The Economic Imperative: Leisure and Imagination in the 21st Century

By John Zerilli

The book explores the role of leisure in modern life. It was written in the belief that leisure sets us apart as a species, that what is “useless” by commercial standards is probably the best thing we have going for us, and that leisure is under attack, in high danger of being lost, and has been for some time (since at least the end of the Second World War). The source of the problem is the ascendancy of the economic imperative, the subordination of the science of means (philosophy) by the science of ends (economics). The book argues that our leisurely impulse has been so squandered that boredom is now a significant problem in modern life. The essays canvass the distinctive contributions of art, science and religion, and provide a synthetic account of these three forces driving human culture. Although the book covers the science/religion question, this book differs from others on the science/religion debate in that it connects the traditional discussion to questions of economics and social policy. It takes an innovative approach in weaving the fundamentals of human life (art, science, economics and so on) into one fabric, namely, leisure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Imprint Academic
• Release date: Oct 10, 2011
• ISBN: 9781845403423

Book preview

J.Z.

Introduction: The Problem Stated

Russell’s famous essay, In Praise of Idleness (1932), contains a fragment which goes a long way towards identifying the themes that are central to the present discussion.

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.

There can be no doubt that leisure, not money, is what makes the world go round. It is the focus of most of the appeals commercial enterprise makes to our disposable income, generates much of the demand that consolidates national output and makes possible from what is seemingly inert the activity, industry and inventiveness which are those vital prerequisites of our civilized manner of life. The problem in view here is that in the heat of effort we forget that the leisurely impulse is what secures for us the claim to humanity.

These essays attempt to exemplify the priority of leisure—and the life-enhancing activities which are made possible by it, chiefly among them speculation and creative reflection—to all forms of productive capacity broadly conceived. True, these activities may be pleasures of the quieter and intellectual kind; but all genuine and lasting insights—of the type which change whole societies or give rise to signal transformations in the relationship between individuals and their environment—are often enough born in sanctuaries of quiet contemplation and forethought. Action without forethought, Durant says, tends to follow a straight line, whereas thought is roundabout, and loves flank attacks. The man of action rushes into play courageously, succeeds now, fails then; and sooner or later wishes that he could think more. The increasing dependence of industry on scientific research and of politics on expert investigators shows how the world is coming to value the man whose specialty is seeing.[1]

Significantly enough, the two great psycho-physical classes of human beings, men of thought and men of action, have appeared in the theology of the Catholic West. There was the way of Martha, which was the way of salvation through action, and the way of Mary, which was the way through contemplation. It was and still remains the case that the Catholic preference and highest reverence is reserved for the way of Mary, because contemplation is understood to be the final end of man.

All problems are at last problems of information: to find out how things stand is the only effective way of getting things done. Santayana baldly declares that faith in intellect is the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruit.[2]

It should be added, however, that any demonstration of the richness of thought behind projects which, without the corrective offered by a new outlook, might be seen exclusively or most substantially to be the result of manual exertion, should not be taken to be deprecatory of the contribution of the active persons involved in implementing those projects, as both the scheme and its implementation are the twin preconditions of our social furnishings. Inevitably, whenever one essays to counter a prevailing mindset one risks replication of the error in the opposite direction, such being the ordinary pattern of thesis and antithesis, action and reaction. But what I hope should emerge is a revised estimation and appraisal of the relationship obtaining between thought and action along lines indicating the priority of thought to effective and coordinated action. My task is not to belittle activity, only to rescue creative speculation from indelicate prejudice.

It is useful also, at this juncture, to clarify the conceptions of forethought, scheme and plan that are intended in the essays which follow. Rather importantly, these terms are not used to designate the kind of planning and direction of activity which is inherent in the central-planning model. That idea of planning is not one which enjoins us to chose intelligently between the various possible organizations of society, or employ foresight and systematic thinking in planning our common affairs, but one requiring central direction according to a consciously constructed blueprint. In the popular tract by F.A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, the author concedes that all who are not complete fatalists will believe and act according to the belief that we should handle our common problems as rationally as possible and that in so doing we should use as much foresight as we can command. In that sense, Hayek says, every political act is (or ought to be) an act of planning: An economist, whose whole task is the study of how men actually do and how they might plan their affairs is the last person who could object to planning in this general sense. But it is not in this sense that our enthusiasts for a planned society now employ this term, nor merely in this sense that we must plan if we want the distribution of income or wealth to conform to some particular standard…What our planners demand is a central direction of all economic activity according to a single plan. To be clear, that central-planning notion is not intended in the essays which follow.

