly susceptible to this kind of thinking. It is a thinking that has addictive traits. There is sense of compulsion in it. And when we begin to see the compulsion we understand why work, to many men, feels like slavery. They feel compelled to do it. The problem, of course, is that some of the compulsion comes from within, not the outside.
The author John Lee is known for his work with men, especially his work with men in recovery. He understands men’s issues with addiction and specifically their problems with work-addiction as interrelated. Ultimately, he believes, addiction is a result of our failure to recognize the child in children and the child in adults. This child, Lee believes, is in constant need for praise and acknowledgement of what he or she is doing. However, we often find ourselves unable to praise our children and adult relatives and friends in truly sustaining ways. Being addicted to work is, from that perspective, a relentless hunt for praise and recognition. Often when this addiction does not produce the desired results, i.e., the satisfaction and peace we so need to survive, other addictions follow. We begin to supplement the lack of praise with alcohol, drugs, etc.
Hope for Men and Boys
If we put this together with the many studies that show that it is especially boys who are not praised enough, that it is especially boys who are, to the contrary, scolded for not paying attention, being too antsy, loud and un-concentrated, we might understand why boys and men in particular seem to pursue praise in the form of hard, self-denying and ultimately self-destructive ways of existing, including work.
However, praise alone is not the recipe for a healthy attitude towards work either. Keeping in mind the interview with my son, it seems reasonable to say that praise is itself a problematic issue when it comes as a stabilizing force for work a boy or man really doesn’t want to do, or doesn’t want to do in this particular way.
Are boys perhaps more likely to become sick and fall prey to the vicissitudes of praise?
What might change, I wonder, if culturally we did indeed begin to nurture male infants and toddlers the way we nurture females? Would strong and rich nurturing and continuous encouragement to find their own true selves rather than fitting in with others’ expectations perhaps allow boys and men to find new approaches to work. Would these approaches leave their sense of self, their sense of others and their health intact? Would work for men actually turn into self-actualization rather than alienation? How would our understanding of boys in class-rooms change, if we could be less concerned with them fitting in and more interested in helping them find their own creative source of work energy? Could we allow ourselves to trust boys’ intrinsic wisdom and knowledge of self? Could we put faith in their ability to use their wisdom to find what intrigues them and to build on that? As my son Jacob pointed out: such boys and men are less in need of praise as they need tolerance and space to see their products, the results of their work, be accepted into the family, class-room or group of which they are a part.
[1] Der Arbeiter wird um so ärmer, je mehr Reichtum er produziert, je mehr seine Produktion an Macht und Umfang zunimmt. Der Arbeiter wird eine um so wohlfeilere Ware, je mehr Waren er schafft. Mit der Verwertung der Sachenwelt nimmt die Entwertung der Menschenwelt in direktem Verhältnis zu. Die Arbeit produziert nicht nur Waren; sie produziert sich selbst und den Arbeiter als eine Ware, und zwar in dem Verhältnis, in welchem sie überhaupt Waren produziert.
Dieses Faktum drückt weiter nichts aus als: Der Gegenstand, den die Arbeit produziert, ihr Produkt, tritt ihr als ein fremdes Wesen, als eine von dem Produzenten unabhängige Macht gegenüber. Das Produkt der Arbeit ist die Arbeit, die sich in einem Gegenstand fixiert, sachlich gemacht hat, es ist die Vergegenständlichung der Arbeit. Die Verwirklichung der Arbeit ist ihre Vergegenständlichung. Diese Verwirklichung der Arbeit erscheint in dem nationalökonomischen Zustand als Entwirklichung des Arbeiters, die Vergegenständlichung als Verlust und Knechtschaft des Gegenstandes, die Aneignung als Entfremdung, als Entäußerung.
Men’s Changing Commitments to Work
In her book No Man’s Land: Men’s Changing Commitments to Work Gerson gives an account of how men’s attitudes towards work have changed since the rise of feminism and women’s increasing presence as part of the work-force. One of Gerson’s central themes is the so-called “decline” of the so-called “provider ethic”.
