Daily Telegraph 9 Aug 1991 

I just cannot stop thinking about the results of the research of that American zoologist, Dr Joan Herbers. She has discovered that most animals, so far from busying themselves from morning till night, do as little as possible.

Beavers are not actually beavering away, or not very much. Ants are not perpetually scurrying purposefully about. Busy bees are not always busy. We think that they are, because that's when we notice them. Mostly they are doing nothing - not necessarily sleeping, just being, and definitely not working. There's something to be unlearnt and a myth to be exploded.

When Anthony Trollope visited the West Indies in the mid-19th century, what struck him most forcibly was that the natives of those islands worked happily enough for the time required to earn enough to live on, and not a moment longer. The idea of regular employment for regular hours, for regular money, held no attraction for them.

This was inconvenient for their employers, but it disturbed Trollope in a more profound way. Like many of his contemporaries, he saw the desire to accumulate wealth as the first and essential step towards what he called civilisation.

Nineteenth-century West Indians may or may not have been closer to nature than their European contemporaries. Their reasoning was sophisticated enough. They were freed slaves, or the children of freed slaves, and they knew exactly what work was and was not. Work was something that powerful people got less powerful people to do for them, by force if necessary.

The force, for us, is moral. From childhood, we are praised if we work hard and reproached if we do not. Inactivity is called laziness or idleness, which are both pejorative words. The intrinsic goodness of work is a given factor in our society. Without having recourse to Weber or Marx, it is apparent that capitalism is based on it. Time is money, and the American zoologist's research is called "time budget analysis".

Animals, so far as we know, do not feel in the least guilty during the long, long hours when they are not rushing about searching for food, warding off enemies, or building better homes. Their inactivity seems blissful.

Yet human animals, when they have retired from the battlefield, continue to assure enquirers that they are "keeping busy", as if not to be busy were a disgrace. The unemployed are sometimes condemned as "shirkers", which adds guilt and anger to the inability to find work.

Guilt and anxiety about working and not working are far more deeply rooted in us than guilt and anxiety about sex, which is just an exciting red herring kept alive by religions and by the structures of psychoanalysis.

Pleasurable inactivity is the default mode, in all the natural world. We know this in our bones. The words tranquillity, serenity, peacefulness, all have blessed and beautiful connotations. It is observable even to the brainwashed that those who do the hardest work for the longest hours are at the bottom of the heap.

Those at the the top of the heap hire other people even to shuffle their money. If they worked hard in the past, it was so that they could enjoy leisure in the present. If they are working hard now, it is so as to enjoy leisure in the future.

Workaholics are like hysterical dogs, addicted to the adrenalin high, chasing imaginary rabbits from morning until night. Anyone who works in an office knows that the "work" could be done in half the time. It is spun out and made to last by means of meetings, conferences, cups of coffee, little chats, and telephone calls to the beloved.

The man - or, nore usually, the woman - who cuts through the nonsense and completes an allotted assignment in less than the allotted time causes frightful embarrassment and receives little thanks from anyone. She has revealed how few clothes Emperor of Work is really wearing.

But what of the pleasures and dignity of work, you will say? What of the thrill of skill, the satisafction of a job well done, the inexhaustible potential of human inventiveness? Aren't these things precisely what makes us different from the ants and bees and beavers, now revealed in their true colours as idle layabouts?

Of course we must work if we are to eat, but by distorting the nature of work we make ourselves miserable. Animals do not procrastinate, muttering to one another that they really should, they really must, get out there and kill an antelope. The empty stomach, the hungry cubs, the single-minded pursuit of prey, are indivisible. Who then, to quote W.B. Yeats can tell the dancer from the dance?

Animals - dogs and horses apart - are freelances. So are many humans, myself included. We have the freedom to behave rationally, like the brute beasts. We end up torturing ourselves, being humans. Energy cannot vanish. Because of the law of the conservation of energy, it becomes degraded from useful forms to useless ones.

Entropy rules, OK? What every animal knows is that activity carries a high risk. The creature who is lying low is in less danger than the one rushing around drawing attention to itself.

Our hyperactivity may bring about our extinction: we just cannot help fiddling with our environment. This has traditionally been called progress. But we have partially ruined the planet, and we have become so good at finding ways of destroying each other that we may end up wiping out the species.

There is dignity and often huge pleasure in work that is done willingly and from necessity. Beyond that point it is an aberration, or exploitation or neurosis. Pascal was on to it when he said that all man's ills arose from his inability to remain alone in a room sitting in a chair.

The rot set in long before the Protestant work ethic or 19th-century theories of self-improvement. The Book of Proverbs said: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise". If we are sluggards it is because no one until now has considered her ways with sufficient care and accuracy.

But there's still time for us to wise up.