The benefits of leisure

[firecat]

I recommend this essay, and to tempt you I've swiped a bunch of quotes from it, both from Russell's essay and Maria Popova's surrounding text.

The only thing I have a problem with is that I suspect Mr Russell, in claiming that we can set things up so that no one has to work more than 4 hours a day, wasn't thinking about some of the kinds of work women are more likely to do, like childcare.

In Praise of Idleness: Bertrand Russell on the Relationship Between Leisure and Social Justice by Maria Popova

Leisure is not the same as the absence of activity… or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.” -- German philosopher Josef Pieper, "Leisure, the Basis of Culture"

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. -- Bertrand Russell

The idea that the poor should have leisure has always been shocking to the rich. -- Bertrand Russell

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. -- Bertrand Russell

[Russell] considers the radical shift that would take place if we were to stop regarding the virtue of work as an end in itself and begin seeing it as a means to a state of being in which work is no longer needed. -- Maria Popova

The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake. -- Bertrand Russell

The seedbed of this soul-shriveling belief is the notion — a driving force of consumerism — that the only worthwhile activities are those that bring material profit. -- Maria Popova

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 potboilers, 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 the capacity. -- Bertrand Russell

Comments

[silveradept]

It's a truth of our lives that the richest people could easily finance the rest of us if they had any inclination to do so. And still probably be the richest people by a degree or two after that. It would be nice to take part in a world or a country where they start at the baseline of "nobody starves, nobody dies, nobody goes without because some capitalist didn't want them" and then figured out how to provide a proper economy out of that so that everyone could have their small workdays and much happier standards of living.

[firecat]

Yes, can I sign up for your country?