IS WORK PUNISHMENT FOR THE FALL OF ADAM?

[Being an address delivered to the Joint Meeting of the Catholic Men Organization of St Cyril's Parish, Okota, Lagos to mark Workers' Day.]

We dedicate this engagement in honour of St Joseph The Worker, the husband of Mary and the foster father of our Lord and Saviour Jesus, The Christ.

Joseph worked as hard as was required in his day to take care of his family. There has been no narrative in the Bible or in Church Tradition that our heavenly Father sent his angels to deliver a hamper or two chock full of food for the Holy Family. So much for any man, any person expecting an easy ride through life, after faithfully reciting the Pater Noster.

In addition, Joseph passed on his trade as a Carpenter to his divine son Jesus, who kept faithfully at it until he began his public ministry.

IN GENESIS, we encounter the primordial origins of work. Most Christians and perhaps some biblical scholars will trace the origin to the "expulsion" of our first parents Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden after the fall.

THE FALL
Genesis 3: 17 - 19
To Adam God said,
“Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
18It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 BY THE SWEAT OF YOUR BROW
YOU WILL EAT YOUR FOOD
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”

The tone of this part of the biblical narrative indicates a stern judgement from the Throne of God. This may explain the notion of many that work is all drudgery. We will easily recall some of the lamentations of Job:

Job 7: 4 "When will the morning come, . etc"

The question then arises. From whence came the socalled Western Christian/Protestant Work Ethic? With the dour reading of Work as part of Man's punishment on losing Divine Favour due to disobedience in the Garden of Eden, what then is the origin of the DIGNITY OF LABOUR? How did we evolve to now have such a much more sublime view of Man's really brief journey on earth. I suspect that this comes from an earlier passage in Genesis.

Gen 2: 15 "The LORD took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden TO WORK ON IT and take care of it."

Other translations have used the following renditions:

- to tend it and watch over it.
- to work it and keep it.
- to cultivate it and keep it.
- to dress it and to keep it.
- to work it and watch over it.

This passage where the concept of work is introduced preceeds the Fall of Adam. It may then seem that God always intended for Man to work. However I wouldn't know if these philosophers who expounded on the so called Dignity of Labour arrived at their conclusion via my route.

EVOLUTION OF WORK OVER THE MILLENIA
We depend on several sources for history in this regard. Apart from biblical narratives, which obviously has immense relevance for those of us of the Christian persuasion, we have the different myths and lores originating from various societies and cultures across the globe. Then we have geological and archeological determinations coupled with modern scientific analysis. To these you add oral and written/documented records. Some of these correlate rather accurately, while others don't. These studies/investigations continue unabated.

From the above, one thing that is certain is that Man has always worked. He was at various times a free ranging soul, hunting and gathering fearing only the elements, wild animals that may also be interested in hunting him and his family for food. It must definitely have been a harrowing experience. Echoes of Franz Fanon's "nasty brutal and short," coined to represent a much more recent era.

As Man settled into communities, strong men arose, perhaps naturally, in the Dark Ages, and pressed the average man into serfdom. Man was free alright, living in his own hovel, but very little of the fruits of his backbreaking labour, including his wife, was truly his own. In this feudal arrangement, the Overlord had power over everything including life and death. He could, with the snap of a finger, press the serfs into battle against his own enemies, against whom the serfs held no grudge.

We are all familiar with the records of the Slave Trade, especially here in Africa with ultimate destination being initially the Arab World but later the new continent of the Americas and the Caribbean. Hard unpaid work was the norm. This and other aspects put a knife to the very sinews that held African society together. This damage persists to this very day.

This obnoxious practice has been replicated in several societies around the world over the millenia, whether among the Euro-Asian communities in the era of Ghenhis Khan and Atilla the Hun, the primordial occupiers of the British Isles who built Stonehenge, the Chinese and the Japanese. Modern society has definitely put most of these practices where they truly belong, in the past.

