Is idleness good for us?
Moral Maze
BBC
4.4 • 623 Ratings
🗓️ 27 July 2023
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
School’s out for summer. For many, holidays are a chance to rest, unwind and empty the mind of work. For others, the long break brings additional pressures and stresses, such as childcare. It’s a period when inaction and inactivity are to be celebrated and envied.
What does that reveal about our priorities? During the pandemic, many people got a glimpse of what it was like to live more simply. Aristotle writes that the greatest possible human good is contemplation, a life lived remote from endless activity. Economics has taught us that our time is money, which is a necessity. But for some it has turned human beings into ‘human doings’ – units of productivity. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote “In Praise of Idleness” in 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, in which he called for nothing less than a total re-evaluation of work – and of leisure.
Throughout history, however, idleness has, more often than not, had a bad press. St Benedict described it as “the enemy of the soul”. Sloth is one of the seven deadly sins – a failure to do what should be done. The greatest danger of idleness, some believe, is that it can slide from a state of inaction to a state of purposelessness. That’s why Christianity has long seen the positive moral value, the character-building nature, of hard work.
Is idleness good for us?
Producer: Dan Tierney.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Good evening. Socrates was an early pioneer of working from home. |
| 0:09.4 | The founder of Western philosophy, one of the great thinkers of all time, was so idle, he never wrote any of his thoughts down. |
| 0:15.9 | He didn't bother to wash much either, had only one ragged coat and despised hard work. Beware, he said, the barrenness |
| 0:23.0 | of a busy life. Maybe we're becoming more Socratic. A survey just out suggests we work from home, |
| 0:30.2 | or at least avoid going into work, more than almost all comparable countries. Economists argue over |
| 0:36.9 | whether we get more or less done that way. They do agree, |
| 0:40.5 | though, that we are less productive as a nation than our competitors. Certainly, the pandemic has |
| 0:45.7 | sharpened the arguments over what is the right work-life balance. Historically, the ancients view that |
| 0:51.1 | a life of contemplation was best, labour was for slaves, |
| 0:55.0 | was overtaken by the idea that work was a virtue and a source of dignity. |
| 0:59.4 | Sloth, after all, is one of Christianity's seven deadly sins. |
| 1:03.1 | The Puritan work ethic built empires. |
| 1:06.1 | Karl Marx inverted the Athenians' hierarchy of work to glorify the working class, |
| 1:11.3 | though his no honor was to be reached when machines did it all for us. |
| 1:15.9 | As we break for the holidays, turn our backs on the workplace, whether it's the office, the factory or the kitchen table, |
| 1:21.9 | we ask, is work good for us, an idleness bad, or vice versa? |
| 1:27.3 | That's our moral maze tonight. |
| 1:28.5 | The panel, I'm a cavalvoy from the Politico News and Policy site. |
| 1:31.8 | The historian Tim Stanley, Ash Sarker from the Navarra Media Group, |
| 1:35.8 | and the Anglican priest and opinionator, Giles Fraser. |
| 1:39.8 | Well, get to work, panel, Giles. |
... |
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