'The wealth of nations has lost that connection with the body's sweat and the Earth's abundance'

From Let's talk about work by Peter Conrad :

In earlier times, our culture treated work as a curse or at least a lowly, shaming necessity like defecation. Adam and Eve spent the time in Eden cultivating their garden and were only condemned to earn a living after their expulsion from the good, happy, idle place. Christianity made work a consequence of the fall and for that reason afflicted women with what are penitentially known as labour pains. The Greeks took an even more disdainful view of work, which for them was beneath the dignity of a true human being.

The 12 labours of Hercules, which include cleaning mucky stables, a job fit for desperate members of the underclass, were tasks imposed by the gods to demean the uppity hero. This lofty classical attitude took for granted the existence of slaves, who were the equivalent of our labour-saving gadgets - not people but appliances to be worked to death and then thrown away.

The world we recognise as modern began by revoking the curse on work. As Alain de Botton argues in his new book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, ours is the first society to believe that work should make us happy, "even in the absence of a financial imperative". The change dates from the Reformation. Calvin sanctified capitalism by suggesting that salvation owed more to good works than to blind, trusting faith.

One of the puritans mocked by Ben Jonson in his play Bartholomew Fair is called Zeal-of-the-Land Busy: zealotry and business, as Jonson recognised, had made a shrewd and lucrative merger. In 18th-century France, the compilers of the Encyclopédie laughed at the lassitude of the governing elite and treated artisans with unprecedented respect. Diderot, one of the encyclopaedists, was fascinated by specialised trades like glassblowing, masonry and silver-plating, which showed that menial men possessed rare, almost magical skills.

The philosopher Locke challenged hereditary privilege when he declared that all property derived from "the labour of our body and the work of our hands". We use those two terms interchangeably, but for Locke they were not synonyms: labour remained carnal, still as much of an agonising chore as a woman's birth pangs, whereas work was performed by our nimble, ingenious fingers (which are also working when they are holding a pen or tapping a keyboard). In 1776, economist Adam Smith made such handiwork the foundation of what he called "the wealth of nations".

Industrial society, geared for productivity, transformed work into a religion. For Marx, what distinguished men from animals was not reason - the prerogative supposedly awarded to us by God - but labour. His theory did less than justice to the totalitarian toil of the beehive, to beavers building dams or to birds fabricating nests from twigs and bits of scavenged rubbish. Perhaps he should have said labour defined us as animals, creatures compelled to grub a livelihood from the soil rather than relying on divine benefactions.

In working, we metabolise nature, as if we were absorbing raw materials in order to regurgitate wealth: a lump of rock dug from the ground is cut, polished and transformed into a diamond. The biblical God claimed to have created the Earth. For the steam-powered, electrified 19th century, our world was actually made by men, who added value to crude, inert, boggy nature by harnessing the elements.

The age of work began in the mid-19th century and lasted about 150 years; as those who have recently lost their jobs will have noticed, it is already over. In its triumphant heyday, it preached an ennobling gospel. In Work (1852-63), the Pre-Raphaelite Ford Madox Brown painted a gang of navvies gutting Heath Street in Hampstead, north London, to lay a drain. No, these are not the kind of labourers you see digging up the street today, with radios louder than their jackhammers and anal clefts on view as they bend over their tools. Posing with their spades or swigging from their water bottles, Brown's navvies might be idealised Greek statues who have stepped down from a temple frieze. They are embodiments of muscular force and determination, admired from the sidelines by philosopher Thomas Carlyle and Rev FD Maurice, who recognised the aspirations of such men by setting up the first colleges for workers.