The Rosy Vision rewritten
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According to Idle Theory, humans have to work to live. The proportion of their time that they work is called their Idleness. At very low levels of Idleness, they work most of the time, and have little leisure. At high levels of Idleness they work little, and have a lot of leisure. The principle purpose of an economy is to increase social idleness, freeing up people from work, and giving them the leisure in which to do what they want. One of the things they may want to do in their free time is to make toys and amusements, and trade them among themselves. But one thing is pretty much for sure: they don't have all their time as leisure. But modern micro-economic theory One possibility is that modern economies are so efficient that people can earn their living in next to no time, and so they effectively have their whole lives as leisure. But the evident fact that some people in industrial society work very long hours simply to survive contradicts this possibility. Another possibility is that economists confuse formal human freedom - the ability of anyone to choose, all the time, what they will or will not do - with real freedom. Prisoners in penitentiaries are formally free, and can do as they wish, within the confines of their cells. Slaves in ancient Greece or Rome were formally free to disregard the orders of their masters, regardless of the consequences. A man with a gun held to his head is formally free to ignore the threat it poses, though few people ever do. Nobody - except maybe an economist - would say that a prisoner or a slave or a hostage was 'free' or 'leisured.' But another possibility is that the idea that human life is profoundly unfree and unleisured is quite simply intolerable to people who suppose that their society offers the best of all possible worlds, and the assumption of freedom is a kind of religious faith. Whatever the explanation, from the point of view of Idle Theory, modern economic theory begins with wholly utopian assumptions about the nature of human existence. And such a rosy vision of human life, if thoroughly developed, must colour not only economic thinking, but also suffuse ethical and political thought. This essay explores some of the consequences of this rosy vision |
The State of Play
While Idle Theory portrays the human past as unrelenting toil, the Rosy Vision portrays it as unremitting leisure. And while Idle Theory sees the development of human society, codes of behaviour, laws, tools, and trade as the means by which humanity could unburden itself of work, the Rosy Vision sees the development of human society as idle humanity setting itself to work to 'improve' itself.
The savage would slumber forever under his tree unless he were roused from his torpor by the cravings of hunger or the pinchings of cold, and the exertions that he makes to avoid these evils, by procuring food, and building himself a covering, are the exercises that form and keep in motion his faculties, which otherwise would sink into listless inactivity. (Malthus. 1st Essay on Population. ch. 18)
I see him satisfying his hunger under an oak, quenching his thirst at the first stream, finding his bed under the same tree which provided his meal, and, behold, his needs are furnished. (Rousseau. Discourse on Inequality. Part 1)
As the Protestant parson Thomas Malthus saw it, savage humanity was indolent humanity which needed to be goaded into constructive activity. For Rousseau, savage humanity was also indolent humanity, but the 'noble savage' began a downward journey once he embarked on the path of civilization. For Malthus, the effort was worth it: art, music, the philosopy of Locke, and the science of Newton. For Rousseau, it was not: human civilization had brought with it a kind of fall, a loss of innocence and simplicity.
In both cases, the mythic human state of nature was one of ease and leisure. And given a general condition of universal leisure, the only reason that human civilization ever developed beyond mud huts was because people wanted to improve themselves, have more possessions, do things they'd never done before. It was human will, human determination, that overcame indolence, and got people to build stone houses, decorate them with paintings, and surround them with gardens. It was human ambition and courage that drove them to build boats and sail acrosss seas. But for dynamic, ambitious men, we'd all still be living in grimy mud huts, eating cockroaches and slugs.
Malthus and Rousseau were writing in the 18th Century. But in the Christian Western world, however, the received myth was not of natural man as idle or leisured, but on the contrary as Fallen Adam toiling 'by the sweat of his brow' in hope of redemption. Somehow or other, by the time Malthus and Rousseau were writing, this sense of fallen humanity seems to have given way to a growing sense of redemption. "Do you not think, gentlemen," remarked Oliver Cromwell during the English civil war, over a century earlier, "That we are not ushering in those things which God hath promised." At the same time, poring over the Book of Daniel, Isaac Newton deduced that the Last Trumpet would sound in 1867. A new optimism had taken root, that would grow up into a towering tree. Christian faith and hope in future redemption gladly surrendered to a conviction of present redemption: mankind had already been saved. This was to prompt a protest from Schopenhauer:
Protestantism has given up the inmost kernel of Christianity by eliminating asceticism... In the end this results in a doctrine of a loving father who made the world so that things might go very pleasantly in it (and in this of course was bound to fail), and who, if only we conform to his will in certain respects, will afterwards provide an even pleasanter world (in which case it is to be regretted that it has so fatal an entrance). This may be a good religion for comfortable, married and civilised Protestant parsons, but it is not Christianity.