To make sense of men’s lives, we first need to lay some myths to rest. Consider the belief that breadwinning is a traditional or natural pattern with a long legacy. In fact, men’s behavior and our wider cultural ideals about manhood have not consistently conformed to this model throughout American history. To the contrary, the idea that men should provide sole or primary economic support for their households in lieu of participating in domestic work did not develop until the emergence of industrial capitalism and only gradually came to describe the behavior of most men. However much some may mourn its decline, the good-provider ethic has not been a continuous historical pattern. It was the product of social forces that converged in one fleeting era, and its reign as a predominant form of behavior and a prevailing cultural ethic has been relatively short-lived.
Gerson finds that how men work and what their commitments to their work are, is a complicated process not easily understood by way of reference to a cultural stereotype like the good-provider ethic. She criticizes the more causally oriented developmental scenarios of psychoanalytic and social learning theories for being unable to “understand the degree of contradiction in the socialization context of little boys, for not adequately distinguishing between the context and the child’s reaction this context and for overlooking the possibility of change in adulthood.
I am convinced that Gerson’s argument is correct. Men have not only begun to diversify their work-choices, they are also much more willing to consider jobs that bring less of an income (as long as their spouse can provide what they cannot). However, Gerson’s argument does not convince me that men’s attitudes towards work itself have changed. In other words, men’s sense of self and self-worth continues to be wrapped up with the work they do in ways that elude our grasp, if we only look at the different work-choices they make. Yet in other words, men continue to have a hard time with not working. It is difficult for them to take a break. If they do, they are socially ousted as lazy, good-for nothing and generally worthless.
What does Work Mean to Boys?
I am not sure I can answer this question in the general way I have asked it. However, with some individuals in mind, I believe I can answer it more specifically. Given the attitudes towards work of boys I see in my practice and in my own family, I believe that it is possible to make two general distinctions: There is the kind of work boys choose for themselves and there is the work we ask them to do. We normally don’t call the former work, rather we call it play. In this area a boy might choose to build a fort, saw apart a few old chairs and make them into a table, glue together a bunch of plastic-bottles to create his own unique robots. In the latter area we’re more concerned with parental ideas and expectations—rather than choices—of “work” their children should do (chores, errands, etc.).
Here is an exchange with my son about this issue:
M: Remember the time you built all those robots from plastic bottles?
J: Yes, that was fun!
M: Yeah, it was. Do you remember what the most important thing was for you when they were done? Do you remember what you expected from us?
J: (Thinks for a moment) That you wouldn’t just say “put them away.”
M: Right, you had them all displayed in the kitchen for a few weeks before we put them
away because they started to stink.
J: Oh, I had forgotten about that.
M: Do you think you also expected us to say how great those robots were and how well you put them together?
J: (Hesitates for a moment) Not really; perhaps a little. But the most important thing is that they could be there for a while.
M: So, what is the difference between that kind of work you did and when I ask you to do something like picking up all the sticks on the lawn so I can mow?
J: The first one is my choice, the second you tell me to do it.
M: Right and what do you expect from me when you’re done picking up the sticks?
J: I expect you to praise (loben) me.
M: Oh, I see. That’s quite different isn’t it?
J: Yeah, that’s quite different.
Granted, this is but an exchange with my own nine-year old son. Eluding all concerns about scientific validity, I conclude from it nevertheless: praise serves to stabilize and reinforce labor done in response to external expectations of others. Praise is not a necessary ingredient of a self-chosen work process. Rather, in such a process, the emphasis is on acceptance and tolerance of the product. I further conclude that the idea that we need to initiate our sons into a system of praise means that we are in the process of preparing them for a life of labor and work that is not self-chosen in the way the tasks of play are chosen. Praise, like money, can be a bait that serves to keep others doing what they’re doing because it serves me.
My Introduction to Work.
I am the son of a sole-provider father. Yes, it is true, when I was only seven and my sister five, my mother did go back to work. She trained as a nurse and began working over-night shifts at a hospital 30 minutes away from our house. Her income was insignificant on the large scale of our family needs, however, and so, my father’s income from being first a teacher and later a principal always had the weight and import of that of a sole-provider income. My mother, I believe, very much felt how little her income seemed to matter and she liked to point out how her income (which she saved not in a bank-account, but in a small box in her wardrobe) had bought us a new couch or new carpeting for the living-room.
