In 1932 Bertrand Russell, the philosopher wrote the following interesting essay ' In Praise of Idleness.' In it, Russell eloquently explains the actual benefits of idleness and criticises the idea that work is inherently virtuous and an end in itself.
I do however personally believe in the benefits of mutual aid and solidarity and greatly admire too all those that have to endure a tough 9-5 existence, but forced employment has led to two nervous breakdowns and paths of despair that I would not recommend to anyone. Beyond procrastinating to much, idleness though can actually be beneficial to all, as long as you don't waste the day sitting around doing bugger all, it can be a way of celebrating life that is extremely wholesome. Idleness is not a force to despise but an energy that can be a force for good and change, if like all things it is used in the right way. A positive essence that can be used to write poetry, learn a language, cultivate a garden, express feelings and emotions etc etc.
At the end of the day indulging in life's passions can actually be quite consuming, writing this blog for instance and searching for new things to write about is no simple task, but I see it though as a way of celebrating existence, even though some of the subject matters that I am drawn to, might not reflect this inner impulse.
The system that compels people to work just in order to increase once wealth has been proven to be wrong and increasingly to many seems absurd and immoral, and I believe to be far from emancipating and is seen by some as a form of consensus brainwashing. Surely there are other ways that can be of benefit to mankind that can be nourishing also for mind, body and spirit.
As The Idler Academy reminds us, http://idler.co.uk/ ( a fine resource by the way) the ancient Greek word for leisure, skhole, later turned into our word for school. We must also remember that the opposition between work and life is not inevitable: is a painter who lives for her art working or playing?
There is room for letting some gaps into our lives out of which creativity can grow. This might look just like idleness to someone in thrall to the work ethic. But it is a different, mindful kind of idleness: not numbing the mind but stilling it to allow the imagination to flourish.
Anyway enough of my lazy preamble, one that I actually had to rewrite again, because in my idleness I pressed a key on computer and my original thoughts were completely erased, so had to start again, so will leave you in the hands of Bertrand who explains these ideas much better than I ever could. Will be quite next few days off idling and generally mooching about.
Bertrand Russell - In Praise of Idleness, 1932
"Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: ‘Satan finds
some mischief for idle hands to do.’ Being a highly virtuous child, I
believed all that I was told, and acquired a conscience which has kept
me working hard down to the present moment. But although my conscience
has controlled my actions, my opinions have undergone a revolution. I
think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense
harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous, and that what needs
to be preached in modern industrial countries is quite different from
what always has been preached. Everyone knows the story of the traveler
in Naples who saw twelve beggars lying in the sun (it was before the
days of Mussolini), and offered a lira to the laziest of them. Eleven of
them jumped up to claim it, so he gave it to the twelfth. this traveler
was on the right lines. But in countries which do not enjoy
Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more difficult, and a great public
propaganda will be required to inaugurate it. I hope that, after reading
the following pages, the leaders of the YMCA will start a campaign to
induce good young men to do nothing. If so, I shall not have lived in
vain.
Before advancing my own arguments for laziness, I must dispose of one
which I cannot accept. Whenever a person who already has enough to live
on proposes to engage in some everyday kind of job, such as
school-teaching or typing, he or she is told that such conduct takes the
bread out of other people’s mouths, and is therefore wicked. If this
argument were valid, it would only be necessary for us all to be idle in
order that we should all have our mouths full of bread. What people who
say such things forget is that what a man earns he usually spends, and
in spending he gives employment. As long as a man spends his income, he
puts just as much bread into people’s mouths in spending as he takes out
of other people’s mouths in earning. The real villain, from this point
of view, is the man who saves. If he merely puts his savings in a
stocking, like the proverbial French peasant, it is obvious that they do
not give employment. If he invests his savings, the matter is less
obvious, and different cases arise.
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some
Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure
of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or
preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government
is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire
murderers. The net result of the man’s economical habits is to increase
the armed forces of the State to which he lends his savings. Obviously
it would be better if he spent the money, even if he spent it in drink
or gambling.
