“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” - Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Russell would have loved the coronavirus – he would have loved the pain that we are all feeling. Never someone to shy away from greater evils and the sacrifice of others, Russell was once famously so concerned about a nuclear standoff between America and the Soviet Union that he wished-out-loud for a pre-emptive nuclear war. An atomic blitz to wipe out Stalin’s emerging arsenal, and to force humanity into a peace it wasn’t otherwise capable of.
In Russell’s own words: “You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years.” Of course he was wrong, and would later change his mind on the issue, but the error says a lot about the blind spots that would run through most of his philosophy – and the happiness that he would now be feeling watching so many people isolated, underemployed and, importantly, idle.
Anything that we do or say largely by instinct deserves some questioning. There is no reason to believe that we are any more likely to inherit wisdom and knowledge than we are pain or suffering. And yet we take so much for granted – and accept so much as foundational truth (another weakness of Russell’s) – simply because it comes to us through cultural memes, passed on by family, friends and community; perhaps nothing more so than “the belief in the virtuousness of work”.
When was the last time you stopped to really think about work? Not the daily annoyances and challenges of the workplace, not the size of your salary and title on your name tag, or even if you should change professions, but rather if you should work at all? It’s unlikely that you have, and this is certainly – if for nothing – a little strange. We increasingly live in a world of scrutiny, where every little behaviour and choice is moralised over-and-over, so why not also with work?
Russell walks us back into the depths of civilization and the Industrial Revolution, and opens up with an analysis of what work actually is – a non-trivial exercise considering how blinkered he thinks we have become to its presence. And the distinction that becomes important is “surplus”.
Idleness is not new for our species, it has just tended to be something reserved in small circles – outside of which work was not only necessary and exhausting, but often also insufficient. People earned just enough to survive each day – so in times of famine these same people died, while the “warriors and priests”, and most notably “landowners”, lived in the “comfortable idleness” that was possible only from the exploitation of others.
But this is more than an attack on capitalism and an echo of Karl Marx. Bertrand Russell spent plenty of time musing over the benefits of communism – as a lot of people did in 1932 – but this is not that. Sure, some of the historicism remains (again another weakness that runs through his philosophy), but Russell saw the workers around him not as prisoners hoping for freedom, but as people who have already had their shackles removed; yet who just can’t quite bring themselves to accept it.
Work was made into a virtue at a time when, for most people, the wolves were still scratching at the door… at all times. Not to work, was to die. And that hangover persists, strong, nauseating and unshakable – “A system which lasted so long and ended so recently has naturally left a profound impress upon men’s thoughts and opinions.”
Beyond the booms of inevitability, Russell’s history is hard to argue too heavily with. But neither is it necessary – it’s in the next step where things get interesting. At the time of writing, Russell estimated each person only needed to work four hours a day to achieve their basic needs (a figure he shared with John Maynard Keynes). The exact number doesn’t really matter here either (three hours, four hours, five hours) – just the observation that, despite escaping hunger and starvation, most of us were continuing to work and sweat as if nothing had changed.
Russell was hoping to see a lot more people sitting around doing nothing! Because if “labor is on the whole disagreeable, it is unjust that a man should consume more than he produces.” Instinctively this doesn’t taste right – there are an uncomfortable number of assumptions being smuggled in to such an impatient sentence. But the fact that something is poorly explained doesn’t always mean it is poorly reasoned.
A Korean friend – who had grown up in the raw capitalist struggle of 1990’s Seoul – once explained to me something very similar. His company had temporarily transferred him to their new factory in Germany – he was to help get things up and running, and after a few months return home. From his first moment on the factory floor my friend did what he thought was expected of him – what he had always done back in Korea: he worked longer, harder and with less breaks than was legally mandated or expected. Eight hour shifts would turn into twelve. And his new German colleagues hated him for it!
Instinctively my friend began to look at the people around him with a certain contempt – they were lazy, even immoral, and now they were upset because the hard work of another person was drawing attention to their failures. After a few weeks of this an older worker sat with my friend at lunch and told him what perhaps should have been obvious from the start. His colleagues weren’t angry with him for exposing their sluggish work ethic, they were angry because for every extra hour he worked he was stealing the salary of another person.
