Before reading this essay I had preconceived notions about it because of the term “idleness.” I thought it would be about the need to play and to rest, but instead Russell’s appeal to be more idle is directly tied to the stark division of social classes, the myth about the morality of work, and the organization of production. He wrote this essay in 1932 and while working conditions may have improved, the number of working hours in favor of leisure has not.
A good job offer might get two weeks of paid vacation, five unpaid sick days, and a base health insurance package. Some companies now are even offering unlimited vacation days because most people don’t take all of them. According to a 2019 Washington Post article titled “What does America have against vacation?” Americans didn’t take advantage of 768 million paid days off in 2018. Many countries have mandated paid time off with the average country in the European Union requiring around 20 paid vacation days. France requires at least 30, while the U.K. mandates 28, followed by Austria, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Spain and Sweden at 25.
According to that article, the United States is “the only country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a group of 36 of the world’s wealthiest nations, that doesn’t require employers to give workers annual paid leave, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research. That leaves 23 percent of Americans with no paid vacation and 22 percent without paid holidays.”
In his essay Russell says that “a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organised diminution of work.” He makes a distinction between two different kinds of work: the first he says is “unpleasant and ill paid” and consists of “altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relative to other such matter.” A lower class. The other is “pleasant and highly paid” and “is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.” An upper class.
Russell mentions a third class for Europe: landowners, whose idleness does not merit praise because it “is only rendered possible by the industry of others; indeed their desire for comfortable idleness is historically the source of the whole gospel of work.” I recognize a similar class division in America; there is a dependency of the elite on the working class to preserve the elite’s livelihood, and what rich person would ever settle for losing their livelihood? None. So the working class must continue to work. “The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own,” Russell writes.
I was interested to hear about his thoughts on the work day because I feel like this is a topic still debated today. He writes: “The [first world] war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organisation of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world. If, at the end of the war, the scientific organisation, which had been created in order to liberate men for fighting and munition work, had been preserved, and the hours of work had been cut down to four, all would have been well. Instead of that the old chaos was restored, those whose work was demanded were made to work long hours, and the rest were left to starve as unemployed.”
It sounds like the rich have always dictated the lives and welfare of the working class. Jeff Bezos comes to mind. I mean what does that do for us to have someone like Bezos operating in our world? These weird feelings come up when I think about how rich people like him are. Similar feelings arise when I see Bill Gates wearing clothes my own dad might wear. Nerdy dad khakis and button ups. I start thinking about what I would do with all that money.
For this system to become more balanced, it must experience an overhaul; the rich would have to give up their idleness, and I don’t see that happening. It’s like we’re in yet another vicious circle. “We have been misled in this matter by two causes,” Russell writes. “One is the necessity of keeping the poor contented, which has led the rich, for thousands of years, to preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect. The other is the new pleasure in mechanism, which makes us delight in the astonishingly clever changes that we can produce on the earth’s surface.” This way of the world works is ingrained in the heads of working men and women who believe that work is a necessary means to a livelihood. I hate the thought of settling for “a necessary means to a livelihood.”
Russell writes that the desire for efficiency has suffocated the capacity for light-heartedness and play, and has protruded into the minds of “the modern man” that “everything ought to be done for the sake of something else, and never for its own sake.” He even nailed a thought I wouldn’t have thought twice about: the notion that getting money is good and spending money is bad. Of course, that seems obvious. But Russell suggests that whatever merit is placed on the production of an item, a similar weight must be placed on the significance of consuming it. There is pride and profit in producing, but not consuming. One result of this, Russell writes, is “we attach too little importance to enjoyment and simple happiness, and that we do not judge production by the pleasure that it gives to the consumer.” This seems related to the idea of delight as defined by Ross Gay. When I read Gay’s Book of Delights, I interpreted the essence of his essays to be about enjoying something for its own sake. To merge it with Russell’s idea about consumption, I don’t think that the intersection of delight and consumption means blindly and excessively consuming because it makes you feel good (makes you feel pleasure). I think it means experiencing an unburdened enthusiasm for whatever you might be consuming.