But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings are
invested in industrial enterprises. When such enterprises succeed, and
produce something useful, this may be conceded. In these days, however,
no one will deny that most enterprises fail. That means that a large
amount of human labor, which might have been devoted to producing
something that could be enjoyed, was expended on producing machines
which, when produced, lay idle and did no good to anyone. The man who
invests his savings in a concern that goes bankrupt is therefore
injuring others as well as himself. If he spent his money, say, in
giving parties for his friends, they (we may hope) would get pleasure,
and so would all those upon whom he spent money, such as the butcher,
the baker, and the bootlegger. But if he spends it (let us say) upon
laying down rails for surface card in some place where surface cars turn
out not to be wanted, he has diverted a mass of labor into channels
where it gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor
through failure of his investment he will be regarded as a victim of
undeserved misfortune, whereas the gay spendthrift, who has spent his
money philanthropically, will be despised as a fool and a frivolous
person.
All this is only preliminary. I want to say, in all seriousness, that a
great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the
virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies
in an organized diminution of work.
First of all: what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the
position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other
such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is
unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid. The
second kind is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those
who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be
given. Usually two opposite kinds of advice are given simultaneously by
two organized bodies of men; this is called politics. The skill required
for this kind of work is not knowledge of the subjects as to which
advice is given, but knowledge of the art of persuasive speaking and
writing, i.e. of advertising.
Throughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third class of men,
more respected than either of the classes of workers. There are men
who, through ownership of land, are able to make others pay for the
privilege of being allowed to exist and to work. These landowners are
idle, and I might therefore be expected to praise them. Unfortunately,
their idleness is only rendered possible by the industry of others;
indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source
of the whole gospel of work. The last thing they have ever wished is
that others should follow their example.
From the beginning of civilization until the Industrial Revolution, a
man could, as a rule, produce by hard work little more than was required
for the subsistence of himself and his family, although his wife worked
at least as hard as he did, and his children added their labor as soon
as they were old enough to do so. The small surplus above bare
necessaries was not left to those who produced it, but was appropriated
by warriors and priests. In times of famine there was no surplus; the
warriors and priests, however, still secured as much as at other times,
with the result that many of the workers died of hunger. This system
persisted in Russia until 1917 ,
and still persists in the East; in England, in spite of the Industrial
Revolution, it remained in full force throughout the Napoleonic wars,
and until a hundred years ago, when the new class of manufacturers
acquired power. In America, the system came to an end with the
Revolution, except in the South, where it persisted until the Civil War.
A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a
profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions. Much that we take
for granted about the desirability of work is derived from this system,
and, being pre-industrial, is not adapted to the modern world. Modern
technique has made it possible for leisure, within limits, to be not the
prerogative of small privileged classes, but a right evenly distributed
throughout the community. The morality of work is the morality of
slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.
It is obvious that, in primitive communities, peasants, left to
themselves, would not have parted with the slender surplus upon which
the warriors and priests subsisted, but would have either produced less
or consumed more. At first, sheer force compelled them to produce and
part with the surplus. Gradually, however, it was found possible to
induce many of them to accept an ethic according to which it was their
duty to work hard, although part of their work went to support others in
idleness. By this means the amount of compulsion required was lessened,
and the expenses of government were diminished. To this day, 99 per
cent of British wage-earners would be genuinely shocked if it were
proposed that the King should not have a larger income than a working
man. The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means
used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests
of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of
power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that
their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity.
Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed
part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization
which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure
is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few
was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors
were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good.
And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure
justly without injury to civilization.
Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount
of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This
was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed
forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of
munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or
Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from
productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of
well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was
higher than before or since. The significance of this fact was concealed
by finance: borrowing made it appear as if the future was nourishing
the present. But that, of course, would have been impossible; a man
cannot eat a loaf of bread that does not yet exist. The war showed
conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is
possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of
the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the
scientific organization, which had been created in order to liberate
men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of
the week had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead
of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were
made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed.