My mother has always worked hard, my father did not work, he taught and was a principal. He was, as I said, a sole-provider, but you might have noticed, I didn’t say he worked. I said he was a teacher. My mother was the one who worked. This is not a spoof on teachers and how they don’t work. It is also not a reckoning with my father’s work-ethic. Rather, it is to say that as a man, the son of my parents, I have to say that I did not learn much about work from my father. Most of it came from watching my mother.
My father would leave the house every morning at around 7:25am and return by 2pm. He would have lunch and then take a 1-2 hour nap. After his nap he would sometimes go grocery shopping or mow the lawn. Often he would just make himself a cup of coffee and read the paper or a book. Sometimes, while he was still mostly teaching, he would have a set of exams to read through in the evenings. But that was rare. He never rushed.
My mother, on the other hand, always seemed rushed. She would take short breaks between work at home and work at the hospital. I remember her sighing and moaning often when she was doing house-work. She always said she didn’t like her house-work and did whatever she could to reduce it to a minimum (short of hiring someone to do it for her).
Interestingly, 12 years ago my father was diagnosed with a bleeding ulcer. He almost died from it. He was stressed, despite his “easy” life as a principal. We always knew he was. Managing a group of up to 40 teachers, dealing with their fears and differing senses of fairness was not easy for him. He hated their in-fighting and their need for him to be their mediator. As a family we had shared stories about hearing my father grinding his teeth in his sleep. It was an eerie sound as if the whole house was creaking and shifting. And, perhaps, in a way of speaking, it was. When he took as many naps as he did and seemed to stop working at 2pm, he simply tried to balance his life with extreme measures of stress-reduction when he wasn’t at school.
My mother, hard-working in a different way, found her balance in taking smoking breaks and later also taking short breaks for a “vino” a glass of wine or sherry. I consider both my parents victims of their attitudes towards work and their powerlessness to control the way work worked its way into their lives.
Work: The Mystical Place
I’d be curious to know from you what images the title of this month’s lecture brings to mind. If you are like me, you are imagining men who go to work. You are thinking of men who travel a short or long distance to get to their place of employment. You are thinking, too, of men who are spending a significant amount of time at this place of employment every day. You might also be imagining them in a place strangely forbidding to other family members. When the man leaves the home to go to work invisible doors close behind him through which only faint noises and sketchy images come back to tell us about his work.
More often than not you will also imagine this man at work as someone who is somehow accountable and responsible for someone else. His work is not just for him. It is a service of some kind. He is expected to give himself to and for this service. When the doors of this strange place called work open again, the man you imagine might come out hungry, grumpy, with a head-ache, a problem face or simply exhausted. You might imagine him pouring himself a drink, reading the paper, watching television or even playing with the children or talking to his partner. But he just doesn’t seem the same man that he was over the weekend. Or worse: He doesn’t seem to be himself ever.
Work has done it again: It has taken him away from himself, unable, it seems, to give him back to himself at the end of the day.
Let’s talk about some things you’re not imagining as you think about the title.
When you hear the title “men and work” you are likely not imagining a man who goes grocery-shopping. You’re also not imagining a man who is doing yard-work. You don’t bring up images of a man who fixes up the house, you are not thinking of a man as working when he interacts with the children, fixes their bikes or dinner for them. And while you would readily concede that all these things could be called work, you wouldn’t call them “working”. If someone called for this man and you picked up the phone, you wouldn’t say “he is working” or even “he is at work” you would say “he is mowing the lawn” “playing with the kids”, etc..
This is not to even mention the things you don’t imagine at all like a man changing diapers, scrubbing the kitchen floor or buying clothes for and with the children.
The Double Standard of Work: What is and what is not work
American men and women (and with them likely most industrialized nations in the West) have managed to divide work neatly into a set of activities they call work and another set they do not call work. However, while women, largely through the forces of feminism, have been able to claim house-hold related activities as work, men have not been able to claim the same title for the things they do in the house. It is not so much that men don’t work at home. Rather, it is that their home-activities lack the status of “work”.
To say that a man is working or at work is, it seems to me, to say that he is engaged in something larger than himself. He is in a way moving the world, making the world a better place and, in so doing, bringing home the sustenance that is necessary for his family to survive. This is another way of saying that a man who just works for himself (i.e., who produces things that are simply for his own consumption) or a man whose work productivity does not benefit a family or similar group, that such a man really is not working at all.