Nonetheless, Christianity always contained a millennial promise, the impending Kingdom of God, and as trade and industry prospered, science extended its scope, it must have indeed seemed to many that, by 1867, those things which God hath promised had indeed been ushered in.
Life as a Game
The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke;--
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of a schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
(Sir Henry Newbolt)
Given a general condition of leisure, all human activity has the nature of a game. All industry, war, religion, research - any activity at all - is a kind of game. People work because they like to work, building bridges and dams and roads. And people fight because they enjoy fighting. And they pray because they delight in kneeling in prayer, singing hymns, etc. And they do research because it's fun to find things out. There is no necessity to any of it. If people stopped work, it wouldn't make any real difference - we'd just be back living in mud huts again.
And, in every game, there are winners and losers. The winners are the most determined, persistent, and ambitious. Those who dispiritedly accept their humble lot are always marginalized and trampled. They are life's losers, lacking the drive and determination to compete for power and wealth and fame. If they were good losers, they'd salute life's winners as worthy of the prize they'd won - wealth, land, power, etc.
Yet everyone has a right to life, and a right to leisure, and a right to pursue their happiness in whatever way they choose. For if all life is leisure, there exists a natural right to leisure, and a natural right to life - just as because men think and dream, they have a natural right.
And if life is a game, then the rules of the game can be changed at will. Just as the rules of football have been changed, to introduce the off-side rule, prohibitions on tackling from behind, and red and yellow cards for referees, and so on, so also can the rules governing all other human activities - which are also games - be changed. The important thing is that everybody abides by the rules, and the decisions of the referees on the football pitch, or judges in courts - otherwise everything degenerates into chaos, and the games are no fun to play.
And no one set of rules is essentially 'better' than any other. For although in football, it is usual for both sides to have an equal number of players, there is no particular reason why one side should not be allowed 15 players, while the other is restricted to 5. True, this would tend to make the game one-sided: but what is wrong with one-sidedness? It's all a game, after all. And anyway somebody has to lose. And if you don't want to play, then join a different game.
And if the rules of football games are arbitrary, and may also be unequal, the same goes for other social games.
Economic Consequences
In Idle Theory, the purpose of the economic activity is to provide leisure. But in the Rosy Vision, leisure is regarded as the given condition of humanity, and all of life, from birth to death, is idle time. It follows that in no sense can economic activity be seen as generating leisure. Instead, the economy can only be concerned with producing a wealth of goods and services that people want for their enjoyment, to add interest to an otherwise idle tedium. In this view of the economy, people forego leisure to work to amass desirable goods and services - cars, TVs, videos, swimming pools, perfumes, etc -. Men and women do not work because they have to, but because they choose to. Rather than sit on their backsides and do nothing, they adopt a work ethic, and forego their idleness to generate an income of real wealth. Governments adopt policies of Full Employment in Wealth Creation. It is held that the harder people work, the more material goods and services are produced, and the richer everyone gets. Economic growth is about producing more and more wealth. The Gross National Product, as an indicator of wealth, is simply a measure of the size of the pile of goods produced by economic activity.
The economic theories underpinning this view of the economy typically begin by ascribing to humans an infinite set of almost insatiable desires, and the economy is driven by a general impulse to possess, to own.
The comsequence of this is that, whereas Idle Theory seeks to minimize work, modern culture tries to maximize it, and to get economies to employ as many people as possible to output as many goods as possible.
Religious Consequences
This optimistic outlook seems to have taken hold in Western society at the time of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, and to have tightened its grip in subsequent centuries. Rather than seeing the condition of humanity as in some sense 'fallen' and in need of Christian 'salvation' or 'redemption', it held that humanity was already saved, and that a new era of human freedom had been inaugurated, or was about to be inaugurated. A Christian notion of a journey or pilgrimage towards a promised land was replaced by a new sense of having arrived. Christianity had become redundant, and church membership steadily fell. The problem for the arrivistes was not how to get to heaven, but what to do now that they'd got there.