Why? Because work is a duty, and a man should not receive wages in
proportion to what he has produced, but in proportion to his virtue as
exemplified by his industry.
This is the morality of the Slave State, applied in circumstances
totally unlike those in which it arose. No wonder the result has been
disastrous. Let us take an illustration. Suppose that, at a given
moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of
pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight
hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men
can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any
more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody
concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours
instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before. But in the
actual world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still work
eight hours, there are too many pins, some employers go bankrupt, and
half the men previously concerned in making pins are thrown out of work.
There is, in the end, just as much leisure as on the other plan, but
half the men are totally idle while half are still overworked. In this
way, it is insured that the unavoidable leisure shall cause misery all
round instead of being a universal source of happiness. Can anything
more insane be imagined?
The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to
the rich. In England, in the early nineteenth century, fifteen hours was
the ordinary day’s work for a man; children sometimes did as much, and
very commonly did twelve hours a day. When meddlesome busybodies
suggested that perhaps these hours were rather long, they were told that
work kept adults from drink and children from mischief. When I was a
child, shortly after urban working men had acquired the vote, certain
public holidays were established by law, to the great indignation of the
upper classes. I remember hearing an old Duchess say: ‘What do the poor
want with holidays? They ought to work.’ People nowadays are less
frank, but the sentiment persists, and is the source of much of our
economic confusion.
Let us, for a moment, consider the ethics of work frankly, without
superstition. Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course
of his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor. Assuming,
as we may, that labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a
man should consume more than he produces. Of course he may provide
services rather than commodities, like a medical man, for example; but
he should provide something in return for his board and lodging. to this
extent, the duty of work must be admitted, but to this extent only.
I shall not dwell upon the fact that, in all modern societies outside
the USSR, many people escape even this minimum amount of work, namely
all those who inherit money and all those who marry money. I do not
think the fact that these people are allowed to be idle is nearly so
harmful as the fact that wage-earners are expected to overwork or
starve.
If the ordinary wage-earner worked four hours a day, there would be
enough for everybody and no unemployment — assuming a certain very
moderate amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks the
well-to-do, because they are convinced that the poor would not know how
to use so much leisure. In America men often work long hours even when
they are well off; such men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of
leisure for wage-earners, except as the grim punishment of unemployment;
in fact, they dislike leisure even for their sons. Oddly enough, while
they wish their sons to work so hard as to have no time to be civilized,
they do not mind their wives and daughters having no work at all. the
snobbish admiration of uselessness, which, in an aristocratic society,
extends to both sexes, is, under a plutocracy, confined to women; this,
however, does not make it any more in agreement with common sense.
The wise use of leisure, it must be conceded, is a product of
civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life
will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle. But without a
considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best
things. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population
should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish asceticism, usually
vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities
now that the need no longer exists.
In the new creed which controls the government of Russia, while there is
much that is very different from the traditional teaching of the West,
there are some things that are quite unchanged. The attitude of the
governing classes, and especially of those who conduct educational
propaganda, on the subject of the dignity of labor, is almost exactly
that which the governing classes of the world have always preached to
what were called the ‘honest poor’. Industry, sobriety, willingness to
work long hours for distant advantages, even submissiveness to
authority, all these reappear; moreover authority still represents the
will of the Ruler of the Universe, Who, however, is now called by a new
name, Dialectical Materialism.
The victory of the proletariat in Russia has some points in common with
the victory of the feminists in some other countries. For ages, men had
conceded the superior saintliness of women, and had consoled women for
their inferiority by maintaining that saintliness is more desirable than
power. At last the feminists decided that they would have both, since
the pioneers among them believed all that the men had told them about
the desirability of virtue, but not what they had told them about the
worthlessness of political power. A similar thing has happened in Russia
as regards manual work. For ages, the rich and their sycophants have
written in praise of ‘honest toil’, have praised the simple life, have
professed a religion which teaches that the poor are much more likely to
go to heaven than the rich, and in general have tried to make manual
workers believe that there is some special nobility about altering the
position of matter in space, just as men tried to make women believe
that they derived some special nobility from their sexual enslavement.
