God forbade...must reading!

Leisure


 
  The wise use of leisure, agreeably, is a product of our civilization and education. A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he suddenly becomes idle. But without a considerable amount of leisure a man is cut off from many of the best things in life. There is no longer any reason why the bulk of the population should suffer this deprivation; only a foolish self-denial, usually perceived by what others do, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.



 
   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 where 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 on 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 usually does now, 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 but in remote rural areas, still, the impulses which caused them to be cultivated must still exist in human nature. The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: watching movies or football games, 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.


    University life is so different from the real world that men who live in academic milieu tend to be unaware of the preoccupations and problems of ordinary men and women. Their ways of expressing themselves usually rob them of their own influential opinions that they should have about the general public.

  
   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; making it oppressive, limiting their sympathies, and causing them to invent theories to justify their privileges. These facts profoundly diminished their 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.


Bertrand Russell


In Praise of Idleness