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format-standard has-post-thumbnail hentry category-culture
category-politics tag-bertrand-russell tag-books tag-culture
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<address><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext"
href="https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/27/in-praise-of-idleness-bertrand-russell/">https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/12/27/in-praise-of-idleness-bertrand-russell/</a></address>
<h1 class="entry-title"><span></span></h1>
<h1 class="entry-title"><span>In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand
Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice</span></h1>
<h2>“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.”</h2>
<h3 class="byline">By Maria Popova</h3>
<div class="entry_content">
<p><img
src="https://i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/inpraiseofidleness_russell.jpg?fit=320%2C491&ssl=1"
class="cover alignright size-medium" alt="In Praise of
Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between
Leisure and Social Justice" width="320" height="491"></p>
<p><em>“Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and
listen,”</em> the great children’s book author Ruth Krauss —
a philosopher, really — wrote in her last and loveliest
collaboration with the young Maurice Sendak in 1960. At the
time of her first collaboration with Sendak twelve years
earlier, just after the word “workaholic” was coined, the
German philosopher Josef Pieper was composing <em>Leisure,
the Basis of Culture</em> — his timeless and increasingly
timely manifesto for reclaiming our human dignity in a culture
of busyness. <em>“Leisure,”</em> Pieper wrote, <em>“is not
the same as the absence of activity… or even as an inner
quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation
of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”</em></p>
<p>A generation earlier, with a seer’s capacity to peer past the
horizon of the present condition and anticipate a sweeping
cultural current before it has flooded in, and with a sage’s
ability to provide the psychic buoy for surviving the
current’s perilous rapids, <strong>Bertrand Russell</strong>
(May 18, 1872–February 2, 1970) addressed the looming cult of
workaholism in a prescient 1932 essay titled <strong><em>In
Praise of Idleness</em></strong> (<em>public library</em>).</p>
<figure class="wp-caption alignnone"><img
src="https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/bertrandrussell3.jpg?resize=680%2C357&ssl=1"
alt="bertrandrussell3" class="aligncenter size-full
wp-image-54436" width="640" height="336"><figcaption
class="wp-caption-text">Bertrand Russell</figcaption></figure>
<p>Russell writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>With his characteristic wisdom punctuated by wry wit, he
examines what work actually means: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Russell points to landowners as a historical example of a
class whose idleness was only made possible by the toil of
others. For the vast majority of our species’ history, up
until the Industrial Revolution, the average person spent
nearly every waking hour working hard to earn the basic
necessities of survival. Any marginal surplus, he notes, was
swiftly appropriated by those in power — the warriors, the
monarchs, the priests. Since the Industrial Revolution, other
power systems — from big business to dictatorships — have
simply supplanted the warriors, monarchs, and priests. Russell
considers how the exploitive legacy of pre-industrial society
has corrupted the modern social fabric and warped our value
system:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Writing nearly a century after Kierkegaard extolled the
existential boon of idleness, Russell considers how this
manipulated mentality has hypnotized us into worshiping work
as virtue and scorning leisure as laziness, as weakness, as
folly, rather than recognizing it as the raw material of
social justice and the locus of our power:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure id="attachment_66286" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img
src="https://i2.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Velocity_BeatriceAlemagna.jpg?resize=680%2C908&ssl=1"
alt="" class="size-full wp-image-66286" width="640"
height="854"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Art by
Beatrice Alemagna for a letter by Adam Gopnik from <em>A
Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader</em>.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Russell notes that WWI — which was dubbed “the war to end all
wars” by a world willfully blind to the fact that violence
begets more violence, unwitting that this world war would pave
the way for the next — furthered our civilizational conflation
of duty with work and work with virtue, lulling us into the
modern trance of busyness. More than half a century before
Annie Dillard observed that “how we spend our days is, of
course, how we spend our lives,” Russell traces the ledger of
our existential spending back to war’s false promise of
freedom: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 work 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Pointing out that this equivalence originates in the same
morality — or, rather, immorality — that produced the slave
state, he exposes the core cultural falsehood it has effected,
which stands as a monumental obstruction to equality and
social justice in contemporary society:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been
shocking to the rich.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Born in an era when urban workingmen had just acquired the
right to vote in Great Britain, Russell draws on his own
childhood for a stark illustration of this belief and its
far-reaching tentacles of socioeconomic oppression:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>That sentiment, Russell reminds us again and again, is
ahistorical. Advances in science, technology, and the very
mechanics of society have made it no longer necessary for the
average person to endure fifteen-hour workdays in order to
obtain basic sustenance, as adults — and often children — had
to in the early nineteenth century. But while the allocation
of our time in relation to need has changed immensely, our
attitudes about how that time is spent hardly have. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Every human being, of necessity, consumes, in the course of
