DOVE International

From Brian Sauder's blog
Whatever Happened to the Virtue of Work?

Is work really a necessary evil as some would say? Is it something to be endured until the weekend arrives? Many think so…where did this thinking come from?

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, there was a great exodus of people from rural areas to cities seeking work in the factories and metal works created by the capitalism of the Industrial Revolution. British towns grew too fast and infrastructure and services lagged behind with poor sanitation, filthy streets and over-crowded housing. Horror stories of the workhouses and industrial workplaces were well documented through the tales of writers like Charles Dickens.

Yet despite these problems, people still flocked from areas of rural poverty to new, industrial workplaces for their survival, and because they aspired to obtain better lives. And human life did improve. Death rates dropped, life expectancy rose, wages rose over time, and food supplies and diets improved. Famine and plague came to an end. Average working hours shrunk and the cost of goods substantially decreased. Technological leaps since the early 1700s delivered extraordinary gains in human prosperity and quality of life.

With such success where did the devaluing of work come from? Somewhere along the way during this amazing transformation, many of the educated classes stopped believing in work as essential to survival, beneficial, a source of pride, a virtue. They’ve come to characterize work as a negative.

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Continue reading this post from Brian's blog at https://futurenhope.com/