The End of Shorter Hours

1
The End of Shorter Hours

• Why did it happen?

2
Explanation Strategy

• Explain why the process occurred and why so many
  thought it would continue.
• Workers wanted it for
• Economic reasons
• Higher wages
• Protect against unemployment
• Cultural reasons- time to live
• E P Thompson (struggle against time becomes the
  struggle for time

3
Explain why the process occurred and why so many
thought it would continue.

• Idea of Progress supports workers in their very
  practical efforts to reduce working hours
• Progress as the advance of Freedom In USA
• Political Freedom prepares the way for
• Economic freedom (free market) that leads to
  ABUNDANCE
• To higher freedom to explore what it means to be
  free- (The Groundhogs Question)

4
Do you believe?

• Do you think we should try to make things better?
• And reform things that need reforming?
• And solve problems and relieve human distress?

5
Belief in Progress is still widespread

6
The Genesis of Higher Progress

• John Adams

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I must study Politicks and War that my sons may
have liberty to study Mathematicks and
Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks
and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval
Architecture, navigation, Commerce and
Agriculture, in order to give their Children a
right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick,
Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.
(Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, post 12
May 1780)
8
Leaders like Jefferson, Gallatin, and Barlow
might without extravagance count upon a coming
time when diffused ease and education should
bring the masses into familiar contact with
higher forms of human achievement, and their vast
creative power, turned toward a nobler culture,
might rise to the level of that democratic genius
which found expression in the Parthenon might
create for five hundred million people the
America of thought and art which alone could
satisfy their omnivorous ambition. (Henry Adams,
History of the United States of America During
the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson,
1890) James Truslow Adams, Epic of America (1933)
9

• The world evidently supposes, and we have
  evidently supposed so too, that the States are
  merely to achieve the equal franchise, an
  elective government--to inaugurate the
  respectability of labor, and become a nation of
  practical operatives, law-abiding, orderly and
  well-off. Yes, those are indeed parts of the task
  of America but they not only do not exhaust the
  progressive conception, but rather arise, teeming
  with it, as the mediums of deeper, higher
  progress. Daughter of a physical
  revolution--mother of the true revolutions, which
  are of the interior life, and of the arts. For so
  long as the spirit is not changed, any change of
  appearance is of no avail. (Whitman, Democratic
  Vistas, 849)

10
The Genesis of Higher Progress

• Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening

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The Kingdom of God in America.

• H. Richard Niebuhr

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• The belief that material progress and political
  reforms might prepare the way for an increasingly
  more Christ-like world, for the spread of
  justice, peace, knowledge and love, represented
  by the image of the kingdom earth, was among the
  most ecumenical of beliefs in the United States
  from Colonial Days to the 20th century.

13
Post vs. Pre Millennialism

• Millennium thousand year kingdom on earth
• Postmillennialism- Humans will help construct a
  kingdom on Earth (a utopia) in preparation for
  the coming of Christ
• Premillennialism- Christ will come unannounced to
  a world unprepared, and theres the devil to pay-
  be careful what you are doing on that dreadful
  day The left behind series

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Millennialism

• And the American Dream
• Elements in common
• Kingdom on earth overarching set of
  interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs
• that by whatever cause, human or divine,
  progress in history was not only possible but
  underway particularly in the United States

15
Kingdom on earth overarching set of
interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs

• that modern scientific and material advances and
  the spread of human rights and political reforms
  had profound religious and spiritual
  implications.

16
Kingdom on earth overarching set of
interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs

• that such advances were desirable because they
  freed humans from the tyranny of the state and
  the exploitation of the powerful and even from
  the chains of material necessity, making it
  possible for them to claim their full humanity.

17
Kingdom on earth overarching set of
interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs

• However these new freedoms were problematic,
  raising new questions about what such freedoms
  entailed, challenging individuals and states to
  make the right choices, tempting them to mistake
  their newly found liberty for license.
  (Groundhogs Question)

18
Kingdom on earth overarching set of
interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs

• Therefore the churches needed to respond actively
  to the advent of new liberties, offering their
  guidance, teaching and vision, providing answers
  to what increasingly refined freedoms, never
  before experience by the majority of humans,
  offered individuals and meant in history.

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Kingdom on earth overarching set of
interrelated, fundamental and enduring beliefs

• By so doing the churches might help establish
  (or welcome the coming of) the kingdom on earth-
  might help into bring an increasingly more
  Christ-like world the culmination of which might
  greet, figuratively the end of history, or
  literally the coming of the Eternal Kingdom.

