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 traveller
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 traveller
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
civilised 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 labour, 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 labour 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 organised
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
organised 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 civilisation 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 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 [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 civilisation which would
have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential
to civilisation, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered
possible by the labours of the many. But their 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 civilisation.
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 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 organisation
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 organisation, 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
demoralising. 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 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 -- assuming a certain very moderate
amount of sensible organisation. 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 civilised, 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 civilisation 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 labour, 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 honoured 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 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 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 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 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 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 labour, 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 civilisation; 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 civilisation.
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 organised, 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 civilisation
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.