1 Philosophy and the Social Problem (1917).

2 Reason in Common Sense (1911).

Leisure and the Economic Imperative

But let us examine still more carefully. The matter is no chance trifle, but how we ought to live.

Socrates to Thrasymachos, in Plato’s Republic (352B)

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.

Oscar Wilde, Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray

In the trajectory of intellectual history the twentieth century was characterized by both the ascendancy of economic science and its coming of age. Political theory, on the other hand, was made suspect, at least in the industrialized West. It had, after all, bequeathed Marxism; and even if Marxism was just as much an economic creed as a political one, it was ultimately political science (or the science of ends), that was forced to give ground to economic science (as the science of means), because it was no longer obvious to Western leaders why deficits in political theory could not be adequately addressed with economic prescriptions. The threat of Marxism combined with the onset of the Great Depression to reinforce a new paradigm of statecraft. Economics was henceforth a tool of social policy. Since bad politics was really bad economics, good politics could be secured by pursuing good economics. Equating politics with economics in this way made it easier to substitute one with the other. The intellectual consequence was that, while political discourse was never discarded, its traditional concerns were taken over in large measure by professional economists. Means became ends. From now on, pursuits which did not in themselves generate means, or which did not answer to the all-important criterion of being useful, were of secondary importance in the value system. Today, pursuit of the good life, even as a worthwhile if unspecifiable object of political discussion, has gradually slipped out of comprehension; such vocabulary is now arcane, Aristotelian, or just Bohemian nonsense. Government is now the handmaiden of the economic specialists, and efficiency, not prudence or temperance, is the guiding principle.

One detects this strain in any contemporary account of political science. The standard account of the election-cycle is, for example, hardly more than the Treasury’s press conference calendar. Political savvy is understood to involve not so much the ability to convince citizens of the vitality of the offered policies as the ability to sell them, whatever substantive repercussions the policies might entail, and to offer tax cuts as quid pro quo. Commercial exchange and bargain are built into the psychology of most election campaigns, and openly understood to operate as such. Campaign funding is virtually a fixed capital expenditure in the cyclical operation of the largest and most powerful transnational corporations. If markets are to operate fairly, which is to say, if contracts are to be kept, then we can only expect that election funders will send their invoices to the successful candidates and expect payment to equal or greater value. And because by this stage the elected candidates owe a dual fealty, both to the people who voted for them and the private wealth which purchased them, the payment is recorded as a debit to democratic integrity. In fact, there appears to be no end in sight to the insidious mercantile debauchery of hard-fought and long-hallowed civic standards. Even the traditional conception of the nation-state is understood as no longer warrantable under current circumstances without some groundedness in market reality. Instead of seeing the truth of this reality as a cause for concern, some of the most acclaimed scholars in the field of geopolitics see fit to embrace it and give it grandiloquent expression. Philip Bobbit’s Terror and Consent, basically an apologetic for international terrorism, charts the rise and development of the nation-state from its origins in the post-Westphalian settlement to the post Cold War era. It presents a sophisticated case for the sublimation of the traditional concept of the nation-state into that of the inevitable market-state of which the existence of a constituency, the swift mobility of capital and the irrelevance of contiguous territory appear to be the defining characteristics.

To be clear, the marginalisation of certain groups in society as a special effect of the narrow concentration of power within them is a recurring theme throughout the history of both the East and the West, not simply a new appearance on the horizon of our times. Nor are purely monarchical establishments the only exemplars of it. A republican administration like the Roman one was already succumbing to the tendency of empire as early as the time of the Gracchi; and even when Rome from all objective accounts had the look of a concrete republic, it still perpetuated itself as the product of a ruling elite whose control of the instrumentalities of the state and the state’s wealth was for practical purposes virtually uninhibited. As for the active ingredient in such circumstances, wherever and whenever they happen to arise, we may point to a certain ebb in the reality of mutual consciousness. In almost every case of oppression and tyranny, the decay of public spirit renders possible the concentration of property in a few hands and the replacement of free workers by slaves, or, what is only apparently a milder form of the same thing, a large and powerless wage-earning class. This happens also to be the case, although not at first blush, in those instances of fascism with which we are as a matter of historical proximity more familiar.

In this context, the German, Spanish