Hard work is destroying our society. This is not to say that hard work, like sex and masturbation, doesn’t have its place: It does. However, hard work has made it difficult for certain institutions to serve their function of finding people who possess natural talent.
But hard work is the Lord’s work, you say. Certainly to attack hard work is to attack the central virtue that allows our society to thrive: It is like attacking kindness and motherhood. (Those essays will come in later weeks).
Hard work substitutes for intelligence but only up to a point, and this is precisely the thing that makes it a problem: It works well as a substitute when it comes to acquiring existing knowledge, but it works less well when it comes to forging new knowledge. Ironically, when our society was less ostensibly meritocratic, people competed less vigorously and academic positions were, ironically enough, filled by more intelligent and talented people.
I was shocked when I learned from a acquaintance who specialized in operations research that the US Naval Academy has lights out rules and that it is not uncommon for cadets to simply fail to complete their problem sets—they are given a fixed amount of time to complete their academic work and that is that: No burning the midnight oil. I thought that this indicated a lacklustre commitment to academic achievement that did not bode well for our military: But I was completely wrong. This system is, in fact, genius. You see, Annapolis as an institution understands that while there is value in mastering your course material, the real purpose of the courses is to determine which cadets will make the best leaders. Annapolis wants all the cadets to work for the same fixed amount of time because they don’t want hard work to confound what is, at the end of the day, a prolonged intelligence test. They would rather test your work ethic separately.
The rest of academia ought to adopt a similar attitude—at least at certain key junctures during the educational process. Otherwise, hypercompetitive individuals (many of whom will suffer from burnout and become nearly useless) will displace talented ones in the academic job market. The quality of our professoriate and leadership classes was better back when our culture was more leisurely.
Of course, the protestant work ethic causes Americans to see work as an unmitigated good: In his rejection of the devotional life that constitutes the Catholic ideal, Luther put forward the idea that there was an inherent piety in pursuing one’s “calling” even if that calling was a trade. As a result, criticizing hard work actually constitutes a religious taboo of sorts: Which blinds people to the possibility that it can be harmful in certain contexts. Praise for hard work is everywhere: Coaches teach our sons that hard work can bring you success and get you into the NFL (alone, it absolutely cannot). Teachers, anxious to increase their scores on standardized testing, wax on about the value of hard work. We praise tiger moms. We admire the toiling of immigrants who strive for the American dream. In short, hard work is a fetish of sorts.
But we must put this petty moralizing away. If education is a long-term test for talent, we should want to eliminate confounds. We should want to see who possesses raw talent and who doesn’t. We need to limit students to the same amount of work.