In Praise of Idleness
By Bertrand Russell
[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 [1], 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.
[1] Since then, members of the
Communist Party have succeeded to this privilege of the warriors and priests.
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