Young Marx
Interesting piece at Tech Central Station, A Tale of Two Prophet: Karl Marx and Brigham Young. Link. Excerpt:
Brigham Young believed that man was put on earth to do hard physical work with his hands, and he believed this was the only sure way to achieve salvation. Marx and his followers believed that man had been put on earth to enjoy it, and looked forward to a millennium in which mankind could eventually be freed from Adam's curse -- the cruel necessity to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Machines could do the work for us; technology would free us to devote our time to the pursuit of higher things. Manual labor would become a thing of the past -- as it has for so many modern Americans, at least those who have received college educations; and the same is no less true for the educated elite around the world who occupy positions of economic power and political influence that exempt them from the necessity to do life's dirty work.
Karl Marx dreamt of a world without hard labor; Brigham Young made a religious duty of it, and, indeed, an honor and a privilege. God had blessed us by giving us something genuinely productive to do, like growing the crops that will keep us from starving, like taking people's garbage out of the suburbs and the cities, or building people's houses, or landscaping their yards, or looking after them when they are sick.
In the eyes of Brigham Young, manual labor was collaboration with the Almighty in his ongoing effort to improve the world. The world, according to this point of view, was not created finished and perfect, as the educated theologians have vainly tried to argue; rather, it was deliberately left in an extremely unfinished state. Why? So that man would have a meaningful task to perform: so that he would become a co-creator of the universe.
Nor were the Mormons alone in sanctifying hard work. Their attitude was ultimately derived from the teachings of John Calvin, who preached what Max Weber would make famous as the Protestant work ethic -- an ethic that emerged in the Puritans, the Quakers, the Methodists, the Shakers and all the other various religious communities that glorified hard work and that inevitably ended up by making the members of these communities so prosperous that their wealth began to endanger the well being of their soul.
The theology of hard labor is radically at odds with the theology of the intellectual. The intellectual wants to contemplate the world, and to understand how it works. The man who works with his hand wants to change it, and to reshape it into a more desirable form.
