The Wisdom of Leisure

In his provocative 1927 essay, The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud outlines his take on the root source of humanity’s seemingly unflagging suffering, finding it in “the sacrifices which civilization expects… in order to make a communal life possible.” These sacrifices consist, for Freud, in a coerced “suppression of the instincts,” foremost among which instincts are sex and aggression, with a nod to death. But a crucial passage, and as I will argue a crucial error, in the opening pages of The Future of an Illusion points us in an entirely different direction from Freud’s theory of civilization as the ground of an inevitable discontent. And, while not a guarantor of unguarded optimism (our earth is far too close to the brink for anything but the most closely guarded forms of optimism), this opposite direction is, or has the potential to be, hopeful.

The passage reads thusly:

“For masses are lazy and unintelligent; they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline.”

His near bottomless contributions to our understanding of the human psyche notwithstanding, Freud here has it exactly backwards. Because masses are (quite often individually and without question collectively) so intelligent I would call them wise, and, furthermore, their genius consists precisely in what Freud calls laziness, but what I would describe as the wisdom of leisure.

In short, I am suggesting that the root source of suffering isn’t Freud’s suppression of the instincts (or, for that matter, Buddhism’s desire, or Christianity’s original sin, etc., etc.), but simply the fact that civilization (as we know it) is so much damn work. (There is some irony in the fact that Freud, a self-described “godless Jew,” sounds, in the passage quoted above, like a mouthpiece for the God-subscribing, goyish “Protestant work ethic.”)

While exercising caution that we don’t romanticize hunter-gatherer civilizations as some kind of Garden of Eden, it is nevertheless instructive to consider the relative workloads of our ancient forebears. To do so, we turn to Charles Eisenstein’s The Ascent of Humanity: “Ethnographic studies of isolated Stone Age hunter-gatherers and premodern agriculturalists suggest that ‘primitive’ peoples, far from being driven by anxiety, lived lives of relative leisure and affluence.” Eisenstein then describes anthropologist Richard Lee’s study of the !Kung of the Kalahari Desert, which found that, for the !Kung, “an average workweek consisted of approximately twenty hours spent in subsistence activities,” and that “Moreover, much of the ‘work’ spent on these twenty hours of subsistence activity was by no means strenuous or burdensome.” Compare this to the typical forty hour work week, which forty hours is a paltry sum when one considers the hours clocked by anyone with any real aspirations to climb the career ladder. (America is run by workaholics; we know this because they are emailing the rest of us between midnight and 3:00 AM.) Ask yourself also if some or much of the work you perform in your forty-plus hours isn’t “strenuous or burdensome.”

In sum, “premodern” civilizations worked a lot less than us and were also a lot less anxious. Work less, feel better. A simple formula that we, in all our technological glory, just can’t seem to grasp. But, of course, civilization isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Leaving us stuck with Freud’s “love and work,” when what we really need is “love and play.” But the closest we seem to be able to get to the latter, as reported by The Washington Post, are employers (usually outdoorsy activity gear companies) who encourage us to take a half hour break for a hike, or a five day paid vacation to go camping somewhere really pretty, with a nod to the bottom line. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/a-company-that-profits-as-it-pampers-workers/2014/10/22/d3321b34-4818-11e4-b72e-d60a9229cc10_story.html?hpid=z5) Happy workers make productive workers. Just so, in our civilization, play is always in the service of work (and profits). We will know the revolution has finally come when we can each devote our lives to working really hard on something out of sheer pleasure, i.e. in a spirit of play. As Terry Eagleton says, socialism is about “leisure, not labor.”

Of course, Eagleton is quick to remind us of Oscar Wilde’s wry observation that “The problem with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” Wilde’s insight provides much needed ironic distance from the cruel truth that the source of the never-ending tide of strenuous and burdensome work can only be undone by yet more such work, making the dismantling of labor in favor of leisure something of a damned if you do, damned if you don’t proposition. All of which makes going through the automatic motions of showing up for work every day in order to put food on the table a symptom of the paralysis that comes from knowing that the only possible cure for what ails us is more of what ails us. In assessing the depth of this paralysis I would submit that the double bind diagnosed by Wilde has as much if not more to do with the failure of really existing 20th century socialism to displace capitalism than the atrocities propagated by Stalin and his ilk. Whereas the latter marked socialism as a brutal failure in Eastern Europe and Asia, the former made it a non-starter in the west, meaning it was over before it ever even started.

In place of socialism’s cure, perhaps the best we can hope for at this moment in time is a therapy, with at least one eye always watching for the event that will break open the possibility of playful leisure, which is the possibility of the reemergence of the human. We need new words for socialism anyway, given the tragic emptying of the term via unstaunched 20th century bloodletting, and playful leisure just might do. We need words that can never again lead to the gulag and the show trial, but that are still apposite to the soul crushing age in bloom on both sides of where the old Berlin Wall once stood. If the revolution is to succeed, it has to be funny (i.e. playful).

In the meantime, our therapy takes the axiom for our age, “Work less, feel better,” and translates it into a question that can be applied at every last decision point: How much is enough?