George Bernard Shaw, of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady fame, raised the question: “Have you ever wondered why I am a communist?” His answer: “Well, it is largely because of my sense of the great importance of leisure in civilized society.”
Indeed, people need time to read books, be they about literature or science, or Mao, Marx and Shaw himself; debate them and go to movies and theaters; surf the internet or go to Church.
But Shaw neither looked into how either the increased leisure would be financed or induce the expanded leisured classes to read, reflect and debate substantive issues rather than spend time on Tik Tok, taking endless selfies, gobbling conspiracies and avoiding debates by joining echo chambers.
However, Shaw did write that for leisure to create and sustain his image of civilization, people must be “informed, trained and disciplined.”
If not, the result would be just the opposite: With “too much leisure” a society emerges that will be wholly sterilized “for cultural purposes, as if you brought them up to work as slaves to the limit of human endurance without any effective leisure at all.”
The outcome of undisciplined use of leisure is “that the little religion and art, literature and science we can obtain, would be frightfully corrupt.”
This happens as, with too much leisure, the “idlers” – Shaw’s term for members of the “cultural and academic” sectors – certifiably “come to loathe education, culture, literature and everything suggestive of intellect” and “use their freedom from toil to cultivate the art of amusing themselves or letting other people amuse them.”
As a result, without self-restraint and discipline, people end up neither civilized nor uplifted. Pretty prescient: Recent Gallup polls show that teenagers between 13 and 19 spend 4.8 hours daily on mainly TikTok and YouTube, far more time than they spend on homework.
Shaw was not the only one to make the latter observation. Long before him, Voltaire wrote repeatedly that “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice and need.”
More recently, Eric Hoffer, in his “The True Believer” on the rise of radicalism and mobs had this to say:
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui, and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed … They must be wholly ignorant, easily persuaded and led… Experience is a handicap.
How is boredom, avoiding work inadvertently, created and financed? The coming celebrated holiday of Freedom – the Exodus – is a good reminder what not to do and that freedom, accompanied by massive welfare without requiring discipline and self-restraint, bring boredom and mobs betting on false idols.
Strangely, as in romantic Hollywood movies, the collective memory about the exodus from Egypt and slavery stops with the “happy ending” of escaping to “freedom” and pays no attention to the events that followed, though history is rhyming.
The events were these: Despite the miracles, the new God performed in Egypt and when parting the sea, the freed slaves complained non-stop, ready to stone Moses. The water was not as good as it was in Egypt and there was not enough of it.
Moses struck rocks and fresh spring water came. But the food was more plentiful and tastier in Egypt, they complained, so God orchestrated the Fall of Manna, or free food catered to please any desired taste. Briefly, the multitude became in no time a fully subsidized, food-stamped welfare mob.
All miracles notwithstanding, as soon as Moses goes to the mountain to bring down the 10 commandments set in stone (eight of which are “no’s” requiring self-restraint) but does not return on the promised 40th day, the welfare mob loses faith, abandons the God that brought them to freedom, reverts to old deities and builds the Golden Calf. Moses promptly crashes the stones and the written commandments turn to dust.
Exodus spends seven chapters (25-31) describing in tedious detail how the tribe-in-the-making must build the Tabernacle before Moses destroys the stones. Then, following his outburst, another six chapters (35-40) repeat in minute detail the materials and intense non-stop work required for the Tabernacle’s construction. The repetition is not as strange as it appears.
Though the 10 commandments appear orally before (Chapter 19), the multitude, used to “solid” deities, saw nothing in writing. Why bother, then, to work so hard? They do commit to hard work only when Moses comes down for a second time with the re-written stones intact – and also putting the fear of God in the multitude by instructing the killing of 3,000 of them.
This is an unacceptably harsh lesson on how now to restore self-restraint, discipline and induce people to get off welfare and start working – though weaning masses of youngsters passing for “students and scholars” from massive subsidies (started with the 1958 National Defense Education Act’s good intentions) and restoring law and order may help.
Hoffer was prescient about this, too, when writing:
[An] individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation… Pleasure-chasing and dissipation are ineffective palliatives. Where people live autonomous lives and are not badly off, yet are without abilities or opportunities for creative work or useful action, there is no telling to what desperate and fantastic shifts they might resort in order to give meaning and purpose to their lives.
Recall, too, that in 1968 Harvard’s president at the time called in the police to restore order when students occupied buildings renaming a hall as “Che Guevara,” sang “Sieg Heil” and shoved banana down the throats of professors before pushing them down the stairs. Though even then only one Harvard professor stood up to denounce his complacent colleagues.
The article draws on Brenner’s Force of Finance and recent sequence of articles on universities and student debt forgiveness