Source: Law & Liberty
by Richard Gunderman
“The view that work represents an affliction or even a curse stretches far back in our cultural history. In the Book of Genesis, when the first humans are expelled from the Garden of Eden, the woman is told that her labor in childbearing will be accompanied by suffering, and the man learns that the ground is cursed because of him, and only through painful toil will he eat of it. In the very next book, Exodus, the Egyptians forced the Israelites into ‘hard service in mortar and bricks and in every kind of field labor.’ A casual reader of core Western texts might easily suppose that freedom from work is a blessing devoutly to be wished for. Yet there are good reasons to doubt this assessment.” (10/11/24)