his life, a certain amount of the produce of human labor.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>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 be 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="wp-caption alignnone"><img
src="https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/openhouseforbutterflies18.jpg?w=680&ssl=1"
width="500" height="657"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Illustration
by Maurice Sendak from <em>Open House for Butterflies</em>
by Ruth Krauss</figcaption></figure>
<p>But while reinstating the dignity of leisure — or what
Russell calls idleness — is a necessary condition for
recalibrating our life-satisfaction to more adequately reflect
the contemporary realities of work and need, it is not a
sufficient one. Exacerbating our already warped relationship
with work is the muddling of needs and wants at the heart of
capitalist materialism — something Russell would address
nearly two decades later in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech,
listing acquisitiveness as the first of the four desires
driving human behavior. He considers the radical shift that
would take place if we were to stop regarding the virtue of
work as an end in itself and begin seeing it as a means to a
state of being in which work is no longer needed, reinstating
leisure and comfort — that is, a contented sense of enoughness
— as the proper existential end:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>What will happen when the point has been reached where
everybody could be comfortable without working long hours? </p>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Our society, Russell argues, is driven by “continually fresh
schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to
future productivity.” He challenges the inanity of this
proposition:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 workingmen 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 hours that they derive whatever happiness
they may enjoy.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure id="attachment_66292" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img
src="https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Velocity_KenardPak.jpg?resize=680%2C911&ssl=1"
alt="" class="size-full wp-image-66292" width="640"
height="857"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Art by
Kenard Pak for a letter by Terry Teachout from <em>A
Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader</em>.</figcaption></figure>
<p>Decades before Diane Ackerman made her exquisite case for the
evolutionary and existential value of play, Russell considers
how the cult of productivity has demolished one of life’s
pillars of satisfaction. Noting that modern people — true of
the moderns of 1932, even truer of today’s — enjoy a little
leisure but wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if they
had to work only four hours a day, he observes: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 lightheartedness 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The seedbed of this soul-shriveling belief is the notion — a
driving force of consumerism — that the only worthwhile
activities are those that bring material profit. A formidable
logician, Russell exposes the self-unraveling nature of this
argument:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Another result, Russell argues, is a kind of split between
positive idleness, which ought to be the nourishing end of
work, and negative idleness, which ends up being the effect of
work under the spell of consumerism and its consequent
socioeconomic inequality. He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure id="attachment_66296" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img
src="https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Velocity_OfraAmit.jpg?resize=680%2C939&ssl=1"
alt="" class="size-full wp-image-66296" width="640"
height="883"><figcaption class="wp-caption-text">Art by Ofra
Amit for a letter by Mara Faye Lethem from <em>A Velocity
of Being: Letters to a Young Reader</em>.</figcaption></figure>
<p>With an eye to our civilization’s triumphs and failures of
self-actualization, Russell points out that, historically,
there has been a small leisure class enjoying a great many
privileges without a basis in social justice, profiting on the
backs of a large working class toiling for survival. While
this rendered the oppressive leisure class morally
condemnable, it resulted in the vast majority of art and
science — “the whole of what we call civilization.” He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Without the leisure class, mankind would never have emerged
from barbarism. </p>
<p>The method of a hereditary leisure class without duties
was, however, extraordinarily wasteful. None of the members
of the class had been 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.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Russell’s most compelling point is the most counterintuitive
— the idea that reclaiming leisure is not a reinforcement of
elitism but the antidote to elitism itself and a form of
resistance to oppression, for it would require dismantling the
power structures of modern society and undoing the spell they
have cast on us to keep the poor poor and the rich rich. To
correctly calibrate modern life around a sense of enough —
that is, around meeting the need for comfort rather than
satisfying the endless want for consumerist acquisitiveness —
would be to lay the groundwork for social justice. In such a
society, Russell argues, no one would have to work more than
four hours out of twenty-four — a proposition even more
countercultural today than it was in his era. He paints the
landscape of possibility:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>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 potboilers, 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 the capacity.</p>
<p>[…]</p>
<p>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 1 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 the 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 for ever.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><strong><em>In Praise of Idleness</em></strong> has only
grown timelier by the ticking of the decades. Complement it
with trailblazing anthropologist Margaret Mead on leisure and
creativity, then revisit Russell on what makes a fulfilling
life, our mightiest defense against political manipulation,
power-knowledge vs. love-knowledge, why “fruitful monotony” is
essential for happiness, and his remarkable response to a
fascist’s provocation.</p>
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