Andres' 3rd Comment

In his posting "My Draft Presentation...", Oliver put forward an argument broadly to the effect that one should be able to value idleness, and be free to express one's valuing of it, with the proviso that it should not develop into an excessive form; firstly, because of the negative consequences for, presumably, oneself, others, institutions, etc.; and secondly, because we need to co-operate with others to survive - i.e. it is in the mutual interest for each to do his/her fair share - society would collapse if it were filled with extreme idlers (cf. "to cut its own throat", in Oliver's posting following my 2nd Comment and, reiterated by Helen in her "The hard worker..." posting)

There are some problems with these positions. They are consequentialist arguments. They suggest that the immorality of extreme idleness is entailed by the fact that it serves as an obstacle to the realization of some posited higher aim; for example, the maintenance of a productive society or, the individual's own, at least subconscious, desire for some sort of 'personal advancement.' But it does not at all seem the case that a given individual must be in possession of a value such as one of these: indeed, it has been central to the arguments of my first two comments that there can be no particular value, or way of seeing the world, that is necessarily universal. This leads me to the more serious problem with these consequentialist positions.

At the heart of my 2nd Comment was the argument that our lived moral experience does not fit well with this picture of moral truths being discovered through rational procedure. Instead, moral values are immediately apparent to us as true, as right. We experience them as intuitively right. And they come to be so for us because they are integral to the particular moral traditions in which we are embedded. They form the syntax, if you will, of our moral vocabulary: without which, just like regular linguistic syntax, we could not make sense of our environment. And so the values we see as right, as true, are entirely dependent upon the cultures into which we have become immersed.

In the furthering of this argument I cited Weber's thesis on the origins of the northern European value of diligence. In regard to which it must also be noted that this consequentialism seems manifest in the conclusion Oliver draws from Weber's work (in the "My Draft Presentation..." posting). One cannot derive from Weber's assertions that idleness has come to be seen as a vice in our society because it fails to further one of the ends of our society; namely, the maximization of capital. Rather, he argues the other way around: the capitalist social structure emerged as an unanticipated ramification of the vice of idleness becoming a part of the culture of the peoples of northern Europe. Moral values are not an emergent property of mature cultures; they are, in the strictest possible sense, the foundation of cultures: a culture is the manifestation of a value-system.

Nonetheless, Oliver brings up a very important point with regard to Tom Hodgkinson's identification of the de-humanizing constraints that a capitalist regime may impose. In light of the fact that there is competition for our affections, if you will (i.e. metaphorically speaking as, we do not, of course, choose the value-system we come to adopt), between rival cultures or moral perspectives, now, perhaps more than in any previous era (as I mentioned in my previous posting), new, partially contrived cultures may arise - contrived, that is, by those who stand to gain from the adoption of particular values by a particular population. I would also like to tentatively suggest that such new cultures are not able to 'hypnotize' the populace into internalizing radically new values; instead they succeed by adopting old values (by which, I mean values that candidates for induction into the new culture would already, in some way, be acquainted with), and utilize them to serve the interests of those who stand to gain. Let us take a striking example: Nazism. Nazism represents possibly the most horrifically extreme and successful example of this purposeful attempt to shape the moral viewpoint of a community, yet its unique character was constructed from very old ideals; those of patriotism and human progress. Thus it can be seen that it would very much be in the interests of those who stand to gain the most from the capitalist socio-economic structure to perpetuate and foster the vice of idleness through the various media of propaganda at their disposal. And so while I remain compelled by Weber's thesis on the origins of the northern European virtue of diligence, I think Oliver quite right to highlight the modern purposeful, exploitative utilization of this value with which we are so well-acquainted.

And this, of course, also connects up with Nietzsche's seminal view of the origins of moral values. Whilst, according to all I have been arguing for, he would seem to have been mistaken in his ideas concerning how we may break the shackles of communal moral dictates, he provided us with his brilliant insight that our moral world may, to some extent, have been contrived by those who obtain political and economic power over us.

And so our present-day obstacles to our valuing of idleness may result from both an organic, so to speak, development of moral tradition and vocabulary, and also from an artificial manipulation of our moral landscape.