Thomas Carlyle and "Labour"

Thomas Carlyle's works were a pleasure to read. While his crankiness did shine through at moments, he was overall dead-on in his takes on society. During this blog, I'm going to focus on what I liked and what I didn't like about his idealism. I will also talk about his piece "Labour".

To start, I want to begin by discussing what I don't like about Carlyle. I know, I know, I sound like a "glass-is-half-empty" guy, but I'd rather end this blog on a positive note than a negative one. Carlyle seems like the kind of guy that would hang out with Karl Marx and just bitch about all of the inequalities in the world. I can't stand this. You can count this as one of my biggest pet peeves. I guess what frustrates me is how someone as brilliant as Carlyle can't realize the most obvious aspects of inequality. The one aspect I'd like to bring up is free will. Perhaps the main reason why inequality exists is due to man's, or woman's, free will. The decisions we make in life determine whether we're rich or poor, intelligent or unintelligent, healthy or unhealthy, etc. If tomorrow everyone had the same amount of money, in one year's time, we'd have the rich and the poor. Why? Because some people made good decisions with their money, and some people made bad decisions with their money. And of course, in the middle of the pile, we have people who made both good and bad decisions. Sure, some people start with more than others, but that's life. What good is complaining about it if it changes nothing? I find this ironic coming from someone who talks about the importance of work.

Now, getting to what I like about Carlyle. In his piece "Labour", Carlyle stresses the importance of a man's work. He says "there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work. (481)" This is an incredibly powerful document, as it applies to all generations, but I think it should be required of my generation to read. We live in an age where we want things immediately without working hard to get it. We want food? Go to the drive-thru. Even then, if it takes a few minutes longer than usual to get our food, we get agitated! Carlyle highlights the fact that, outside of money, work is good on many different levels. He says, "Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it...Labour is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his God-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into him by the Almighty God... (482)" While we look at a job, or work in general, as a means to getting money, he puts the task in a different perspective. He wants us to realize that without work, we would cease to exist. So, by his standards, finding work is fulfilling our life's purpose. We are helping prolong ours and future generation's existence.