People chafed under the most burdensome yokes but, with various degrees of constantly increasing pressure and success, stirred to rid themselves of them. It has never been the intention of Man to return to the Adamic condition existing before The Fall. Man only wanted to work for his own benefit and, as society evolved, also for the benefit of society at large. Many of you may have watched the movie BRAVEHEART. The mythical character William Wallace, is supposedly an amalgam of various real historical Scottish nationalists, who over time risked all to rid themselves of their English overlords. Bravehearts can be found in all societies up to and including the modern era. They just want to be left alone to work for themselves and their loved ones.

We must note that even in the Nigeria of today, the vast majority of our people want the opportunity and the environment to work. Chinua Achebe's character Unoka in his novel Things Fall Apart, is definitely an aberration. We embrace work, hard work so much that I hereby propose that Fathers' Day and Mothers' Day too should be celebrated in appreciation every week!

THE MODERN ERA: WORKERS' RIGHTS & LABOUR UNIONISM

With the benefit of hindsight, it would now seem inevitable that evolution towards a world increasingly governed by knowledge, science and scientific methods, with Literature and the arts serving as a backdrop, would gravitate towards more centralized production systems. Welcome to the Industrial Age! Most farmers and craftsmen would now leave their homes, farms and sheds to go work for somebody else or even an impersonal corporate entity. It didn't take long for the underpaid workers, toiling for long hours in often unsafe environments, to deduce that here indeed is the new serfdom! . Labour agitation was born, organized or not, the forebears two centuries ago of the modern Labour Movement. These movements have been severely impacted to a large extent by the many theories of Political Economy developed by many including Adam Smith, Fred Engel, Karl Marx. These define the many ISMs, Feudalism, Capitalism, Socialism and Communism. Fascism fits somewhere in this continuum.

On the Workers/Employment front of the struggle, the equilibrium has been fluid, shifting slowly but inexorably towards increased Labour involvement in decision making. The more openness required in corporate governance has made it increasingly difficult to hide money under the table whilst starving the Workers. In Trump’s America, the chosen route of the owners of Capital is now sheer bravado. As far back as forty years ago, Labour leaders or their chosen representatives have been sitting on the Boards of major US and European companies and routinely pore over the financial records. This makes for more transparency in Wages and other negotiations. The value ascribed to Man's work is gradually if reluctantly being recognized. However we should make no mistake about this. Nigeria is nowhere reflected in this trajectory. The policies of our various administrations over the years have essentially remained divide and rule. All effort is geared towards destabilizing the Labour unions while demanding or expecting little or no productivity from the workers. All this is illustrative of the Resource Curse plaguing Nigeria, since Nigerian workers in the public sector, are remunerated by income that they do NOT generate - Oil Money!

MAY 1, MAY DAY: CELEBRATION OF INTERNATIONAL WORKERS' DAY
The world cannot but have noticed the huge May Day Parades held routinely in several Socialist and Communist countries over the past seven decades. At these events the ruling party brass seeks to project an air of success in achieving an utopian classless society where everyone is a contented worker, with the party leadership mere co-travellers. They know that this is a farce just like we do. In addition, they know that we know. Listening to the earlier manifestation of Communist mythology, one would be hard pressed to believe that the Original May 1 Workers' Protest actually took place in, of all places, Chicago, Illinois in the USA. These were events and planned worker actions in the days before, on and after the Haymarket Square disruption by the police of a peaceful gathering by striking workers on May 1, 1886. The shooting and massacre that ensued attracted global outrage and in the ensuing struggle between the two major sides of the ideological divide, Europe, the Communist and Socialist world, including Russia and China, inherited the May Day Commemoration, now generally called the INTERNATIONAL WORKERS DAY. The various US administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, have chosen to downplay if not disparage its significance. So here we are celebrating another Workers' Day. Whichever way we look at these developments leading up till today, we must be grateful that God has granted us the intellect and the brawn necessary for subduing the earth as the Lord has commanded. Definitely WORK is good. That is my take