20
Like the three Adamses, church leaders struggled
for generations with the meaning and implications
of the new liberties being won in America, trying
to guide the direction of progress, urging others
to make use of new opportunities to follow
Christs banner leading beyond earthly things of
market place and courthouse toward the kingdom to
come on earth. Beyond want and necessaries,
ordinary purposes and convention, obligation and
reward, progress presented Libertys ultimate
challenge to the churches to fill the purest of
freedoms with activities that were complete in
themselves that containing their own meaning
were their own virtue and reward. Many thus
recognized the modern challenges of the
autotelic, questioning and exploring what a
fullness of free-being might look like in
anticipation of the kingdom to come, and
proposing with the likes of the Adames and
Whitman a variety of metaphors and possibilities
that might answer freedoms final challenge.
21
Jonathan Edwards To Set And Sing This Life Away

• traditionally deterministic
• Only God could save individuals, awaken them to
  their salvation and cause a people to prosper.
• Service to God is perfect freedom

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independent moral authority (exousia) reserved
to God, vs.. Christ gift of eschatological
freedom (eleutheros)

• Good works could never guarantee salvation. By
  Grace, being redeemed regardless of merit, humans
  act in a kind of spiritual autotelic state,
  inclined to do those good works given to them by
  God as ends in themselves apart from reward.

23

• Redeemed, individuals act in the fullness of a
  being, lacking no good thing but motivated by the
  most powerful of intrinsic motives, a redeemed
  will. Such acts are thus radically free (vain),
  at the zenith of human liberty. Containing their
  own meaning (in Christ), they are complete in
  themselves

24
Redeemed by Christ and habitually inclined to
virtuous action, humans become free agents of the
kingdom- free to participate in the beauty of
Gods holiness as His kingdom unfolds through
time, a priceless gift denied even to the
angels.
25

• In the spiritual autotelic state Edwards
  imagined, the redeemed life was wholly gift. Even
  where Edwards rejects the idea that humans are
  free moral agents he repeatedly emphasizes the
  finer autotelic (or eschatological) freedoms
  that comes as gift with Gods Grace.

26

• Edwards described in detail the kinds of
  autotelic activities humans might enjoy as heirs
  to Gods kingdom, producing a catalogue of what
  John Ryan was later to call the higher goods of
  life.

27

• Humans experience Christs freedom on earth both
  as freedom from the slavery of self-love that is
  sin and the freedom for the gifts of the spirit.

28

• While filling his sermons with threats of hell to
  discourage sinners, Edwards nevertheless
  emphasized that sin was its own punishment here
  and now in an argument that was a mirror image of
  his claims about the autotelic rewards of virtue.

29

• By contrast, the pleasures found in Christs
  Liberty, even though they may be esteemed the
  greatest bondage by the profane world, are in
  reality the best kind of pleasures in the
  world the desires for which are pleasurable in
  themselves and their satisfactions, instead of
  satiating and enslaving, lead the spirit to ever
  new, more sublime spiritual joys.

30

• in the service of God there is full and free
  liberty to seek as much pleasure as we please, to
  enjoy the best kind of pleasure in the world and
  as much of it as we possibly can obtain with all
  our mighte and main. There are no Restraints.  

31
The traditional spiritual virtues of course
figure prominently as general categories in his
vision of the kingdom.

• Then shall flourish in an eminent manner those
  Christian virtues of meekness, forgiveness,
  long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, and
  brotherly-kindness, those excellent fruits of the
  Spirit.

32

• But Edwards goes on to detail specific kinds of
  fruits of the spirit that might result as
  practical expressions of these virtues. Through
  prayer, supplication, and meditation on Gods
  word the soul may become dimly aware of the
  presence of God, seeing through a glass darkly.
  Though incomplete, such awareness is still the
  essence of freedom and the ultimate answer to
  freedoms question what is worth doing in and
  for itself? Communing with the Omnipotent, part
  of whose essence is love, might occupy the soul
  eternally and certainly fill our days here on
  earth with works completely satisfying both in
  the desire and fulfillment.

33
mysterium tremendum

• There are some persons that have been swallowed
  up exceedingly with a sense of the awful
  grateness and majesty of God and told me that
  if they in the time of it, had had the least
  fear, that they were not at peace with this so
  great a God, they should instantly have died.

