Pre and Post-Scarcity Ecotheonomics

“Getting people comfortable not working sucks their souls away and destroys their families.”

Not to distract from the ecotheonomics, but I’m shocked that Erickson is so opposed to inherited wealth.

Only two comments…and the definitive comment has been made.

The mechanization of agriculture was apparently the greatest orgy of sin in history, because machines enabled humans to weasel out of the sweaty toiling for food that God imposed as a punishment. Erick and his ilk should consider returning to subsistence agriculture using only handmade tools. That way they don’t risk sweating too little or enjoying too much. They’ll simultaneously avoid diminishing anyone else’s virtue taking this route, since they’ll have no taxable income to redistribute.

Work may be inherently satisfying but obviously people will only avail themselves of those inherent satisfactions if prodded with economic sticks.

Well, people do work—as in, engage in productive activity—without being prodded by economic sticks. It’s a common phenomenon, it seems to me. What this has to do with heaven is rather obscure to me.

Also, everyone should listen to this song.

The only work apparently required in the Garden of Eden is “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground”. From which we can deduce approximately nothing about the actual work required, since when they were turfed out of the Garden God says “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food” – .e.g actual sweat wasn’t required.

As for the Kingdom of Heaven – there’s very little specific promises given. There is “No longer will there be any curse” – which is a reference to the quote above. Also, no pain, sorrow, sickness, or dying. There is much disagreement about exactly which promises are literal, and how.

Economics just isn’t that important, and one will fall in a hole if one tries to make it so

John Holbo I commend your theology in this post — you are quite right, in the Garden Of Eden Adam and Eve did not have to work, and then after they ate of the tree of knowledge which they were told not to do, they were cast out of Eden to labor for their own sustenance forevermore.

God was quite angry about them eating from the tree since he told them not to, and increased the pain of giving birth for Eve and told Adam “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”

So you can see that they only had to work after they got expelled from Eden, as God was quite angry and said they wouldn’t get an after life as well and just turn back to dust, and also giving birth would be more painful. They got cast out of the Garden of Eden so they didn’t eat the fruit of the other tree they got told not to, the tree of life, which if they did then they would have lived forever and given God a headache like when Monkey did that in the Chinese book and it caused so much drama.

On your second point, the operation of the job-market in Heaven, it is organised like several choirs with a somewhat hierarchical structure. This is the current idea about the organisational structure:

First Sphere

These angels serve as the heavenly workers of the Son.

Seraphim – this means burning and these are the highest angels and continually chant praises Holy Holy Holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory!

Cherubim — these are the next highest and have four faces: a man, an ox, a lion, and an eagle. Thomas Aquinas thought Satan was probably a cherub who deliberately tried to get higher promotions by using illegal methods, and then got downgraded. Cherubs are sometimes mistakenly taken for putti which are baby sort of angels without wings.

Thrones — these are living Elders who are connected to the Cherubim and listen to God

Second Sphere

Dominions or Lordships — These regulate and superintend the lower orders of angels

Virtues or Strongholds — These are very virtuous and strong, and both reach toward the ever higher virtue of God, and send down virtue and strength to those below

Powers or Authorities — These are warrior angels that oppose evil spirits like police, and also make sure all the stars and planets stay in order. They are bearers of conscience, and keep history as well, and they distribute powers to humans. As you see this is a very important and diverse heavenly workforce. Some people say none of the Authorities have ever done anything wrong and needed disciplining or downgrading, but others say they think Satan was the Chief of the Authorities before he got found out doing the wrong thing always trying to get promotions he didn’t deserve, and was downgraded from there.

Third Sphere

Principalities or Rulers — these angels guide and protect countries, groups of people, or institutions like the Church. They preside over the normal angels, and carry out orders from the higher Spheres and give blessings to Earth. They also are the graces of the arts and the sciences and are educators and guardians.

Archangels — there is some confusion about this. Whether these are everyday archangels or Seven Archangels that are highest and closest to God like the Archangel Michael. They are suppose to protect countries and be concerned with events of politics and the military and commerce and trade. So these are like your Defence Minister, Trade Minister, and Treasurer and very important.

Angels — These are the most abundant and these are concerned with helping living things, and include personal guardian angels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_angelology

Well, that’s easy to figure out. There’s work, but yes, basic subsistence is assured. I agree that the idea of work as opposed to labour and toil is in the text somewhere.

Genesis 2, according to the New International Version

8Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. 9The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

10-15 [stuff about rivers and how they’re named, and geography, yay!]

15The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. 16And the Lord God commanded the man, “You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; 17but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.”

