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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.