In Russia, all this teaching about the excellence of manual work has
been taken seriously, with the result that the manual worker is more
honored than anyone else. What are, in essence, revivalist appeals are
made, but not for the old purposes: they are made to secure shock
workers for special tasks. Manual work is the ideal which is held before
the young, and is the basis of all ethical teaching.
For the present, possibly, this is all to the good. A large country,
full of natural resources, awaits development, and has has to be
developed with very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard
work is necessary, and is likely to bring a great reward. But what will
happen when the point has been reached where everybody could be
comfortable without working long hours?
In the West, we have various ways of dealing with this problem. We have
no attempt at economic justice, so that a large proportion of the total
produce goes to a small minority of the population, many of whom do no
work at all. Owing to the absence of any central control over
production, we produce hosts of things that are not wanted. We keep a
large percentage of the working population idle, because we can dispense
with their labor by making the others overwork. When all these methods
prove inadequate, we have a war: we cause a number of people to
manufacture high explosives, and a number of others to explode them, as
if we were children who had just discovered fireworks. By a combination
of all these devices we manage, though with difficulty, to keep alive
the notion that a great deal of severe manual work must be the lot of
the average man.
In Russia, owing to more economic justice and central control over
production, the problem will have to be differently solved. the rational
solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts
can be provided for all, to reduce the hours of labor gradually,
allowing a popular vote to decide, at each stage, whether more leisure
or more goods were to be preferred. But, having taught the supreme
virtue of hard work, it is difficult to see how the authorities can aim
at a paradise in which there will be much leisure and little work. It
seems more likely that they will find continually fresh schemes, by
which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity. I read
recently of an ingenious plan put forward by Russian engineers, for
making the White Sea and the northern coasts of Siberia warm, by putting
a dam across the Kara Sea. An admirable project, but liable to postpone
proletarian comfort for a generation, while the nobility of toil is
being displayed amid the ice-fields and snowstorms of the Arctic Ocean.
This sort of thing, if it happens, will be the result of regarding the
virtue of hard work as an end in itself, rather than as a means to a
state of affairs in which it is no longer needed.
The fact is that moving matter about, while a certain amount of it is
necessary to our existence, is emphatically not one of the ends of human
life. If it were, we should have to consider every navvy superior to
Shakespeare. We have been misled in this matter by two causes. One is
the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for
thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labor, while taking care
themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new
pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly
clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface. Neither of
these motives makes any great appeal to the actual worker. If you ask
him what he thinks the best part of his life, he is not likely to say:
‘I enjoy manual work because it makes me feel that I am fulfilling man’s
noblest task, and because I like to think how much man can transform
his planet. It is true that my body demands periods of rest, which I
have to fill in as best I may, but I am never so happy as when the
morning comes and I can return to the toil from which my contentment
springs.’ I have never heard working men say this sort of thing. They
consider work, as it should be considered, a necessary means to a
livelihood, and it is from their leisure that they derive whatever
happiness they may enjoy.
It will be said that, while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not
know how to fill their days if they had only four hours of work out of
the twenty-four. In so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a
condemnation of our civilization; it would not have been true at any
earlier period. There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and
play which has been to some extent inhibited by the cult of efficiency.
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of
something else, and never for its own sake. Serious-minded persons, for
example, are continually condemning the habit of going to the cinema,
and telling us that it leads the young into crime. But all the work that
goes to producing a cinema is respectable, because it is work, and
because it brings a money profit. The notion that the desirable
activities are those that bring a profit has made everything
topsy-turvy. The butcher who provides you with meat and the baker who
provides you with bread are praiseworthy, because they are making money;
but when you enjoy the food they have provided, you are merely
frivolous, unless you eat only to get strength for your work. Broadly
speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending money is
bad. Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd;
one might as well maintain that keys are good, but keyholes are bad.
