Make Way For The New Puritans

There is a group of young men online who spend a lot of time talking about what they call "productivity hacks." They are obsessed with how to make their days more productive, but their advice seems more consistent making a promising individual more like a robot than a fully formed human being. In this episode of the In-House Ethicist, John Paul Rollert explores this productivity fad and ties it to a longer tale about the connection between Christian beliefs about work and the rise of capitalism in the West. He shows us how we became so devoted to utility – and stayed so devoted – even as religious imperatives receded from public life and we forgot the reason why we cared so much in the first place.