If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?: Virtue and vocation

Ora et labora

In 529, Benedict of Nursia wrote a Rule: prayer and work. Not prayer instead of work. The conjunction is the theology. The baker who rises at four is not earning a living. He is participating in the sustenance of his community. The discipline, the repetition, the offering — that is the spiritual exercise. Remove the work and what remains is not leisure. What remains is a human being with nothing to practice on.

The post-work fantasy circulating in Silicon Valley — machines liberating humanity for creativity and play — is the aristocratic dream repackaged. The Athenians had it. Their leisure was purchased by slaves. The question the UBI advocates never answer is the one the Athenians never answered: what happens to the character of a person who does not have to do anything difficult?

The noonday demon

Acedia — a medieval theological term for the listless despair that descends when a person has no obligation, no task, no demand. Thomas Aquinas classified it as a capital vice. The modern name is depression. The mechanism is identical: a human being without purposeful labor does not rest. A human being without purposeful labor deteriorates.

The Benedictines still rise at 3:30. The Amish still build barns by hand when power tools are available. These are not cosplay communities. They are laboratories running the experiment for centuries: what happens to a community organized around the proposition that labor is a practice to be cultivated? The communities that work together cohere. The communities that abandon shared labor disintegrate.

Where we concede ground: We romanticize labor. The baker is our metaphor. The warehouse worker whose back gives out at fifty-three is not.

What would change our mind: If a post-employment community demonstrated equal character formation and social cohesion after a generation.

Read the full synthesis: If machines do most of the work, what do the humans do?