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                      |_|    ...2017-07-03 |___/

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 cars 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.

This text was first provided by the Massachusetts Green Party.

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