34
mysterium tremendum is Ottos term Rudolf Otto's
Das Heilige (1917), translated from the German as
The Idea of the Holy. Otto characterizes the
numinous as the holy (i.e. God) minus its moral
and rational aspects it is the ineffable core of
religion the experience of it cannot to be
described in terms of other experiences. Hence
the mysterium tremendum For more go to this link.
35

• The final answer to the question why is there
  something rather than nothing, must needs be
  happiness and the communication of the goodness
  of God nothing but the Almightys inclination to
  communicate of his own happiness, could be the
  motive to him to create the world and that man
  is the immediate object of this goodness, and
  subject of this communicated happiness.

36
In songs of praise and thanksgiving and in a
transport of joy, the soul can find its authentic
recreation and the community its voice.

• near voluptuous enthusiasm
• Our public praises were then greatly enlivened.
  God was then served in our psalmody, in some
  measure, in the beauty of holiness. It has been
  observable, that there has been scarce any part
  of divine worship, wherein good men amongst us
  have had grace so drawn forth, and their hearts
  so lifted up in the ways of God, as in singing
  his praises. Our congregation excelled all that
  ever I knew in the external part of the duty
  before, the men generally carrying regularly and
  well, three parts of music, and the women a part
  by themselves But now they were evidently wont
  to sing with unusual elevation of heart and
  voice, which made the duty pleasant indeed A
  great delight in singing praises to God and Jesus
  Christ, and longing that this present life may
  be, as it were, one continued song of praise to
  God longing, as the person expressed it, to set
  and sing this life away.

37
Nature then reveals the splendor of Gods design

• Elevated by joy, the commonplace may be
  experienced as newly satisfying in and for
  itself.
• The light and comfort which some of them enjoy,
  gives a new relish to their common blessings, and
  causes all things about them to appear as it were
  beautiful, sweet, and pleasant to them. All
  things abroad, the sun, moon and stars, the
  clouds and sky, the heavens and earth, appear as
  it were with a cast of divine glory and sweetness
  upon them

38
Watching God at Work

• The heavens are telling
• And so is the firmament of history
• Creation is an ongoing project
• We can watch God at work in history- an activity
  pleasing in itself that Edwards claims as his own

39
Watching God at work in history. from the first
promise of the seed of the woman to this time,
may easily observe that it has all along been
Gods manner to open new scenes and to bring
forth to view things new and wonderful, such as
eye had not seen nor ear heard nor entered into
the heart of man or angels, to the astonishment
of heaven and earth, not only in the revelations
he makes of his mind and will, but also the works
of his hands. so it is in the progress of new
creation and we live in those latter days And
it is a work above all others glorious, as it
concerns the happiness of mankind more
happiness, and a greater benefit to man
40
Community
As ecclesiastical authority and civil tyranny
weakened in colonies, the people found new, free
ways of congregating and acting together. In
Christs true ecclesia the poor are fed and God
receives all glory and praise humans are freed
from competition with one another In such a
condition, fellowship, caring and compassion
might be found in a society unlike any other on
earth. Brothers and sisters in Christ may begin
to treat each other as ends in themselves, worthy
of pure affection, in true charity undiluted by
selfish purposes, untroubled by envy, freely
giving to each other those spiritual gifts that
they received freely by Gods grace.
41
Gods Peace

• As Edwards envisioned it, Christs peace
  contained the static Classical Epicurean virtues
  of tranquility and simplicity. By contrast,
  Christs peace was also forward looking- a
  waiting patiently for the Lord and the coming
  kingdom

42
Finding it hard to describe Christs Peace,
Edwards quoted a member of his congregation who
had tried to put her experience into
wordsblessed, blessed, blessed be the Lord my
God! He hath brought me to a place of rest, even
to the sweet running waters of Life. The way I
now go in is a sweet and easy way, strewed with
flowers he hath brought me into a place more
sweet than the garden of Eden. Oh the joy, the
joy, the delights and joy that I feel! 0 how
wonderful!
43
Enough/Abundance

• Resting in Christs peace, the soul is untroubled
  by the quest for eternally more of the things of
  this world. As John Ryan was to claim nearly two
  centuries later, Edwards understood that human
  material needs (what he called objective or
  extrinsic needs) were legitimate and should be
  satisfied. One could even take a rational delight
  in the gratification of them. But unlike the
  inherent needs they were finite.

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• God will give you liberty to recreate and
  delight yourself in the best, the purest and most
  exquisite pleasures, as much as you please,
  without restraint.