18The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

19-20 [stuff about naming animals, which was apparently part of the work; nice work! zoology!]

But for Adamf no suitable helper was found. 21So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; [about woman, known stuff]

Erik Erikson: a man who wants to bitch about black people on the Internet, for eternity!

@9: It may be important to remember that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are different versions of the same story. Genesis 2 definitely says that Adam was created to work the Garden, Eve is an afterthought, and there’s a strong implication that they are not having sex until after they eat of the forbidden fruit.

There is an alternative interpretation where the serpent is a Promethean figure who frees Adam and Eve from mindless servitude by giving the knowledge, including the knowledge of how to reproduce. Not saying that’s the best supported interpretation, but it is an interesting one.

Make America Farm Again!

@17: Genesis 1 and 2 do contradict each other in a lot of small ways (the order of creation, and in Genesis 1 man and woman are created together, in 2, separately).

The old testament is replete with this sort of duplication.

So, I think the idea of using to Gen 1 to clarify or explain what Gen 2 says is problematic.

As for the rest, yes God is pissed, and man’s lot is punishment. The question of why God might be so angry about “stolen” knowledge, and how He feels about human autonomy is worth considering. There’s no one right answer here.

Work is force times distance, or kg*m^2/s^2. This implies some passage of time, which, if I were in charge of heaven and hell, would not occur there. The simplest way to provide eternal bliss and torment, it seems to me, is to freeze time in an instant of bliss or agony. The idea of an eternity of time, passing from moment to moment forever is so incomprehensible to me as to seem incoherent, although that may be (one of) my problem(s). Whether ir not that is the case, my way seems more energy-efficient.

Heaven of course is whatever people want and will pay for. A colleague of mine at work, one with some significant accomplishments, once remarked to me, “I wonder what will happen when we die. I’ll bet we get a tour of the galaxy to start.” He had faithfully paid his dues as a Shriner and volunteered as a caller at Bingo games, and so on.

As far as i know, there is no way known to science (no forces, fields, or particles which have shown up in any reliable experiment) to extract memories and personality from a living (or dead) brain and store them in any cosmic cloud, and we know from natural experiments (e.g., brain tumors) that memory and personality are brain functions, so I expect that when my brain dies my memories and personality (such as they are) will cease to exist. At least then I won’t have to do any more work.

Just look at monastic “work requirements”…about 4-6 hours a day…max…the rest of the time is meant to be rest, contemplation and prayer, ( the last two can be combined).

The Genesis story and religious texts in general are rooted in early attempts to describe and explain the expansion in consciousness that is experienced in the activity all brain functional networks at once, a salubrious state of being which can be instigated after long practice of asceticism and single-point concentration on transcendent intellectual concepts like “God”, or a mandala or the world in a mustard seed, and so on.

The sudden onset comes as indescribable revelation.

The status of labor in the post-scarcity economy, similarly, has everyone going in circles.

Work as productive activity is engaged in by every living creature in an ecosystem. One of my best exchanges on CT in the last year or so was with bob mcmanus when he, defending the labor theory of value, alluded to the lilies of the field, and I pointed out that plants “work” to produce flowers, which feed bees, who pollinate plants and incidentally make food for us.

So the Garden of Eden was working before Adam and Eve started to toil, if that’s what you mean by work. That’s pretty much the sense of “work” that we need to have as global resource limits become felt and economies don’t get to treat the non-human workers as an inexhaustible source or sink.

One time I heard a sermon that claimed the Serpent’s Question: “Hath God said?” showed that it is wrong to question things like boundaries. But actually it was exactly the right question. He hath said.

So Adam and Eve ate the fruit which gave them the “knowledge of good and evil”. That is, they could now say, “This is right and true!! That is false and terrible no-good stuff!!” which may indeed be an important milestone in cultural formation, but still today causes no end of trouble and is a good candidate for “original sin”.

Arguably the newly Fundamentalist couple was expelled not strictly for disobedience but for hiding from God, from being ashamed to admit what happened and do the necessary. Again still today, forgiveness is possible with honesty, but Temptation is to go with the coverup, the Bart Simpson defense: I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove I did it.

marcel proust @8

Yes, unlike the seraphim, the sephardim do have to live by the sweat of their brows. The ashkenzim, on the other hand, are often academics.

pnee @16

“…there’s a strong implication that they are not having sex until after they eat of the forbidden fruit.”

On the contrary. Genesis 2 talks about man and woman becoming one flesh. I think the implication is that they were having sex; they just weren’t ashamed about it.

faustusnotes @22

Adam died. He lived 930 years . Unless you’ve seen him around lately.