If the factory needed three employees working eight hours each day on a particular task in the production line, then if one, or two, of those employees start working twelve hours instead, the third person is suddenly no longer needed. The over-work of a few people, take away the possibility of full employment for everyone.
This economic reality is central to Russell’s argument – but it still only goes halfway. My friend told me that after this discussion he made a commitment to put his Korean work ethic on hold until he returned to the peninsula. There he was, a man free – for the first time in his adult life – from the rigors of overwork, and yet instead of enjoying his new independence, and the loosening of built-up stress, he suffered through the experience in near-torture. “A man who has worked long hours all his life will become bored if he becomes suddenly idle.”
So how does idleness become fulfilling, what does Russell want us to do with all this time to ourselves? It comes down to a change in judgement: begin to value life, and what we do with it, only by the pleasure we find within it. It can sound a little delinquent, and pushes an immediate criticism into the mind: what if overwork, for the benefit of overconsumption, makes some people truly happy? Russell’s answer is as intellectually unsatisfying as it is emotionally gratifying: what we produce beyond basic necessity is always illusory, and fundamentally “not wanted”.
Much of the narrative here is weaved together with shallow dismissals of this kind – and Russell never properly tackles the infinite fungibility of the human mind (derived from the universality of computation). But again, the actual thrust of his argument doesn’t need it. It is less counterintuitive than it first sounds, but through idleness, even boredom, comes creativity and progress.
Anyone who watches children play will understand this – excused from the overwork of adulthood, children often find themselves alone, even when in the company of other people. When the entertainment of adults – or ‘passive pleasure’ (yet another glaring weakness of Russell’s philosophy of mind) – is unavailable, and when other forms of easy stimulus can’t be found (when the automatism of life and choices is switched off), children don’t sit around in “pure frivolity”. They instead go looking for pleasure, excitement and interest. They become – through the silence and space of idleness – Nietzschian self-creators.
In Russell’s brave new idle world, “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.”
Sounds nice, doesn’t it! And yet it likely also sets you on edge, skin tingling with a sense of familiar tragedy. The parallels to communism, and the remembered promises of utopian paradises – built on the liberation of workers from workplaces – is a difficult mental hurdle to overcome. And despite offering significant criticisms of communism – quite presciently believing that new elites would inevitably form to live, once again, off the work of others; and that the overwork of the masses would never end with leaders “find[ing] continually fresh schemes, by which present leisure is to be sacrificed to future productivity” – Russell never quite manages to win his case.
This was a deliberate attempt at public philosophy – and everyone pays a heavy price for playing this game. The lack of time to explain yourself, and the uninitiated position of your audience, demands a certain degree of shallowness and half-baked argumentation. Think about how much time and space would need to be roped-off if Russell were to really step this out in detail, and fill-in every auxiliary claim, such as “the taste for war will die out…because it will involve long and severe work for all.”
Instead they are forced to sit there, ugly and exposed, while the author self-consciously feels the need to reassure the reader that he is, in fact, addressing them “in all seriousness”. It’s for this same reason that it feels a little inappropriate to be too critical of the finer details, or lack thereof.
What is certain though, looking back from the present moment, is that Russell was wrong! He was wrong about the inevitability of nuclear warfare, he was wrong about how enticing a dramatically reduced working week would be, as he was wrong about the promises of full-employment and the positive response that people would have to the idea of idleness. So instead of muddling forward through slow improvements, Russell would likely have seen the coronavirus as a wonderful, revolutionary, opportunity.
People, who for so long, have been unwilling to accept their freedom and throw-off the burdens of work, suddenly don’t have a choice in the matter. The virus has not only forced quarantine and isolation onto a huge percentage of the world’s population, but it has also, invariably, forced many people out of work. The economic questions that Russell hoped we would ponder are now inescapable, just as the idleness – from which he expected so much creativity and happiness – is now ubiquitous.
Perhaps, once the shock and discomfort has worn-off, we will develop a taste for this new type of living – Bertrand Russell was sure that we would: “there is no reason to go on being foolish forever”. I’m not so sure! Maybe it’s the slave in me talking, but it all still feels a little unrealistic, a little dangerous even, and definitely a little indulgent.