In the past, men had seen themselves as playthings in the hands of fickle gods. Or else that whatever happened was the expression of the implacable will of one supreme and omnipotent God. In the Rosy Vision, it ceases to be the will of God (or the gods) that determines events, but the Will of Man. The divine will is replaced by human will. This shift from the divine to the human was prefigured, perhaps, in a Christianity whose God became incarnated on earth as a particular historical individual, a kind of divine pilgrim father establishing the will of God on earth. But the shift from God to Man entailed no essential change in the underlying explanatory logic: Whatever happened could simply be explained by saying "X willed it," where X may be God, or Man, or whatever. This kind of explanation is extremely attractive, precisely because it can explain absolutely anything. But when X is equated with humanity, or Man, or the common people, it is doubly attractive, because then every man can pride himself as being in some sense omnipotent and omniscient.
This kind of explanation of events renders every sort of intellectual enquiry redundant. Once "X willed it" becomes a sufficient explanation, further enquiry is simply a waste of time. The only task left for philosophy is to demonstrate the futility of philosophy, the purposeless of intellectual enquiry and discussion, the meaningless of the terms it uses and the statements it makes. Human history becomes simply the record of what men wanted to do, from one age to the next, and has no internal logic or meaning.
Once Man had become the player rather than the plaything, the world became his playground. Games are the religious services of the Rosy Vision, and sports of every variety hold up a mirror on the world - life is a game.
Political Consequences
In the Rosy Vision, whatever mode of life people adopt is their Chosen Way of Life. And they have a right to do as they choose.
The Rosy Vision first took hold in the rich, leisured and cultured classes of Western society. The less well-to-do classes, as they adopted the Rosy Vision, came to regard the same freedom as their right also. Political movements towards liberty and equality emerged, which sought the emancipation of workers who were seen to have been cheated of their birthright, and exploited by rapacious aristocrats, landlords, and capitalists. In a series of bloody revolutions, aristocrats and capitalists were deprived of their rights and possessions.
More profoundly, the Rosy Vision incalcated the belief that human society could be whatever humans wished it to be. Any sort of utopian society could be designed and constructed, given sufficient political will. What mattered was human Will, human determination, and solidarity in political mass movements. All that was needed, to institute any sort of social change, was to get enough people to agree, and to actively campaign for change, and change would inevitably follow.
At the same time, since the world was perfect, or soon to be perfected, human society as a mutual aid organization in time of trouble became redundant. There ceased to be a need to help other people, but instead for each person to look after his or her own well-being, entirely independent of society. The ideal type became the 'self-made man', who had bettered himself entirely through his own efforts, without assistance or education.
Ethical Consequences
If people were rich, it was because they had worked hard. If anyone was poor, it was only because they had been idle. Equally, if anyone got sick, it was increasingly seen to be their own fault, through the lifestyle or personal habits they had adopted. In a perfect world in which perfect health was the norm, after all, it could only be through some sort of carelessness or neglect that anyone became ill. Indeed, if doctors could not cure an illness, or arrest its progress, it indicated malpractice.
Since human society was whatever people wanted it to be, it followed that if anything went wrong, then someone somewhere was to blame. And also malefactors, who were after all perfectly free to behave in proper ways, must in some sense be malevolent or evil. So wrongdoers of every sort were increasingly demonized. Witch-hunts and pogroms followed. Whereas Christianity advocated the forgiveness of sins, the Rosy Vision increasingly advocated the harshest punishments.
But at the same time as the Rosy Vision promoted a moral righteousness that saw evil and malice everywhere, it was also busy dissolving ancient moral codes. The ferocity of the witch-hunts concealed increasing uncertainty about what actually was right and wrong. After all, in this perfect world, with all life leisure, there was no obvious reason why one activity was any 'better' or 'worse' than any other, any more than peaches were better than apples. Morality increasingly became a matter of aesthetic personal preference or fashion, a purely private concern. Attempts to enforce ancient moral codes, the rational justifications for which had anyway long been lost, were increasingly resisted as unwarranted social or state or religious interference.
This outcome was inevitable, once human society ceased to be a mutual aid organization with rights and duties, and simply became a collection of pleasure-seeking individuals. In the former case, moral codes acted to benefit everybody, but in the latter case they merely obstructed the pursuit of happiness. The Rosy Vision regularly advocated the most complete liberty, the natural right of anybody to do whatever they wished.
The Anti-science of the Rosy Vision
Deterministic science threatens to undermine the Rosy Vision by reducing human nature as wholly determined rather than wholly free. Natural science, applied to human life, threatens to take away human freedom. The devotees of the Rosy Vision maintain that human life is somehow separate from all other forms of natural life, peculiarly free in ways that those others are not. Science, they hold, is applicable to gross matter, to stars and planets, and even to much of life - but human life is uniquely different from all these. And when scientists accept that science can offer no ethical advice to humanity, then the separation of humanity from nature remains assured.