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Summary of Gods RecreationsA Christian list of
answers to the groundhog

• Enjoying the peace of God
• waiting and watching for Him
• delighting in true community and fellowship
• doing acts of penance and charity
• seeking to see God and His work in history
• finding a heightened awareness and appreciation
  of nature
• taking joy in the everydayness of life
• Praising
• giving thanks
• Repenting
• trembling before the Presence
• reading the bible
• Praying
• Singing
• experiencing His presence more and more in this
  life
• Being redeemed might easily become a full time
  occupation- indeed such recreations anticipated
  the coming of the kingdom and could fill
  eternity.

46
Progress and a People

• God made His promises of liberty to nations as
  well as individuals
• Hence the kingdom will be a fullness of time in
  which things spiritual will fill this life for
  all.

47
The Great Awakening- a foretaste of the kingdom

• yet there then (the awakening) was the reverse
  of what commonly is. Religion was with all sorts
  the great concern and the world was a thing only
  by the by. The only thing in their view was to
  get the kingdom, and evey day seemed, in many
  respects, like a sabbath-day

48
The weakening of the Protestant Work Ethic and
the beginning of the school of work

• 'Tis great imprudence for one that would obtain
  salvation to involve and entangle himself in
  needless cares. A man should be so much at
  liberty that he can pursue his main end without
  distraction. Labour to get thoroughly convinced
  that there is something else needs caring for
  more than this world The care of his soul will
  thrust out the care of his body. And for all his
  outward business he will be most intent upon his
  spiritual concern

49
The Kingdom to Come

• Edwards view of human progress and the coming
  kingdom included material abundance. But wealth
  was decidedly a means to an end. With wealth,
  ease might increase. With increasing ease and
  as God granted humans their contrivances and
  inventions, the redeemed would have ever more
  time for more noble exercise and for spiritual
  employments.

50
Edwards Millennium

• 'Tis probable that the world shall be more like
  Heaven in the millennium in this respect that
  contemplation and spiritual employments, and
  those things that more directly concern the mind
  and religion, will be more the saint's ordinary
  business than now. There will be so many
  contrivances and inventions to facilitate and
  expedite their necessary secular business that
  they will have more time for more noble exercise,
  and they shall have better contrivances for
  assisting one another through the whole earth by
  more expedite, easy, and safe communication
  between distant regions than now. And so the
  country about the poles need no longer be hid
  from us, but the whole earth may be as one
  community, one body in Christ.

51
Samuel Hopkins

• Edwards pupil, Samuel Hopkins took up Edwards
  themes and extended them.
• Established a new influential school of theology-
  Hopkinsianism

52
The Present

• for Hopkins serving God might become such an
  absolute fullness that all concern for future
  punishment and reward were crowded out.
• Willing to be damned for Gods glory
• Zen like focus on the here and now

53
Disinterested Benevolence

• Complete giving up of self and self-seeking
• Complete focus on the wellbeing of others
• Loss of self
• Redemption was a process of replacing self with
  Christ who then might fill the soul to
  overflowing. For the redeemed, the joys of
  Christianity were vouchsafe here and now as one
  lived for and suffered with Christ and for others
  instead of self.

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Hopkinsianism

• Gloomy Puritan conscience

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Hopkins and the Millennium

• When all these things are considered, which have
  now been suggested, and others which will
  naturally occur to them who attend to this
  subject, it will appear evident, that in the days
  of the Millennium, there will be a fullness and
  plenty of all the necessaries and conveniences
  of life, to render all much more easy and
  comfortable, in their worldly circumstances and
  enjoyments, than ever before, and with much less
  labour and toil And that it will not be then
  necessary for any men or women to spend all, or
  the greatest part of their time in labour, in
  order to procure a living, and enjoy all the
  comforts and desirable conveniences of life. It
  will not be necessary for each one, to labour
  more than two or three hours in a day, and not
  more than will conduce to the health and vigor
  of the body. And the rest of their time they will
  be disposed to spend in reading and conversation,
  and in all those exercises which are necessary
  and proper, in order to improve their minds, and
  make progress in knowledge especially in the
  knowledge of divinity And in studying the
  scriptures, and in private and social and public
  worship, and attending on public instruction, c.
  When the earth shall be all subdued, and
  prepared in the best manner for cultivation, and
  houses and enclosures, and other necessary and
  convenient buildings shall be erected, and
  completely finished, consisting of the most
  durable materials, the labour will not be hard,
  and will require but a small portion of their
  time, in order to supply every one with all the
  neceflaries and conveniences of life And the
  rest of their time will not be spent in
  dissipation or idleness, but in business, more
  entertaining and important, which has been now
  mentioned. (A Treatise on the Millennium, 1794)