The Pace of Modern Life
Perhaps the main enquiry of Idle Theory has been: why is everyone working so hard? Why, despite all manner of technological innovation and automation, is life for most people one long round of toil? Why is modern life increasingly hurried and rushed?
Underlying this is an idea of wealth: that a rich man, whatever material possessions he may have, must at least have leisure. If a rich man possesses a large house with a landscaped garden with lake, swimming pool, tennis courts, stables, and a garage full of fast cars, he can only enjoy these things if he has the leisure time in which to go boating, swimming, playing, riding, driving. If he has no leisure, then he may as well not have these things, unless his purpose in possessing them is for ostentation alone.
But in modern Western culture, wealth is understood to be material wealth. A rich man is someone who owns a lot of things, or else has sufficient money at his disposal that he could buy them if he wished. The rich, it seems, do not wish to be thought to idly enjoy their wealth, but set out to live demonstrably active, busy lives, usually acquiring yet more money and material possessions.
In modern Western economic theory, furthermore, material wealth - large houses, manicured gardens, picturesque lakes, rare paintings, antique sculptures - is regarded as the product of leisure foregone. A rich man, according to this economic myth, is someone who has worked hard to acquire this wealth, and a poor man is an idler, a do-nothing, a loafer. Underlying this myth, quite clearly, is a belief that life in itself is essentially leisure, and that all men live a life of leisure from the day they are born to the day they die. In the historical extension of this myth, Western society, almost uniquely, is made up of dynamic, go-ahead, busy people who got off their backsides and made something of themselves, rather than festering in mud huts. The busier their lives, the richer they got. The formal measures of wealth, in Western society, is the Gross National Product, which, since it is the measure of how much has been produced, is also roughly the measure of how hard everyone is working. An economic slump is a period when workers are laid off, production falls, business slows. An economic boom, by contrast, is a period when workers are hired, production increases, and trading increases.
According to this measure of wealth, it follows that the richest possible society is one in which everyone is working all day every day - i.e. foregoing all their leisure - producing wealth. It can be no great surprise that perverse and obstructive laws that forbade work on religious holidays have been repealed, making the entire week available for wealth-generating work. In future, the production of wealth will no longer be interrupted by weekends, holidays, lunch hours, coffee breaks, and we will all be the richer for it.
Something of a protest movement has grown in the face of this modern Western myth. It is pointed out that ever-increasing wealth production entails ever-increasing pollution, because of the waste products given off during production, and because the material products themselves in turn become waste, once used. And this ever-increasing production entails ever larger and more extensive mines, oil fields, dams, roads, railways, the conversion of green fields into factories, the felling of forests - in short the destruction of the natural environment, and the consumption of its resources.
It is also pointed out that the increasingly stressed and busy lives that people are forced to lead generates varieties of psychological disorder. Modern Westerners are increasingly prone to breakdown, alcoholism, drug addiction. In their increasingly restricted free time, they search for ever more intense experiences to offset the boredom and tedium and constraints of work - life has to be crushed into ever briefer interludes.
Science and the Humanities
The modern Western economic myth has, curiously, no basis in modern Western science. While ours is commonly held to be a scientific era, in which science pervades the entire culture, there is in reality a sharp division between, on the one hand, the 'hard sciences' of physics, chemistry and increasingly biology, and on the other hand the 'life sciences' of economics, politics, and ethics. The axioms of these 'life sciences' (to the extent that there are any) are not derived from physics. Science tends to be mathematical in character, and the humanities tend to be discursive and literary. Science and the Humanities form two entirely separate cultures.
This is sometimes expressed as the distinction between facts and values. Science, it is held, deals with the factual motion of the planets, the factual combination of chemical elements, the factual genetic basis of life. The Humanities, by contrast, are concerned with the subjective valuations of wealth or well-being, subjective valuations of justice, equality, good and evil. Science can build the tennis court, rackets and balls, but it cannot provide the rules of the game, or the spirit in which it should be played. It is not possible, it is argued, to argue from what is the case (facts) to what ought to be the case (values).
The appearance of these two cultures is really the result of the emergence and expansion of scientific knowledge in Western culture over the past 500 years. Science is akin to an expanding Roman empire, gradually incorporating or subjugating barbarian states - traditional folk-wisdoms - on its borders. Economic philosophy, ethics, and politics, still lie beyond the borders of that expanding empire. These largely discursive and literary philosophies belong to a tradition that extends back to Socrates and Plato, 2500 years ago, and they have no better answers to their questions now than they did back then.
There has been a continual attempt, in Western society, to extend Science into the Humanities. Marxism, as Scientific Socialism, was one such attempt. Freudian psychology attempted a science of mind. Sociobiology, blending Darwinism with modern genetic science, is among the more recent attempts. Economic philosophy, sensing the threat, has attempted to become more mathematical, more science-like.
Science is strongly deterministic, and the incursion of science into human life always appears to threaten to cancel human freedom, and to explain human behaviour as wholly determined by external forces and powers, just as the motion of planets is determined by gravitational attraction. The humanities, by contrast, asserts a fundamental human freedom, a very real ability to make genuine choices. This collision has an all-or-nothing character: either we are completely free or we are completely determined. Science attempts to impose complete determinism on human life, and the humanities attempt to assert a complete freedom.
Idle Theory
Idle Theory sees human life as neither completely determined nor completely free. It sees humans as part-time free agents. It accepts that human beings actually do make free choices, but it sees this ability as being restricted to relatively brief interludes.
The basis of this approach lies in understanding that humans have to work to stay alive. Human life, and every kind of life, actively maintains itself. Human beings require food, water, and shelter in order to continue to live, and they have to work to find or produce these things, which permit them continued life. In the best of circumstances, where food and water and shelter is abundantly at hand, this self-maintenance work takes very little time. In the worst of circumstances, where food and water and shelter are scarce, this self-maintenance work may take up most of the available time. The time during which humans work to find the necessities of continued life is a time during which they are constrained to a particular set of activities.
If, for example, one man lives solely by catching and eating fish, then he is required to spend some part of each day catching fish with a fishing line or net. Failure to perform this task this results in starvation and death. Fishing, for this man, is not an optional activity. It is an activity that he must perform, or else die. It is, in effect, work carried out at gunpoint - except that there is no other man holding the gun to his head. What he does with the remainder of his time is largely inconsequential: he can do whatever he likes, whatever he chooses.
Thus Idle Theory makes a sharp distinction between unavoidable self-maintenance activity, during which an individual is busy working to maintain himself, and the remainder of time during which he is idle, and able to undertake other freely chosen activities. In Idle Theory, human life alternates between constrained busy-ness and free idleness.
The goal of human life is to maximize idleness. In part this is because an individual who can maintain his own life with minimal exertion is more likely to survive a time of difficulty than one who maintains himself only via the maximum exertions.