Like Anthea Callen’s essay on the sexual division of labor, I was taken aback to find Russell’s essay on idleness deeply layered and linked to oppression, and the intersection between privilege, fascism, and white supremacy: “In the past, there was a small leisure class and a larger working class. The leisure class enjoyed advantages for which there was no basis in social justice; this necessarily made it oppressive, limited its sympathies, and caused it to invest theories by which to justify its privileges.” In the end, Russell advocates for a four-hour work day with the premise that more leisure time will give ordinary men and women the “opportunity for a happy life, will become more kindly and less persecuting and less inclined to view others with suspicion.” I have to say that I never see his end-goal coming to fruition. Like the saying on the back of one of my t-shirts, “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world before the end of capitalism.”
I wanted to look more into the childhood of French philosopher Jacques Derrida who first coined the term deconstruction, which has since been adopted by a number of industries including design. I found an article about the pedagogy of schools in colonized Algeria, where Derrida, along with prominent female writers Hélène Cixous and Assia Djebar, were born.
France maintained colonial rule over Algeria for about one hundred years beginning in the mid-19th century, and Algeria’s colonized schools emphasized the study of French history. Brigitte Weltman-Aron in her book French Education: Fifty Years Later (2008) writes, “The colonized were expected to recognize French supremacy and to accept French domination.” Derrida recalled of his education, “not a word of Algeria, not a single one concerning its history and its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany and the Gironde estuary with our eyes closed.” Similarly, Cixous wrote of her lycée: “a cult to France reigned and was not questioned. We learned France.” Weltman-Aron writes that the rhetoric of assimilation within education in colonial Algeria “cannot be overemphasized,” and that this rhetoric was rooted in schools as “an alibi that covered ‘a deliberate enterprise of destructuration of Muslim society.’”
Both Derrida and Cixous were of Jewish descent, and like indigenous Algerians, were not accepted by pure French citizens living in Algeria, although Derrida himself acknowledged the different levels of prejudice experienced by Jews and native Muslim Algerians, like Djebar, who faced stronger opposition from the French: “not all exiles are equivalent,” he said. For the sake of focusing on the intersection between Derrida and design, I’m going to focus on Weltman-Aron’s writing on Derrida and Cixous because she often writes about them having parallel experiences as Jews in colonized Algeria.
Any traumatic experience that erases the natural identity of a child is sure to reflect in their adult identity. Weltman-Aron wrote that their experience in the oppressive, colonized Algeria is what “gives urgency and promise to their writing.” Derrida called it “disorder of identity,” and Cixous “a false identity.” While the rhetoric of assimilation and oppression was pressed by the administration of colonized schools, French children living in Algeria picked up on the treatment of their Jewish and Muslim classmates: it was “the persecution of children by children,” Derrida said. Cixous said of the schools, they were “Algeria without Algerians.”
In the early 2000s, through a series of laws called lois mémorielles, or memory laws, the French state acknowledged its injustices toward the indigenous and minority people of Algerian. In reaction to these laws, petitions erupted to keep the government out of history: “‘In a free State, it is not up to Parliament or the judiciary authority to define historical truth. The politics of the State, even motivated by the best intentions, is not the politics of history,’” Weltman-Aron cites. Speaking about a different topic, Derrida explained what the problematic lois mémorielles tried to do: they attempted ‘‘to situate justice, the justice which exceeds but also requires the law, in the direction of the act of memory.’”
I felt the complex nature of all of this—memory, history, identity, trauma—and one acknowledgment by the French government of past wrongdoing wouldn’t begin to fix any of the problems caused by the period of French colonization. Even when decrees affecting Jews and Muslims were implemented and later revoked in colonized Algeria, their effects long prevailed.
