Our current crisis is due to the fact that we have, as a civilization, refused to live within our means – and the means afforded us by the natural world – over roughly the past 50 years. Mistaking a temporary glut of post-war wealth and resource plenty as a permanent condition, we are told by our leaders – indeed, we demand of them that they tell us – that we can continue to have it all, costless plenitude. Yet these past thirty-odd years of our â??economyâ?? have been one in which we have maintained our wealth simultaneously by transferring the accumulated national wealth abroad, importing oil and debt, while refusing to face the mounting costs of this exercise…Meanwhile we continue to dismantle those cultural institutions that once taught restraint and limits – many of them religious, since they are an offense, above all, to our sense of sexual entitlement – in an effort to achieve ever more perfect individual autonomy….Yesterday the President told us that we were going to have to become again a nation that worked – and my ears perked up – until he described precisely what he meant. By work, more of us are to become scientists and engineers. That is, more of us are to become the kinds of workers who make it possible for the rest of us not to work, to engage in the sort of work that lies at the heart of the modern project, namely of extracting from a recalcitrant nature its secrets so that we can enjoy the â??relief of the human estate.â?? More of us are to engage in that project that is being taken up readily by our Chinese and Indian competitors, to transform our world ever more into a useful commodity for our pleasure and enjoyment. Americans must cease trying to make easy money at the casinos of Wall Street and instead seek to extend the mastery and dominion of nature so that the rest of us will not have to work or think too hard about what makes living possible or even worthwhile. Fewer traders, more lab coats. Above all, no jobs that actually demand work. Top scientists are working to eliminate any possible drudgery from our lives, especially the need to do things with our hands, make or repair our own stuff, understand for ourselves how the world works and how we can best live in it.
Patrick Deneen