There is an underlying mythic component to work. Work must not be for itself,i.e., for the man who is doing it; rather, it must be for a purpose outside of himself.
Listen to John Eldridge as he describes this point:
The way a man’s life unfolds nowadays tends to drive his heart into remote regions of the soul. Endless hours at a computer screen, selling shoes at the mall, meetings, memos, phone calls. The business world—where the majority of American men live and die—requires a man to be efficient and punctual. Corporate policies and procedures are designed with one aim: To harness a man to the plough and make him produce.
Eldridge continues to say that ultimately a man’s soul refuses to be harnessed in this way. Men, he believes, will realize that they are not a “mechanism” or cog in an apparatus from which they cannot escape. While I believe that men certainly have the potential to realize these things and while I believe that it is within their power to disconnect themselves from merely being seen as mechanisms, I cannot be as optimistic as Eldridge I believe that men are deeply “hooked” into this way of thinking. Without some serious re-thinking of their own role and aspirations, of their values and things they might heretofore have considered as virtues, they will not be able to distance themselves enough to become free.
The Lure of Work
Why is it that men seem so easily drawn and hooked by work? Why is it that men seem to have a hard time imagining themselves in a place of rest and comfort, perhaps a hammock in the summer or a comfortable chair or couch in the winter? What happens when men just sit, by themselves or with other men, to their sense of well-being and self-worth? Somehow the promise of work must succeed in convincing men that it is worth their while to sacrifice themselves to it. Work promises, I believe, what men look for so desperately, a sense of pride, worth, being a hero showing endurance, skill and capability. Work for men is a rite of passage and a daily ritual without which they will never be seen or valued as real men.
I know very few men who know how to be lazy. It is almost as if laziness is an art, a skill which to accomplish is a lofty, if not impossible, goal. Of course, I wish there were a better word for it. Lazy sounds so . . . well, lazy!
This may be hard to understand. Aren’t there plenty of men whose spouses complain about their men’s laziness? Aren’t there enough men who seem to avoid tasks at home and at work that seem to hard, too complicated, too demanding? Yes, there are plenty of those. However, I tend to think of their alleged laziness not so much as the kind I have in mind here. Their’s is a kind of reaction formation. A rebellion of sorts against the relentlessness of work itself. The laziness I have in mind is the kind that might be called joyful and rich inactivity.
The Silence about Work
Most of the men who come to talk to me don’t talk about their work. Of those who do talk about their work only a small percentage will talk about content issues: problems with colleagues or a boss, not being able to meet a dead-line, competition with others. Most will let things suffice by mentioning what it is they’re doing. No one, so far, has ever talked to me about not wanting to work. No one has ever said to me “all I want to do is go on a long vacation”. Similarly, no one has mentioned anything about lounging around on a weekend or holiday, wanting to be lazy or needing to forget work. As one of my clients put it:
“Not wanting to go to work tells the whole world I am depressed. But I don’t want the whole world to know this. So I keep working, I might even work more just to hide how I’m really doing. ”
At the same, not talking about their work also means that few people have talked to me about how passionate they are about their work. I am waiting still for the man who will come to my office and tell me he is energized and rejuvenated by his work; a man who will say my work makes me a better husband, partner and father. This would also be a man who can say “my work is meaningful beyond the income I receive from it. It is meaningful not only because it and the income it receives serve others, but also—and most importantly—because it serves me.
Interestingly, too, it does not matter whether those men are single, married, in relationships, whether they have a traditional house-hold with strict role-divisions, whether they are single providers or part of a dual-provider household, it doesn’t matter, if they inherited a three-generation family business, worked their way up from washing dishes to being millionaires or if their work just fell into their lap by accident, white-collar, blue-collar, farmer, driver, industry worker, teacher, therapist. . . they don’t talk about it.
The phrases “he is at work” or “he is working” veil one of the best-kept secrets in this culture, it is the secret of how he might feel about his work. It also veils and hides from us his friends, relatives and extended family what he is doing and how he copes with what he is doing. The fact that we’re so clueless is only made worse by the fact that, should we ask a man this question—how he feels about his work—he will in all likelihood answer something along the lines of “oh, I love my work”. He will lie about it. Ask a man how his day at work has gone and he will most likely answer “great.”