Bertrand Russell’s main argument in this essay acknowledges the utility of the kind of technical knowledge evoked in the phrase often attributed to Sir Francis Bacon, “knowledge is power,” but advocates for the acceptance of “useless,” or perhaps better named “leisured,” knowledge. “Men as well as children have need of play,” he writes, “that is to say, of periods of activity having no purpose beyond present enjoyment.” And also, women, right Russell? Women like to enjoy things too.
In another thought, he writes that a habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than through action opens a window into a “larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.” I love this idea because it acknowledges the innate sorrow in life, as mentioned in Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, while maintaining that despite this we can still feel life’s pleasures if we allow ourselves; it seems that practicing a balance between the highs and lows of life requires a great deal of wisdom, thoughtfulness, and awareness.
In this essay, Russell mentions this phrase mental delight as a main motive of the Renaissance: a revival of learning that restored richness and freedom in art and speculation. “Learning, in the renaissance, was part of the joie de vivre, just as much as drinking or love-making,” Russell writes. This is the first time I’ve heard of the idea of mental delight; it makes it seem like these small things that I’ve been trying to notice for the past couple months aren’t just things, but part of a larger practice. It makes me think that I will only notice my delights if I’m open to them.
On this note, Russell writes, “An advantage of ‘useless’ knowledge is that it promotes a contemplative state of mind.” During the hours I spend watching the trees and boaters and birds and fish on the swimming raft, I feel that contemplative state of mind he’s talking about. “A contemplative habit of mind has advantages ranging from the most trivial to the most profound,” he writes. “ To begin with minor vexations, such as fleas, missing trains, or cantankerous business associates. Such troubles seem hardly worthy to be met by reflections on the excellence of heroism or the transitoriness of all human ills, and yet the irritation to which they give rise destroys many people’s good temper and enjoyment of life.”
Russell mentions the consistent questioning of useless knowledge throughout the last hundred and fifty years, which I think has continued since he wrote the essay almost one hundred years ago, so make that throughout the last two hundred and fifty years. Instead, the leading thought is that knowledge is an ingredient in technical skill and only worth having when “applicable to some part of the economic life of the community.” Russell writes, “This is part of the greater integration of society which has been brought about by scientific technique and military necessity.” This kind of knowledge is still valued in society evidenced by the different salaries of a doctor versus a philosophy professor.
Russell criticizes the world as being full of “angry, self-centered groups, incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch. To this narrowness no amount of technical instruction will provide an antidote” As I’m writing this in July 2020, it feels like Russell’s aforementioned statement is more relevant than ever. People are protesting every week against police brutality and demanding justice for black and brown lives, and on other days for gender equality and future generations who will have to face the consequences of global warming. These are human problems created by humans.
“What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos — all this touched with an emotion of pride in what id distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs.”
“Better economic organisation, allowing mankind to benefit by the productivity of machines should lead to a very great increase of leisure, and much leisure is apt to be tedious except to those who have considerable intelligent activities and interests. If a leisured population is to be happy, it must be an educated population, and must be educated with a view to mental enjoyment as well as to the direct usefulness of technical knowledge.”
I think Russell is essentially advocating for the knowledge of humanities (which I consider to be more enjoyable than mathematics and grammar), rather than scientific knowledge because he offers this delightful example about the origins of the word apricot: “Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant, but also makes pleasant things more pleasant. I have enjoyed peaches and apricots more since I have known that they were first cultivated in China in the early days of the Han dynasty; that Chinese hostages held by the great King Kaniska introduced them into India, whence they spread to Persia, reaching the Roman Empire in the first century of our era; that the word ‘apricot” is derived from the same Latin source as the word ‘precocious,’ because the apricot ripens early; and that the A at the beginning was added by mistake, owing to a false etymology. All this makes the fruit taste much sweeter.”
In this essay Russell provides some context for the way we live today. The rise of commercial architecture in the Middle Ages, perfected by plutocracy in Italy (government by the wealthy), propelled a separation between the individual and the communal.