Whatever merit there may be in the production of goods must be entirely
derivative from the advantage to be obtained by consuming them. The
individual, in our society, works for profit; but the social purpose of
his work lies in the consumption of what he produces. It is this divorce
between the individual and the social purpose of production that makes
it so difficult for men to think clearly in a world in which
profit-making is the incentive to industry. We think too much of
production, and too little of consumption. One result is that we attach
too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do
not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.
When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four, I am not
meaning to imply that all the remaining time should necessarily be spent
in pure frivolity. I mean that four hours’ work a day should entitle a
man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that the
rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit. It is an
essential part of any such social system that education should be
carried further than it usually is at present, and should aim, in part,
at providing tastes which would enable a man to use leisure
intelligently. I am not thinking mainly of the sort of things that would
be considered ‘highbrow’. Peasant dances have died out except in remote
rural areas, but the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must
still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have
become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches,
listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their
active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure,
they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part.
In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class.
The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in
social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its
sympathies, and caused it to invent theories by which to justify its
privileges. These facts greatly diminished its excellence, but in spite
of this drawback it contributed nearly the whole of what we call
civilization. It cultivated the arts and discovered the sciences; it
wrote the books, invented the philosophies, and refined social
relations. Even the liberation of the oppressed has usually been
inaugurated from above. Without the leisure class, mankind would never
have emerged from barbarism.
The method of a leisure class without duties was, however,
extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members of the class had to be
taught to be industrious, and the class as a whole was not exceptionally
intelligent. The class might produce one Darwin, but against him had to
be set tens of thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of
anything more intelligent than fox-hunting and punishing poachers. At
present, the universities are supposed to provide, in a more systematic
way, what the leisure class provided accidentally and as a by-product.
This is a great improvement, but it has certain drawbacks. University
life is so different from life in the world at large that men who live
in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems
of ordinary men and women; moreover their ways of expressing themselves
are usually such as to rob their opinions of the influence that they
ought to have upon the general public. Another disadvantage is that in
universities studies are organized, and the man who thinks of some
original line of research is likely to be discouraged. Academic
institutions, therefore, useful as they are, are not adequate guardians
of the interests of civilization in a world where everyone outside their
walls is too busy for unutilitarian pursuits.
In a world where no one is compelled to work more than four hours a day,
every person possessed of scientific curiosity will be able to indulge
it, and every painter will be able to paint without starving, however
excellent his pictures may be. Young writers will not be obliged to draw
attention to themselves by sensational pot-boilers, with a view to
acquiring the economic independence needed for monumental works, for
which, when the time at last comes, they will have lost the taste and
capacity. Men who, in their professional work, have become interested in
some phase of economics or government, will be able to develop their
ideas without the academic detachment that makes the work of university
economists often seem lacking in reality. Medical men will have the time
to learn about the progress of medicine, teachers will not be
exasperatedly struggling to teach by routine methods things which they
learnt in their youth, which may, in the interval, have been proved to
be untrue.
Above all, there will be happiness and joy of life, instead of frayed
nerves, weariness, and dyspepsia. The work exacted will be enough to
make leisure delightful, but not enough to produce exhaustion. Since men
will not be tired in their spare time, they will not demand only such
amusements as are passive and vapid. At least one per cent will probably
devote the time not spent in professional work to pursuits of some
public importance, and, since they will not depend upon these pursuits
for their livelihood, their originality will be unhampered, and there
will be no need to conform to the standards set by elderly pundits. But
it is not only in these exceptional cases that the advantages of leisure
will appear. Ordinary men and women, having the opportunity of a happy
life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to
view others with suspicion. The taste for war will die out, partly for
this reason, and partly because it will involve long and severe work for
all. Good nature is, of all moral qualities, the one that the world
needs most, and good nature is the result of ease and security, not of a
life of arduous struggle. Modern methods of production have given us
the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead,
to have overwork for some and starvation for others. Hitherto we have
continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in
this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish
forever."