Yes, in its most general form his love for his work might be true. But this generality serves only to disguise the details and the real dynamic of stress, hate, tiredness that accompany most men’s employment situations. The generality of a man’s love of his job and work serves to distract us from the reality of the drudgery, boredom and/or pressure he feels every day to succeed at his job. With the aide of such generality we can avoid seeing that many men feel like slaves at their jobs, incomes not withstanding, because, ultimately, how they work and what they produce is not for them.
Work as Alienation from Self
The economist Karl Marx recognized this over a hundred years ago when he began to articulate the consequences of a shift in labor and the need for laborers in an increasingly industrial society. He called what he saw the process of alienation or estrangement :
A worker becomes only poorer the more wealth he produces and the more power his productiveness attains. The worker himself turns into a good the more goods he produces. The more what he produces gains in value, the more he himself loses his value as a human being. Work produces not only goods, rather it produces itself and the worker as goods.
Marx continues saying:
That this doesn’t mean anything else but that the worker puts himself into his work and in the process encounters what he has produced as a strange, different from him, object which contains parts of him (because he produced it) that are now no longer accessible to him.[1]
Marx’s basic point: when we work we lose ourselves. Losing ourselves through work is something that is not easily retrievable, perhaps not at all retrievable.
Work as Moral Pressure
But this connection between work, objectification and loss of self is not even the only aspect of work that holds us captive to it. What is even worse are the moral aspects of work that have made us into slaves. The philosopher Nietzsche, almost a contemporary of Marx’ diagnosed with unwavering clarity the “breathless haste of work” which has spread among Americans not unlike their desire for gold during the times of the gold-rush. This haste has already infected Europe, he believes. One is now ashamed of long periods of rest. To be caught in thought ( rather than be productive) will cause a conflict of conscience; we live like people who feel they might constantly miss something. What suffers most from this haste and this urge to work and to still one’s conscience is our ability to simply be with others. “We don’t have time or energy” to pursue conversation and all otium (i.e., free-time, leisure, ease, peace, repose). The hours of repose are rare and when we are permitted to have them we want to simply stretch out and do nothing. When we think up ways in which to please ourselves we please ourselves like slaves, quickly and, preferably, without losing touch with our work. Nietzsche recognizes that already the inclination to be happy has changed to being called the “need for relaxation”. As it is becoming a need it is falling prey to a tendency to be ashamed of itself. It could be, Nietzsche muses, that we will no longer be able to enjoy our inclination towards a vita comtemplativa (i.e., a contemplative life) without a hefty amount of self-loathing and bad-conscience.
So far about Nietzsche. I would be surprised to know that there is anybody here that will not recognize himself (or herself) partially or entirely in these descriptions. Perhaps that recognition is less cognitive than it is emotional. We know something is off with the way we feel and go about working, but we can’t quite put our finger on it. Doesn’t every body have to work? Nobody else seems to complain about their work, I must be wrong feeling the way I do. Perhaps I need another job, one that helps me make even more money, to feel better about myself. Perhaps, I need to sell my soul completely to feel successful?
Work and Addiction
In my opinion, men are highly susceptible to this kind of thinking. It is a thinking that has addictive traits. There is sense of compulsion in it. And when we begin to see the compulsion we understand why work, to many men, feels like slavery. They feel compelled to do it. The problem, of course, is that some of the compulsion comes from within, not the outside.
The author John Lee is known for his work with men, especially his work with men in recovery. He understands men’s issues with addiction and specifically their problems with work-addiction as interrelated. Ultimately, he believes, addiction is a result of our failure to recognize the child in children and the child in adults. This child, Lee believes, is in constant need for praise and acknowledgement of what he or she is doing. However, we often find ourselves unable to praise our children and adult relatives and friends in truly sustaining ways. Being addicted to work is, from that perspective, a relentless hunt for praise and recognition. Often when this addiction does not produce the desired results, i.e., the satisfaction and peace we so need to survive, other addictions follow. We begin to supplement the lack of praise with alcohol, drugs, etc.
