Tuesday, September 11, 2007

D-I-Y POP-UP GUIDE TO JOY IN WORK IIB

by the Sandwichman

The "problem of leisure"

Eric Gill defined the problem of leisure in the following terms: "In former times, such culture as men attained as the product of their working life. Now culture, if it is to be attained at all, is a product of leisure."

Gill also defined the relationship between work and leisure as a political problem. "It is the problem of freedom and slavery. For the freeman does what he wishes when he is at work -- but the slave, when he is working, does what he is compelled to do. And the slave is only happy when he is not working -- but the freeman, as it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, 'has joy in his work and this is his portion.'"

9 comments:

Bruce Webb said...

Well I am fairly well informed about four different slave societies: Greece, Rome, Early Medieval Europe and the United States and in none of them does this relationship between leisure and work hold out well as between free man and slave.

Now the Comedies of Aristophanes and Plautus are obviously not designed to be sociological studies, on the other hand audiences could be expected to recognize their own society when they saw it, and in these plays we see slaves with considerable power of self-organization. Of course this was exaggerated for comic effect and you can expect labor conditions were quite different for quarry slaves. Still life wouldn't have been a picnic for the typical free peasant farmer. The implicit notion that a slave plowman was grumbling while the free plowman was whistling while he worked seems a little stretched.

Certainly in Rome the Emperor's slaves had wide powers and great wealth, once again Petronius' Satyricon is not a documentary but equally not so far from reality as to allow Gill's formulation.

And the same for early medieval Europe. It is one of the oddities of early courts that postions that were originally servile evolved into great State Offices. The Chancellor, the Chamberlain, the Marshall, the Steward all were originally slave positions. For that matter the word "Knight" is in origin from "cnict" meaning 'boy' or 'servant'. Clearly opportunities for leisure had much more to do with access to resources than civil status.

Finally as to the US South. One of the most illuminating things I took from my survey of American history was that in the South the most dangerous work, like ditching and mining was reserved for poor free whites. That is while you might be willing to drive your slaves to the very edge of their potential productivity in the fields, slaveowners were not willing to expose expensive capital assets to threat of loss. A ditch collapse that killed a wage worker just meant finding a replacement, a collapse that killed a slave meant the loss of years of production. Here too the contrast between 'house slave' 'free white' and 'field slave' doesn't line up neatly with Gill's free/slave dichotomy.

Anonymous said...

with a great deal less knowledge than Bruce I can only observe that nevertheless there is a great "felt difference" between working for yourself and working for someone else.... and this difference is greatly affected by the degree to which, in either situation, you feel yourself "free" or "compelled."

as to the willingness of owners to drive slaves to death or "free" irishmen.. i have heard that story. but i have heard the contrary about conditions in the Caribbean... slaves were brought in on the understanding that they would be worked to death in about a year.

Anonymous said...

and i should add, without endorsing Gill, whom I have not read...

the post is about leisure. leisure seems to be a concept that is very much out of favor in America.

not only are Americans supposed to work hard, they are supposed to work overtime at the boss's convenience. and now, they are not supposed to retire at 65, because someone has shown that they can contribute a hundred thousand dollars a year to GDP if they keep working into their mid seventites... of course they don't get the hundred thousand. and if asked, they say they'd rather retire.

Anonymous said...

the problem for us "lazy" people... people who think life has joys to be savored that don't require a lot of money... is that we always have to compete with those who value nothing but gold. these latter people will clean the fields and kill the buffalo.. all the buffalo... so that their lazier brothers have nothing at all unless they submit to a kind of slavery to the more "enterprising."

having known both the excessively greedy and the excessively lazy, i keep hoping we will be smart enough to find a happy medium that allows scope for both types to find a measure of what they desire.

Sandwichman said...

Yes, you're quite right. I also understand that slaves in the U.S. south actually did often self-organize their work processes and rhythms. I think Gill's problem here is that he is mistaking the connotation of slavery for a literal description of its actuality.

Your elucidation certainly adds depth to Gill's two-dimensional dichotomy. I would maintain that Gill is trying to undermine standardized associations of leisure with enjoyment and work with pain. In that respect, I would grant him some literary and historical leeway -- although not carte blanche.

With regard to the elevation of servile positions to high office, I'm particularly fond of using the validiction, "I beg to remain, (sir or madam), your most humble and obedient servant," which implies precisely that exalted servility.

Bruce Webb said...

Coberly, a couple of responses;
"great "felt difference" between working for yourself and working for someone else"
Well sometimes. But personally given the choice of selling anything door to door and being a wage slave tenured Professor of History, well all I can say is "Mr. Chancellor bring on those shackles!

Similarly I doubt many independent truckers feel sorry for that crane operator when transhipping cargo at the port. "Poor guy, cooped up in a small cabin all day with only that six-figure income, juicy pension plan and benefit package. Oh and sleeping in his own bed every night."

As to the bigger point. I once worked with a guy at the UC Library. He worked the mail room which pretty much just meant moving boxes and sorting mail. You would think that he equated work with pain and leisure with enjoyment. Instead he never took time off, to the point that he turned back paid vacation to the employer. We would argue with him about this over beer after work, I mean no one was forcing him to take a foreign trip (though he could have afforded it), but hell at least take the day off and hit a bar in San Francisco or something, why on earth would you work for free? Moving boxes?

Well he was a solitary guy with no intellectual curiousity. His idea of a good time was to watch the scrambled Playboy channel in hopes of those seconds where you can actually see the picture. Of course he could have paid for the channel, he just wasn't even that motivated. Instead his live revolved around the rhythm of the mail room, and there is nothing more rhythmic than the predictable cycles of deliveries to a large mailroom, every truck coming by at pretty much the exact same time every day.

Not my idea of leisure (I am six months from my last day of work and not particularly motivated to look), but it worked for him. He probably rates a chapter in Sandwichman's next book.

Gill is onto something but he seems to be confusing contract status for control of work conditions.

Anonymous said...

Bruce

yes, i have seen those... i was going to call them pathologies.

and i agree with you about the door to door salesman, but i almost think i'd take the truck driver job just to be able to stop the truck once in a while and walk over the scenery for a few minutes.

i suspect that solitary guy with no intellectual curiosity also makes up the core of workaholic financial experts... and i almost said "entrepreneurs" here, but having been in that class briefly, i have to say that working 16 hours a day at something you believed in was liberating, though, like you, i got fed up with it after a while and persuied my intellectual curiosity into a place where it is granted to freedom to breathe: graduate school.

Anonymous said...

that should have been

granted No freedom

ninacawyu said...

Greetings. Have been following the blog. Note that I am Coberlyd, not your original Coberly. Researching ancient family roots reveals much about how concepts of "slavery" changed according to cultures of the times and and economic conditions. An American Indentured Servant would be a slave by our modern terms, perhaps somewhat glad to have a job and learn a trade by others. When one considers that most males were killed off, with more females surviving as actual "slaves" things begin to break those television stereotypes.