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miriam_eIdleness has long been regarded as a great enemy of civilisation, but I've begun to wonder if in fact hard work is the real threat.
Many years ago the great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a short piece titled In Praise of Idleness in which he considered that idleness might not be the bad thing it is generally thought to be. It was a great surprise to me when I read it as a teen. Russell cunningly weaves his message with humor, but he carefully questions the prevailing workaholic attitudes.
Periodically, some people seem to wake up from the puritanical mindset and realise that working too hard and leaving little or no time for enjoying life sucks all the value out. Unfortunately, using money as the measure of all value has gained such unquestioning acceptance in our society that those who would ask us to make more time for pleasure are seen as dreamers, slackers, unrealistic idealists. Now especially, with the financial system cracking and falling in large chunks upon us, instead of wondering about the wisdom of selling our lives in the service of a deeply flawed system, I keep hearing people say our only way out of the trouble is to work harder. Indeed today I heard some nutter in Australian government telling people that they have to be less choosy about their work now.
It seems to me that civilisation is like a cruise ship. If we put everybody to work running it and kick all the passengers off, sure it will go fast, but what is the point? Wouldn't it be more sensible to automate the ship and let everybody be passengers? Isn't that more sensible? But there is something deeply threatening to most people's inner sensibilities in this picture. The common response is, "You can't have everybody enjoying themselves! Someone has to do the work!" This is the sad view that most people hold: that civilisation is built on slavery and would collapse without it. Exposing this often touches a raw nerve bringing the rapid reply, "It isn't slavery if people are paid for their work." Anybody with a clear eye can see how wrong that is. The working poor have always been bound into slavery. Wages make up a large part of the substance of their chains. I've had bosses who are quite literally slavedrivers who terrorise their staff with the psychological equivalent of whips. I've also had bosses who were nice friendly people, but even then there was never any question of who was the boss and who was the slave.
But in recent years the open source community has shown that there is no need for that master-slave relationship; that people will do tedious, difficult tasks for the pure pleasure of it. Many people clean up rubbish around Australia because they want to, not because they're paid to. My parents have turned their land from the grassy paddock it was when they bought it, into a glorious rainforest. There was no financial imperative behind this. They did it because they love growing trees and plants. The old picture of the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids with slave power now appears to be wrong. Recent research indicates those gigantic feats of engineering were voluntary.
Many years ago I attended Swinburne Film and Television School. It was hell. The staff used to joke about the gruelling pressure they put students under. Interestingly, I spoke with one of the famous previous graduates and she said the school used to be run very differently. Instead of a hectic schedule, the students used to lounge about and enjoy animated discussions about film. There was no such luxury in my time. It was felt by everybody (including the students) that everyone had to work frantically, and this was unquestioningly accepted as a good and important thing. Nobody that I know of in my year went on to achieve greatness in film. All Swinburne's great achievers that I know of came from the early days when the course was leisurely and gave students time to think and goof off.
Many of the greatest works of philosophy, mathematics, and science are the outcome of leisure. It worries me that if we manage to bring about the economists' dreams of all society working hard we will effectively kill off our own future. We will swindle ourselves out of our lives and be trapped inside the machine, with no purpose except to maintain it.
Reorienting our priorities toward leisure has become more important than ever now. We have an aging society. There will not be enough young people to look after our aged population. We need a different approach than simply enslaving people to do work for us. We need automation to take on more jobs in preparation for the time, soon, when there will be less workers available. And we need our machines to last longer before they need repair or are discarded. We've long had the ability to build things that last for centuries. Nowadays however, home building materials often are expected to last only 25 years. But a home that lasts only that long is next to useless! Cars last just 7 years, as do computer hard drives. Refrigerators used to last more than 25 years, but now you'd be lucky to have one survive just 10. This is insane.
If we want our civilisation to continue we have to see the problem in all this. We need to make less work for ourselves and savour life more.
In the end the most important argument is the one that most people consider the least important: Life should be for living, not working.
Many years ago the great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a short piece titled In Praise of Idleness in which he considered that idleness might not be the bad thing it is generally thought to be. It was a great surprise to me when I read it as a teen. Russell cunningly weaves his message with humor, but he carefully questions the prevailing workaholic attitudes.
Periodically, some people seem to wake up from the puritanical mindset and realise that working too hard and leaving little or no time for enjoying life sucks all the value out. Unfortunately, using money as the measure of all value has gained such unquestioning acceptance in our society that those who would ask us to make more time for pleasure are seen as dreamers, slackers, unrealistic idealists. Now especially, with the financial system cracking and falling in large chunks upon us, instead of wondering about the wisdom of selling our lives in the service of a deeply flawed system, I keep hearing people say our only way out of the trouble is to work harder. Indeed today I heard some nutter in Australian government telling people that they have to be less choosy about their work now.
It seems to me that civilisation is like a cruise ship. If we put everybody to work running it and kick all the passengers off, sure it will go fast, but what is the point? Wouldn't it be more sensible to automate the ship and let everybody be passengers? Isn't that more sensible? But there is something deeply threatening to most people's inner sensibilities in this picture. The common response is, "You can't have everybody enjoying themselves! Someone has to do the work!" This is the sad view that most people hold: that civilisation is built on slavery and would collapse without it. Exposing this often touches a raw nerve bringing the rapid reply, "It isn't slavery if people are paid for their work." Anybody with a clear eye can see how wrong that is. The working poor have always been bound into slavery. Wages make up a large part of the substance of their chains. I've had bosses who are quite literally slavedrivers who terrorise their staff with the psychological equivalent of whips. I've also had bosses who were nice friendly people, but even then there was never any question of who was the boss and who was the slave.
