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In Praise of Idleness - An anti- work essay by Ber
In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell (Written in 1932)
Like most of my generation, I was brought up on the saying: 'Satan
finds some mischief still 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 traveller in Naples who
saw twelve beggers 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 traveller was on the right lines.
But in countries that do not enjoy Mediterranean sunshine idleness is more
difficult, and a great public propaganda will be recquired to inaugurate it.
I hope that, after reading the following pages, the leaders of the Y.M.C.A.
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 except. 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 other
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.
But, I shall be told, the case is quite different when savings is to
lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public
expenditure of most civilizations consists in payment for past wars or
preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Governement 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 his 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 labour, which might have been devoted to something that could be
enojoyed, 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, on 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 spends it (let us say) upon
laying down rails for surface cars in some place where surface cars turn out
to be not wanted, he has diverted a mass of labour into channels where it
gives pleasure to no one. Nevertheless, when he becomes poor through the
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.
Thoughout Europe, though not in America, there is a third kind of
men, more repected 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 subsistance of himself and his family, although his wife worked at least
as hard as he did, and his children added their labour 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, (Since
then, members of the Communist Party have succeeded to this privilege of the
warriors and priests.) and still persists in the East; in England, in spite
of the Industrial Revolution, it remained in full force thoughout 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 primitve 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 diminshed. To this day, 99 per cent of British wage-earners
would be generally if it were proposed that the King should not have a larger
income than a working man. The conception of duty, speaking historically,
has beens 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 ecnomic system. Leisure is essential to
civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered
possible by the labours of the many. But the labours 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 labour required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone.
This was made obvious during the war. At the time all the men in the armed
forces, all the men and women engaged in the productions 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 physical 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 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.
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 illustraion. Suppose that, at a fiven moment, a
certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make
as many pins as the workd 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 manufacture of
pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else
would go on as before. But in the actualy world this would go on as before.
But in the actualy world this would be thought demoralizing. The men still
work eight hours,thereare 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 labour. Assuming, as we may,
that labour 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-assumiong a certain very moderate
amount of sensible organization. This idea shocks well-to-do, because they
are convinced that the poor would not know how to use so much leisure. In
America, men aften work long hours even when they are already well off; such
men, naturally, are indignant at the idea of leisure for wage-earners, except
as the frim 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 not 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
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.
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 still 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
concealed the 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', which 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 honoured than anyone else. What are, in essence,
revivalist appeals ar 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 ethical teaching.
For the present, possibly, that is all to the good. A large country,
full of natural resources, awaits development, and has to be developed with
very little use of credit. In these circumstances, hard work is necesary, 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 monority 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 dispence with their labour 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
other 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. Tha rational
solution would be, as soon as the necessaries and elementary comforts can be
provided for all, to reduce the hours of labour 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 value of hard work, it is difficult
to see how the authorities can aim at a paradise in 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 things, 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
necesary 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 labour, while taking care themselves to remain
undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism,
which makesus 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
tranform the plante. 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 hours that they derive whatevery 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
every 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 period.
There was formerly a capacity for light-heartedness and play which has been to
some extent inhibited by the culy of efficiency. The modern man thinks that
everything ought to be done for the sake of something alse, 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 derivitive from the advantage to be
obtained by consuming them. The individual, in out 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 ina 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 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
social system that education should be carried further than it usally 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 'highbrow'. Peasant dances have died out except in remote
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 pleausres 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 books, invented 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 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 on Darwin, but against him had to be set tens of
thousands of country gentlemen who never thought of anything more intelligent
than foxhunting 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 an 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, 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
in 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 independance needed for monumental works, for which, when the
time at last comes, they will not 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 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 and 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 devoted 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 partky 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 being foolish forever.
the beginning, oh wait, no, it's the end. really.
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