Max Weber was a German economist and sociologist whose theory developed out of watching Protestants at work -- the example often used is the lowly cobbler working away at his cobbler's bench, making a shoe and humming a hymn -- and Weber decided that labor framed as an ethical expression of faith in God led inexorably to the development of capitalism.  Or something like that.  At any rate he came up with the phrase "Protestant Work Ethic" and later just "Work Ethic" when he realized it wasn't all about the Christians.

Now, you can call me crazy, but I always thought that, for instance, Methodism (a form of Protestantism for you non-Christians out there) developed as a way of helping people cope with capitalism.  My great grandmother Dinah used to go out into the fields and factories in Yorkshire and preach to the common laborers about the glories of God which they would come to know if they just did their miserable low-paying back-breaking jobs and accepted the Lord into their hearts and didn't drink --  Methodists, you understand, tended to be very much opposed to alcohol as a way of coping with capitalism.  In other words, you worked hard, prayed hard, and even though life was terrible and painful, when you died you got to go to Heaven.  Where everything, apparently, would be really really nice. 

The only downside to this approach, in my opinion, was that the sensible thing to do would be to die as soon as possible.  However, eventually the Methodists stopped letting women preach and Dinah had passed onto her reward long before 1904, so Weber could not possibly have met her, or he might have sung a different tune, as they used to say, and his theory might have gone in another direction entirely.  

All of this came to me because I was reading the Summer-Fall issue of SALMAGUNDI Nos. 155-156, in which Jennifer Delton discusses and reviews Robert Dahl [On Political Equality. Yale U.P. 2006] and Alan Wolfe [Does American Democracy Still Work?  Yale U.P. 2006] and in the process discusses the "death of that phenomenon known as postwar liberalism."  Further, she references one of my favorite writers, Christopher Lasch, whose 1991 work, "The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics" addresses the issue of why "vast numbers of blue-collar, ordinary voters, the so-called Reagan Democrats, had abandoned the Democratic Party in the 1980s."

What Prof. Delton points out is what Lasch argued: that when you equate "Progress" with distribution of goods (who gets what) or "material abundance" you end up being opposed to those traditional values like family, community and religion which come to be seen as "reactionary obstructions to progress and greater economic equality" (Delton).  

I know I'm supposed to be amusing here -- and most of the time I think I am, a little, right? -- but sometimes you just got to look at this stuff going on.  I mentioned a while back Joe Bageant's book "Deer Hunting with Jesus" and how he was trying to figure out what happened to the Worker in America.  My friend X called to say she's re-reading Joe and found his website [ http://www.joebageant.com Dispatches from America's Class Wars ] and she's giving Joe's book to everyone for Christmas.

Oh, and my old chum M-J K. wanted me to note that her father was born in 1904.  M-J was also raised in the Methodist Church.  She was additionally married in one in upstate NY.  I attended and had great fun perusing the hymnal with S.K. in the pew next to me, pointing out favorites to one another:

"When through the woods and forest glades I wander
and hear the birds sing sweetly in the trees;
when I look down from lofty mountain grandeur,
and hear the brook, and feel the gentle breeze;
Then sings my soul..."

A hymn that, being published in 1953, could not possibly have been the one the cobbler was singing when Max Weber walked by his shop, but hum a few bars and I can pull up nearly every line without even thinking.  So maybe Weber knew that there is something deep down in your Geist that makes you just keep going, cobbling, working, and wishin and hopin and thinkin and prayin...

except that's Burt Bacharach isn't it.  So maybe what it really comes down to is Dionne Warwick.