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Time to Down-Shift

Entry 2129, on 2021-05-25 at 21:50:27 (Rating 3, Philosophy)

In my last post I discussed the ideas of Karl Marx, which was a result of my listening to the audio book "The Philosophy Book". As I continued to listen to this book, one of my favourite philosophers was also discussed, and that philosopher is Bertrand Russell.

There are a couple of reasons I like Russell; one superficial and the other a bit deeper. First, he looks like a classic British philosopher, especially in pictures of him as he got older. The elegant suit, the slightly dishevelled hair, and the pipe! He's just what a philosopher should look like. And second, he always seemed to make a lot of sense, without getting hopelessly swamped in meaningless detail as many philosophers like to do.

For example, I saw an interview where he was asked his opinion on the existence of God. He simply replied that there is no good evidence that one exists, so his interim hypothesis is that there is no god. That's a pretty solid theological statement, and the fact that it agrees completely with my own thoughts is entirely coincidental!

Russell wanted philosophy to be useful to ordinary people, so his relatively practical thoughts might be because of this. He also realised a lot of problems in the subject were related to the use of language and definition of terms, and attempted to create a way to define problems using logic instead of natural language.

In fact, as I listened to this book I have been quite surprised at how complicated some other philosophers' arguments are when simplicity is possible, how many arguments are based on unproved starting premises, how many misunderstandings are based on disagreements over the meaning of words, and how some arguments are clearly weak and could be easily challenged.

If someone with only a passing interest in philosophy can see this, why are some of these ideas still taken seriously? Maybe I'm just missing some of the complexity in the arguments due to my relative non-expertise, but I suspect in many cases the philosophical arguments really are as weak as I suspect.

But this post isn't meant to be a critique of philosophy in general, although that is a good topic for the future. This is intended to be more a commentary on Russell's thoughts on work. It leads on naturally from my previous post about Marx, because many of these ideas come from there, even though Russell was quite suspicious of Marxism.

So let's have a look at some of Russell's ideas and my own thoughts on them...

Here are some quotes, just to present the basic ideas: "the road to happiness lies in an organised diminution of work", and "immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous", and "the morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery".

It's pretty clear from this that he sees justifications for work as being mainly dishonest, and existing more for the convenience of those who benefit from exploiting the working class, rather than having any real intrinsic merit. It's hard not to agree that there is some merit in this idea, although making generalised statements like that is problematic.

He advocated the idea of "down-shifting" which was effectively just working for fewer hours each week. But, ironically he was a hard worker himself and wrote many volumes of work, as well as founding analytic philosophy, and being a social activist.

Maybe the issue here gets back to a definition of work. To me, work involves some aspect of activities which are involuntary. I would say that someone doing something because they want to, when another person does exactly the same thing for pay, makes it leisure instead of work. I'm guessing Russell would have wanted to record his thoughts even if that wasn't his job.

He wrote the "Essay In Praise of Idleness" in 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, which might have seemed somewhat tasteless, but in some ways that was the best time to have done it.

The Depression was a classic case of capitalism failing and the working class bearing most of the consequences, exactly as Marx predicted. Again, I have to say that I am not a Marxist; see my previous post for details on this.

Russell thought there are two kinds of work: first, work aimed at altering the position of matter at or near Earth's surface relative to other such matter; and second, work involving telling other people to alter the position of matter at or near Earth's surface relative to other such matter.

I'm sure these definitions are primarily used as a rhetorical device, but I think they make the point well. In fact, the idea is extended like this: the "supervisor" kind of work can be extended indefinitely, so that a typical organisation might look more like this: workers, supervisors, supervisors of supervisors, supervisors of supervisors of supervisors, advisors on who to employ, supervisors of advisors, etc.

Again, this fits in well with my own ideas where the modern world has reached the point where a good fraction of people do completely pointless jobs. Some estimates are as high as 60% of jobs being pointless. I would go further and say that these jobs aren't only useless, but they actually make it harder for real work to be done, so they are worse than pointless.

He then notes that the first type of work, that is the work involving actually doing something useful, which is primary reason for a workplace existing, is often dangerous, unpleasant, not highly admired, and poorly paid. In contrast, the "useless" jobs are often the opposite: relatively pleasant, safe, admired, and well paid.

Again I agree. We have reached a point where not only are the majority of jobs useless (or worse), but the more useless the job is, the more esteem it is likely to have, and the better it is paid. Something has clearly gone wrong somewhere!

He also claims that many people are overworked, making them miserable, while others are unemployed or underemployed, also making them miserable. The answer might be to reduce working hours (he suggests 4 hours per day) so that the overworked have a better lifestyle and the unemployed can get work because of the extra requirement which then exists.

I haven't seen any economic analysis of this in terms of efficiency and productivity, but I know there are studies showing reducing working hours doesn't result in lower productivity. Ironically, many jobs can be performed as well or better in 30 hours per week than they can in 40 hours.

Also, if there is extra work to be done after working hours are reduced, maybe the "supervisor class" might want to do some of it instead of whatever it is they do under the current system!

Russell agrees that there might be people who don't know how to occupy their time when they don't work a full 40 hour week, but he says this is more a deficiency in society rather than in individuals' personalities.

Considering that most people spend at least 10 years of their life in learning how to become "productive" members of society, as well as learning a lot of completely useless stuff they will never need again, this is a good point. Maybe the school system should spend as much time teaching people how to live a fulfilling life outside of work; in writing poetry, or playing music, or writing novels for example.

Finally, he thinks that we need to look at our attitudes. We accept current working hours and types of work, but most of us don't like our work, yet we find idleness a vice. We need to scrutinise this belief, and accept that leisure is OK. Not letting machines take over dangerous, boring tasks is foolish and irrational. And we should ask ourselves why is work good in itself, and why is some more valuable than others?

I find it difficult not to agree with a lot of this. Work in its current form does seem to be an invention of the industrial revolution, and the work ethic we have could easily be seen as a false belief created and encouraged by those who have most to gain; that is the third class of people, who Russell blames for many of society's problems: the non-working, rich land owners.

To sum up, before you accuse me of being lazy and just wanting to sit around all day doing nothing, I should say that I do spend a lot of my "leisure" time fixing computers, creating web sites, writing programs, and writing material (like this post) for the internet. Note that a lot of this is exactly what I do at work as well. But do I enjoy the work as much? Well, in some ways, yes, but the obligations and control from that "useless class" make it less desirable than doing the same thing outside of work.

I know many people who have "alternative lives" where they play in a band, write books, or coach or play sports. Why shouldn't they do this full time instead of trying to fit in around work? Good question. Maybe it's time to down-shift.

Comment 1 (6723) by Anonymous on 2021-06-03 at 14:44:48:

If everyone down shifted how would we get anything done? We still need people to do the work. Or will they just be playing in bands and writing irrelevant blog posts?

Comment 2 (6727) by OJB on 2021-06-04 at 09:36:32:

Well, that's the question everyone asks. I think a compromise would be for everyone to work half the hours they do now. They would probably get almost as much done (a company which changed to a 4 day working week found their employees got *more* done in less time) and the extra could be made up by employing the currently unemployed and re-deploying the "useless class" of "workers" to actually do something instead of whatever it is they do now.

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