Draft of my idleness presentation contribution

I have managed to arrive at an argument which (although I am still not entirely convinced by the merits of its arguments) seems to offer an argument against careless idling that will fit in with the presentation. It is still open to change...

Here it is:

Every day, our social interactions teach us that idleness is a vice. Indeed – “The devil makes work for idle hands”! Our boss at work chastises us for what he/she perceives as idleness. If we are late we are docked pay. If our productivity slows we receive a written warning. Ultimately, the boss’s perception of our idleness can result in our dismissal. At home, if we don’t wake early enough family members chastise our idleness. If we delay in walking the dog, put off a household chore, you guessed it! – WE ARE CHASTISED FOR OUR IDLENESS! Everywhere we turn we are inescapably reminded that our idleness is a sin, and that oppositely if we meet deadlines, if we work hard and assist society with appropriate timekeeping and speedy action – we will be rewarded! Indeed as Benjamin Franklin put it “Trouble springs from idleness, and grievous toil from needless ease”, and who are we to question one of the founding fathers of great American values? It’s no coincidence that the moralist and polymath so instrumental in laying the foundations for the system that now inescapably saturates our social cosmos has his face immortalized on the US $100 bill! His moral framework has played such an important role in keeping the capitalist ball rolling.

Max Weber recognized this in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. He identified a historical link between changes in culture and changes in economic and social systems. He identified the rise of the ascetic protestant ethic in conjunction with the modern capitalist ethic and their eventual coalescence into the capitalist cosmos that saturates our lives today. The religious justifications for avoiding idleness may have become less relevant but the message remains the same – if we are idle and if we do not rise early, labour usefully and contribute to the system appropriately we are of lesser use to the modern capitalist system than those who refrain from idleness. Tom Hodgkinson also highlights this argument in his book How to be Idle, launching an attack on the de-humanizing constraints that the western capitalist system places upon society in order to achieve its aims.

But what are the philosophical ramifications of being idle? I have looked at idleness from a political and social standpoint, and this has hopefully removed the issue from its previously commonsensical position in your considerations to a much more loosely anchored position of analysis. Are we perhaps being exploited and taken advantage of when we are denied our fundamentally human right to idle if we wish? Indeed, do we have the right to be idle?
The danger here is that an individual can become what I like to call anarchically idle. They can recognise the hitherto arguments that the system is placing irrational and exploitative constraints on their ability to idle and use this recognition in a negative way. Here we can use the example of societal ‘drop-outs’ and welfare system abusers. After a time this anarchic idleness turns into apathetic idleness. The idler is now at a stage where they no longer consider the consequences of their actions.

Sartre’s notion of freedom can help us in understanding the problem of this. If we are to argue that we are free to idle and do as we wish then so be it, but we must be aware of the consequences of our actions. Humanity has been here a lot longer than capitalism so can we really use capitalism as an excuse for us acting idle? We may well not agree with the capitalist conditions that condemn our idleness, but we are socially interactive children of history. Systems come and go with the epochs but our need to labour remains. We rely upon constant social co-reliance to survive and to idly renegade breaks our inescapable contract of productive interaction with those around us. What do we really achieve from becoming apathetically idle? Sure, we renegade against the order of things, renegade against the system. It gives us a brief but limited sense of satisfaction. No matter how much we idly rebel, don’t we always feel ultimately exploited and still downtrodden? Surely mindful positive worldly interaction is the most appropriate way to maximize ones opportunities in life.