Modern invocations of the work ethic are usually misreadings: The Protestant Ethic was more lament than celebration. New York Review of Books, 176 pp., $15.95 Others, hooray, could sustain and perform their work ethic from home. Those who did not face immediate economic peril could experience quarantine as a kind of relief and then immediately feel a peculiar guilt for that very feeling of relief. People go to work because they have no choice. As the pandemic loomed, it should have been obvious that the U.S. In the U.S., meanwhile, celebrations of the “work ethic” add insult to the injury of overwhelming precarity. The modern Dutch, bless them, are at least as lazy as everyone else, and their enjoyments are vulgar and plentiful. Or the Dutch invoke the Protestant ethic with self-deprecating smugness: Alas, we are so productive. I am from the United States but now live in Amsterdam the Dutch often claim the mantle of an industrious, Apollonian Northern Europe, as distinct from a dissolute, Dionysian, imaginary South. It is less a real thing than a story that people, and nations, tell themselves about themselves. People worked hard long before there was a thing called the “work ethic,” much less a “Protestant work ethic.” The phrase itself emerged early in the twentieth century and has since congealed into a cliché.