What makes an economics of heaven absurd is not just infinite supply. It’s also finite demand. All the social sciences are sciences of fallen Man.

(cough) Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.

Less seriously, I’m imagining heaven as like a workhouse.

In the state of Nirvana, on the other hand, we will no longer need material possessions or other non-material status symbols to gratify our narcissism.

Henry @32
As bianca said, I linked to that quote upthread (@18), so you were the first to type out the quote, but not the first to refer to it.

[Btw, there was a time when I thought those lines were perhaps obscene, before I looked up and/or otherwise clarified for myself the meanings of the key words ‘delved’ and ‘span’. First ran across it I think in Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down, which is about radical mvts during the pd of the English civil war — but some of them recycled these lines, orig. from a sermon preached during the 1381 peasants’ revolt.]

William Blake saw the traditional patriarchal God as doddering senile old man. And sometimes referred to Y*W*H as “Nobodaddy”. But then Blake was some sort of Christian Universalist/Animist. Blake is one of my favorite “interesting nuts”. Alfred Korzybsky and Wilhelm Reich are a couple of examples.

Someone should represent traditional Judaism on this thread so I’ll jump in.

The shorter answer is N0 there cannot be work; and actually the question is itself ridiculous.

Maimonides believes the world of reward will be entirely spiritual with no physicality at all. It will be just souls basking in the radiance of sensations of the divine. Obviously no work here.

Nachmanides argues on this and posits that there will be a physicality; but that physicality will no longer have properties of deficiency or decay. There would no point in working to prevent say – boredom, because boredom is a property of deficiency.

In Talmud tractate Avodah Zarah there is a thought experiment of what this world would look like if there were no temptation or choice to disobey the divinely expressed will:
Animals stopped reproducing
Plants stopped growing
People lost interest in reproducing and in WORKING. – In other words the world had only one motivation left – to do as much as possible to bask in knowledge of the divine.

There is a science fiction story (well really a series of books) by the late Phillip Jose Farmer called “Riverworld” . Riverworld is a mashup between an Edenic world populated by people with full memories of life as it was when they lived on Earth. One of the main characters winds up marrying a child who died on Earth at age 5 and grew to adulthood on the Riverworld. The marriage ultimately fails because there is too great a psychological and emotional gulf between someone whose psyche if formed from the motivations of dead Earth and someone is psyche is formed in a more Edenic model.

About heavenly working hours:

Von morgens acht Uhr bis Mittag zwölf Uhr: frohlocken.
Von Mittag zwölf Uhr bis acht Uhr abends: Hosianna singen!

Won’t try to translate or explain, but if you have a good grip on the german language you should seek out “Ein Münchner im Himmel” on a video portal near you.

Jake @30, Howard @33: the well-known hippie John Milton went out of his way in “Paradise Lost” to have Adam and Eve enjoy sinless sex before the Fall. They have sweaty sinful sex afterwards, but Milton is too classy to draw a convincing contrast, as with rape.

The orthodox Christian belief is in the resurrection of the body – perfect as is Christ’s body. Hard to know what comes with this? Sweat? Tears? Excretion? Or are these imperfections? The only detail provided is that one shall be immortal, glorious, powerful and infused with the spirit. So worth a really high wage except for the competition.

The best part of “Ein Münchner im Himmel” is the end, where Heaven’s messenger angel just goes and stays forever in the Hofbräuhaus, drinking beer, so Bavaria’s ruling party (which is as xenophobic and conservative as they come) to this day is still waiting for divine advice, but will never receive it.

I thought the most recent, up-to-date interpretation of the Garden of Eden story is as a metaphor for the conversion from hunter-gatherers (nature’s gentlemen) to farmers (grunts.) The hunter-gatherers labor perhaps an hour or two a day (in good times anyway) for their subsistence, while the farmers have to hump it all day long every day. No wonder the transition was experienced as a “curse.” Also, it seems to suggest that the much higher level of (coercive) social organization demanded by farming communities required draconian rules–which could easily have passed for the “knowledge of good and evil”, which had been unnecessary in the good old days. Since it seems generally accepted that hunter-gatherers were healthier and probably happier than their farming descendants, the whole story seems to hint that the transition may well not have been voluntary. Farming communities were much denser than hunter-gatherers and would certainly have won any military encounters, and may have spread for reasons having little to do with the well-being of the average person.

Some of Jesus’ sayings and parables, of course. Not all.

And this would suggest both that ancient Israelite and first-century Jewish ‘Jesus Movement’ writers took economic concerns seriously. I tend to agree, but it’s a contested area of research.