But in recent years the open source community has shown that there is no need for that master-slave relationship; that people will do tedious, difficult tasks for the pure pleasure of it. Many people clean up rubbish around Australia because they want to, not because they're paid to. My parents have turned their land from the grassy paddock it was when they bought it, into a glorious rainforest. There was no financial imperative behind this. They did it because they love growing trees and plants. The old picture of the ancient Egyptians building the pyramids with slave power now appears to be wrong. Recent research indicates those gigantic feats of engineering were voluntary.
Many years ago I attended Swinburne Film and Television School. It was hell. The staff used to joke about the gruelling pressure they put students under. Interestingly, I spoke with one of the famous previous graduates and she said the school used to be run very differently. Instead of a hectic schedule, the students used to lounge about and enjoy animated discussions about film. There was no such luxury in my time. It was felt by everybody (including the students) that everyone had to work frantically, and this was unquestioningly accepted as a good and important thing. Nobody that I know of in my year went on to achieve greatness in film. All Swinburne's great achievers that I know of came from the early days when the course was leisurely and gave students time to think and goof off.
Many of the greatest works of philosophy, mathematics, and science are the outcome of leisure. It worries me that if we manage to bring about the economists' dreams of all society working hard we will effectively kill off our own future. We will swindle ourselves out of our lives and be trapped inside the machine, with no purpose except to maintain it.
Reorienting our priorities toward leisure has become more important than ever now. We have an aging society. There will not be enough young people to look after our aged population. We need a different approach than simply enslaving people to do work for us. We need automation to take on more jobs in preparation for the time, soon, when there will be less workers available. And we need our machines to last longer before they need repair or are discarded. We've long had the ability to build things that last for centuries. Nowadays however, home building materials often are expected to last only 25 years. But a home that lasts only that long is next to useless! Cars last just 7 years, as do computer hard drives. Refrigerators used to last more than 25 years, but now you'd be lucky to have one survive just 10. This is insane.
If we want our civilisation to continue we have to see the problem in all this. We need to make less work for ourselves and savour life more.
In the end the most important argument is the one that most people consider the least important: Life should be for living, not working.
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no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 06:28 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 08:14 am (UTC)If you didn't already know about it, you might like Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capaitalism". I haven't read it myself but I did crash a lecture on it once.
Whenever somebody questions the virtue of work I remember a story of an Indian family who work very hard to save up and move to the US only to find that most people in the US "work too hard" (in their own words).
no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 12:00 pm (UTC)Ooh. I didn't know of that book. Thank you for the pointer. I found a couple of online copies:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~HYPER/weber/toc.html
and
http://www.ne.jp/asahi/moriyuki/abukuma/weber/world/ethic/pro_eth_frame.html
so will read it offline later.
I use
wget -m -k -p -E -l 0 -R.pdf,.gz,.tar,.ps -np http://addressto quickly snaffle such things because reading online ties up my dialup connection.The whole "virtue of work" thing is the bit I find hardest to swallow -- even apart from how I think it threatens our future. It is surprising how many people view work as a moral imperative. Asking them why they feel that way is like asking a priest why they believe in a god, except the priest is likely to good-humoredly indulge you. The person who thinks work is a moral requirement is more likely to look at you as if you'd just vomitted on his shoes. It is so weird.
I'm pretty damn certain we could run most of civilisation voluntarily, without work. I think it would function better, and might eliminate some of the root causes of corruption.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 12:42 pm (UTC)Of course, the TV is problematic, as the government is hell-bent on removing analogue TV. Then, I'll either have to replace the TV or buy a set-top box, which itself will probably break down before the TV will ... or cease watching TV.
no subject
Date: 2009-07-26 10:17 pm (UTC)Old cars tend to last, I've noticed. Engineering seemed to be stronger back then. Nowadays if they can save a few cents on making a part thinner and weaker then they will. But back in the 60s, 70s, and 80s they were already heavily into planned obsolescence. It's just that they're better at it now.
The move to digital TV in Australia is one that I'm hoping will put the nail in the coffin for TV here. It, along with radio and newspapers, is in trouble already. If they force everybody to spend large amounts of money on a new stupifier that does the same thing as the old one I'm hoping many people will dig in their heels and find the joys of the net irresistible, or rediscover the pleasures of a stroll in the park, or reconnecting with their family. I would just love it if the TV industry reaped the poisoned seeds they have sown these past decades. I'm delighted to be living without TV these days. It has made it so much more obvious that TV sucks the life out of a room when it is on.
Are you old enough to remember the joyful promotion of TV, that it would herald a new age of culture and education for all? It could so easily have been that. For a long time the ABC (our tax-paid channel for the benefit of overseas readers) kept the bar high, but even they often degenerate to propaganda and lowest-denominator programming now. Bummer.
I have to add a retraction of sorts though. TV has not been an unmitigated disaster. There have been some brilliant TV shows. Beyond 2000 (and the earlier Towards 2000), Catalyst and its Quantum predecessor, Time Team, David Attenborough's series of doco's, Foyle's War, Seachange, Invader Zim, Veronica Mars, Firefly, and many more innovative, informative, and witty shows grew in this stagnant medium.