Keeping Busy

Alan Ryan Keeping Busy PIRA NDELLO’S PLAY SIX CHARACTERS IN SEARCH OF AN AUTHOR HAS spawned endless feeble witticisms o f the form “six x in search o f a y.” I was tempted to begin this paper with another: six episodes in the history of ideas about work and leisure in search of a common theme. The temptation was easy to resist; I have a theme looking for a grounding in my six episodes. I begin with a short introduction to lay out my theme, then move through the six episodes: Adam’s Curse, the Protestant Ethic as Neurosis, Kantian Redemption, Nineteenth-century Cross-Purposes, Arendt’s Hatred of Hobbies, and Keeping Busy. ROOTS AND ROOTEDNESS “Busyness,” like many concepts, trades on contrast. The most obvi­ ous contrast is with “real work” and “really working.” “Busy work” is usually pretend work; we try to look as though we are achieving some­ thing but all we are doing is shuffling the paper on our desks, polishing the inlet manifold rather than diagnosing the fault about to destroy the engine, marching our soldiers up to the top of the hill and marching them down again rather than engaging the enemy. All the same, being “busy” is often said to be a good thing: the Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts celebrated “the little busy bee” for improving the shining hour. For creatures other than the bee, busy may be a good thing to be but not usually the best thing: a midfield soccer player who is “busy” is useful, but a player of equal skill who is “economical” is better. My theme is that our attitude to “real work” is deeply ambiguous. On the one side, work is a curse, the labor to which we are doomed as a result o f the Fall; its side effect of enforcing upon us a necessary discipline and self-disci­ social research Vol 72 : No 2 : Summer 2005 427 pline is small consolation. On the other side, work is the expression of distinctive human powers and aspirations; work brings imagination into the world as well as drudgery. We imagine a world that does not exist but might, and then we set about creating it. The Fall was a happy Fall, and the need to labor was the first step in teaching the human species how to make the most o f its potentialities. Innumerable questions arise. If labor is a curse, is technology an unequivocal good, or does it infantilize its beneficiaries by giving them their bread without requiring any sweat on their brows? If eating with­ out working is bad for us, why did exemption from labor not infantilize the aristocratic leaders of Greek and Roman society? Or are we wrong to think it did not? Should we take a stem view of their heroic qualities and conclude that they were morally infantile? This seems a difficult thought to entertain in the presence o f Pericles, if easier to entertain in the presence of Mark Antony. Or should we think more imaginatively about what constitutes labor? We habitually think of it as defined by a spade and a peasant and the resistant earth that the peasant is digging; perhaps we should reconnect labor and its benign effects on those who work by acknowledging that organizing an army and navy, uniting the population o f Athens behind a strategy to hold off the Spartans, and keeping up morale in the face o f plague and near-famine are all “real work.” This leaves room for the thought that hanging about in Egypt and letting your hired help do the serious work is infantile. What follows is a series of reflections on the question ofwhat counts as work, what is mere “busyness,” why we are to emulate the little busy bee—if we are; whether the Gospel of Work preached by Carlyle and Ruskin made sense even in the 1850s, and what we should think about work now. I end with some depressing thoughts about work and retirement. THE CURSE OF ADAM And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which...