Hope for Men and Boys
If we put this together with the many studies that show that it is especially boys who are not praised enough, that it is especially boys who are, to the contrary, scolded for not paying attention, being too antsy, loud and un-concentrated, we might understand why boys and men in particular seem to pursue praise in the form of hard, self-denying and ultimately self-destructive ways of existing, including work.
However, praise alone is not the recipe for a healthy attitude towards work either. Keeping in mind the interview with my son, it seems reasonable to say that praise is itself a problematic issue when it comes as a stabilizing force for work a boy or man really doesn’t want to do, or doesn’t want to do in this particular way.
Are boys perhaps more likely to become sick and fall prey to the vicissitudes of praise?
What might change, I wonder, if culturally we did indeed begin to nurture male infants and toddlers the way we nurture females? Would strong and rich nurturing and continuous encouragement to find their own true selves rather than fitting in with others’ expectations perhaps allow boys and men to find new approaches to work. Would these approaches leave their sense of self, their sense of others and their health intact? Would work for men actually turn into self-actualization rather than alienation? How would our understanding of boys in class-rooms change, if we could be less concerned with them fitting in and more interested in helping them find their own creative source of work energy? Could we allow ourselves to trust boys’ intrinsic wisdom and knowledge of self? Could we put faith in their ability to use their wisdom to find what intrigues them and to build on that? As my son Jacob pointed out: such boys and men are less in need of praise as they need tolerance and space to see their products, the results of their work, be accepted into the family, class-room or group of which they are a part.
[1] Der Arbeiter wird um so ärmer, je mehr Reichtum er produziert, je mehr seine Produktion an Macht und Umfang zunimmt. Der Arbeiter wird eine um so wohlfeilere Ware, je mehr Waren er schafft. Mit der Verwertung der Sachenwelt nimmt die Entwertung der Menschenwelt in direktem Verhältnis zu. Die Arbeit produziert nicht nur Waren; sie produziert sich selbst und den Arbeiter als eine Ware, und zwar in dem Verhältnis, in welchem sie überhaupt Waren produziert.
Dieses Faktum drückt weiter nichts aus als: Der Gegenstand, den die Arbeit produziert, ihr Produkt, tritt ihr als ein fremdes Wesen, als eine von dem Produzenten unabhängige Macht gegenüber. Das Produkt der Arbeit ist die Arbeit, die sich in einem Gegenstand fixiert, sachlich gemacht hat, es ist die Vergegenständlichung der Arbeit. Die Verwirklichung der Arbeit ist ihre Vergegenständlichung. Diese Verwirklichung der Arbeit erscheint in dem nationalökonomischen Zustand als Entwirklichung des Arbeiters, die Vergegenständlichung als Verlust und Knechtschaft des Gegenstandes, die Aneignung als Entfremdung, als Entäußerung.
Appendix (9/2009)
An article by Alfie Kohn investigates the strategies of praisin/withholding of praise and love as a form of helping our children learn discipline. I have copied the article and am pasting it into the appendix for this paper:
This copy is for your personal, noncommercial use only. You can order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers here or use the "Reprints" tool that appears next to any article. Visit www.nytreprints.com for samples and additional information. Order a reprint of this article now.
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September 15, 2009
Mind
When a Parent’s ‘I Love You’ Means ‘Do as I Say’
By ALFIE KOHN
More than 50 years ago, the psychologist Carl Rogers suggested that simply loving our children wasn’t enough. We have to love them unconditionally, he said — for who they are, not for what they do.
As a father, I know this is a tall order, but it becomes even more challenging now that so much of the advice we are given amounts to exactly the opposite. In effect, we’re given tips in conditional parenting, which comes in two flavors: turn up the affection when they’re good, withhold affection when they’re not.
Thus, the talk show host Phil McGraw tells us in his book “Family First” (Free Press, 2004) that what children need or enjoy should be offered contingently, turned into rewards to be doled out or withheld so they “behave according to your wishes.” And “one of the most powerful currencies for a child,” he adds, “is the parents’ acceptance and approval.”
Likewise, Jo Frost of “Supernanny,” in her book of the same name (Hyperion, 2005), says, “The best rewards are attention, praise and love,” and these should be held back “when the child behaves badly until she says she is sorry,” at which point the love is turned back on.