In Venice, the slums were in back-alleys, concealed from gondola riders, while everything visible remained pleasing and aesthetic—a success for the plutocracy. The Church, however, built on a “restricted form of Communism:” individual spaces were “Spartan and simple,” while communal spaces were “splendid and spacious.” It’s clear at this point that Russell is advocating for wider use of communal spaces rather than the individual, private spaces we use today.
I think a common theme of Russell’s writing, across a number of his essays, is the idea that a narrow focus on the individual is dangerous, including individualistic architecture which bleeds into thinking individualistically and therefore without empathy and with prejudice. Reference this quote I included in my analysis of “‘Useless’ Knowledge:” “The world at present is full of angry, self-centered groups, incapable of viewing human life as a whole, each willing to destroy civilisation rather than yield an inch.” In this quote, Russell is saying that in order to not destroy civilization, people must become capable of viewing human life as a whole. Similarly, in answer to the question, “How much flexibility is there in the organization of a society—various governments, cultures, religions—for it to be moral? Are there any boundaries we need to adhere to?” contemporary philosopher Pamela Hieronymi says, “What you need is something like equal respect, and once you get equal respect for persons you can do whatever you want. There's a lot of variation, room for change, but not room for oppression, not room for domination.”
This sentiment applies to our modern pandemics. Equal respect is the value that divides people who wear masks and people who don’t wear masks; it is the value that divides people who say “All lives matter” and “Black lives matter.”
Russell identifies two main types of architecture in the nineteenth century: the factory, and the tiny house and tenements made for working class families: “Where high ground rents make large buildings desirable, they have a merely architectural, not a social, unity: they are blocks of offices, apartment houses, or hotels, whose occupants do not form a community like the monks in a monastery, but endeavor, as far as possible, to remain unaware of each other’s existence.”
Factories created a social life, and workers retreated to the home; the family desired (and I think still desires) isolation and privacy. Russell makes an interesting point when he connects this preference for individual architecture to the status of women: a links between social architecture and anti-feminist, patriarchal ideology. However, he writes of women as inevitably tied to roles as wife and mother, which I see as a flaw in his argument and proposed solution. “[Individualistic architecture and thinking makes] wives endure, and even prefer, the separate little house, the separate little kitchen, the separate drudgery at housework, and the separate care of children while they are not at school. The work is hard, the life monotonous, and the woman almost a prisoner in her own house; yet all this, though it frays her nerves, she prefers to a more communal way of life, because separateness ministers to her self-respect.”
Russell suggests various elements for a solution: take down separate houses and tenements and replace them with communal buildings around a central quadrangle. The quadrangle would hold a nursery school where children spend the majority of their time and will be fed all their meals. They would be allowed freedom of movement, within safe parameters, to develop “adventurous and muscular skill.” Mothers would see their children in the morning and evening and they would have hours of work and hours of leisure, like their husbands, Russell writes.
As for married women, they should be allowed to earn their living outside the home, he says. “What such women need is a service flat or a communal kitchen to relieve them of the care of meals, and a nursery school to take charge of the children during office hours,” Russell writes. Given the right architecture, he says, women would not be overworked; they could be relieved of most housekeeping and childcare work.
He writes of needed leisure for children and mothers: “She is always tired, and finds her children a bother instead of a source of happiness; her husband is at leisure when his work stops, but she never has leisure; in the end, almost inevitable, she becomes irritable, narrow-minded, and full of envy.” He’s saying that the system that is prepared for families and mothers is set up to fail: “A system which demands exceptional qualities of human beings will only be successful in exceptional cases.”
A problem I see with Russell’s solution is that it assumes women will want to be wives and mothers. I feel that his proposal to adjust existing social architecture remains within the lens of a patriarchal ideology. I wonder what social architecture plan he would offer to a group of young working women. He writes that the increasing possibility of the desire of women to have independence may lead more women to working outside the home, but says that feminism is “still at an early stage of development.” Perhaps I’m interpreting his writing wrong and he has intentionally chosen to focus only on wives and children. But nowhere does Russell mention the revised social architecture for women who might desire a wholly independent life, one not being a wife or mother.