Conditional parenting isn’t limited to old-school authoritarians. Some people who wouldn’t dream of spanking choose instead to discipline their young children by forcibly isolating them, a tactic we prefer to call “time out.” Conversely, “positive reinforcement” teaches children that they are loved, and lovable, only when they do whatever we decide is a “good job.”
This raises the intriguing possibility that the problem with praise isn’t that it is done the wrong way — or handed out too easily, as social conservatives insist. Rather, it might be just another method of control, analogous to punishment. The primary message of all types of conditional parenting is that children must earn a parent’s love. A steady diet of that, Rogers warned, and children might eventually need a therapist to provide the unconditional acceptance they didn’t get when it counted.
But was Rogers right? Before we toss out mainstream discipline, it would be nice to have some evidence. And now we do.
In 2004, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, joined Edward L. Deci, a leading American expert on the psychology of motivation, in asking more than 100 college students whether the love they had received from their parents had seemed to depend on whether they had succeeded in school, practiced hard for sports, been considerate toward others or suppressed emotions like anger and fear.
It turned out that children who received conditional approval were indeed somewhat more likely to act as the parent wanted. But compliance came at a steep price. First, these children tended to resent and dislike their parents. Second, they were apt to say that the way they acted was often due more to a “strong internal pressure” than to “a real sense of choice.” Moreover, their happiness after succeeding at something was usually short-lived, and they often felt guilty or ashamed.
In a companion study, Dr. Assor and his colleagues interviewed mothers of grown children. With this generation, too, conditional parenting proved damaging. Those mothers who, as children, sensed that they were loved only when they lived up to their parents’ expectations now felt less worthy as adults. Yet despite the negative effects, these mothers were more likely to use conditional affection with their own children.
This July, the same researchers, now joined by two of Dr. Deci’s colleagues at the University of Rochester, published two replications and extensions of the 2004 study. This time the subjects were ninth graders, and this time giving more approval when children did what parents wanted was carefully distinguished from giving less when they did not.
The studies found that both positive and negative conditional parenting were harmful, but in slightly different ways. The positive kind sometimes succeeded in getting children to work harder on academic tasks, but at the cost of unhealthy feelings of “internal compulsion.” Negative conditional parenting didn’t even work in the short run; it just increased the teenagers’ negative feelings about their parents.
What these and other studies tell us, if we’re able to hear the news, is that praising children for doing something right isn’t a meaningful alternative to pulling back or punishing when they do something wrong. Both are examples of conditional parenting, and both are counterproductive.
The child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, who readily acknowledged that the version of negative conditional parenting known as time-out can cause “deep feelings of anxiety,” nevertheless endorsed it for that very reason. “When our words are not enough,” he said, “the threat of the withdrawal of our love and affection is the only sound method to impress on him that he had better conform to our request.”
But the data suggest that love withdrawal isn’t particularly effective at getting compliance, much less at promoting moral development. Even if we did succeed in making children obey us, though — say, by using positive reinforcement — is obedience worth the possible long-term psychological harm? Should parental love be used as a tool for controlling children?
Deeper issues also underlie a different sort of criticism. Albert Bandura, the father of the branch of psychology known as social learning theory, declared that unconditional love “would make children directionless and quite unlovable” — an assertion entirely unsupported by empirical studies. The idea that children accepted for who they are would lack direction or appeal is most informative for what it tells us about the dark view of human nature held by those who issue such warnings.
In practice, according to an impressive collection of data by Dr. Deci and others, unconditional acceptance by parents as well as teachers should be accompanied by “autonomy support”: explaining reasons for requests, maximizing opportunities for the child to participate in making decisions, being encouraging without manipulating, and actively imagining how things look from the child’s point of view.
The last of these features is important with respect to unconditional parenting itself. Most of us would protest that of course we love our children without any strings attached. But what counts is how things look from the perspective of the children — whether they feel just as loved when they mess up or fall short.
Rogers didn’t say so, but I’ll bet he would have been glad to see less demand for skillful therapists if that meant more people were growing into adulthood having already felt unconditionally accepted.
Alfie Kohn is the author of 11 books about human behavior and education, including “Unconditional Parenting” and “Punished by Rewards.”
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