24
THE TYRANNY OF NATURE
THE very first lesson that should be taught us when we are old enough to understand it is that complete freedom from the obligation to work is unnatural, and ought to be illegal, as we can escape our share of the burden of work only by throwing it on someone else’s shoulders. Nature inexorably ordains that the human race shall perish of famine if it stops working. We cannot escape from this tyranny. The question we have to settle is how much leisure we can afford to allow ourselves. Even if we must work like galley slaves whilst we are at it, how soon may we leave off with a good conscience, knowing that we have done our share and may now go free until tomorrow? That question has never been answered, and cannot be answered under our system because so many of the workers are doing work that is not merely useless but harmful. But if by an equal distribution of income and a fair division of work we could find out the answer, then we should think of our share of work as earning us, not so much money, but so much freedom.
And another curious thing would happen. We now revolt against the slavery of work because we feel ourselves to be the slaves, not of Nature and Necessity, but of our employers and those for whom they have to employ us. We therefore hate work and regard it as a curse. But if everyone shared the burden and the reward equally, we should lose this feeling. Nobody would feel put upon; and everybody would know that the more work was done the more everybody would get, since the division of what the work produced would be equal. We should then discover that haymaking is not the only work that is enjoyable. Factory work, when it is not overdriven, is very social and can be very jolly: that is one of the reasons why girls prefer working in weaving sheds in a deafening din to sitting lonely in a kitchen. Navvies have heavy work; but they are in the open air: they talk, fight, gamble, and have plenty of change from place to place; and this is much better fun than the sort of clerking that means only counting another man’s money and writing it down in figures in a dingy office. Besides the work that is enjoyable from its circumstances there is the work that is interesting and enjoyable in itself, like the work of the philosophers and of the different kinds of artists who will work for nothing rather than not work at all; but this, under a system of equal division, would probably become a product of leisure rather than of compulsory industry.
Now consider the so-called pleasures that are sold to us as more enjoyable than work. The excursion train, the seaside lodgings, the catchpenny shows, the drink, the childish excitement about football and cricket, the little bands of desperately poor Follies and Pierrots pretending to be funny and cute when they are only vulgar and silly, and all the rest of the attempts to persuade the Intelligent Woman that she is having a glorious treat when she is in fact being plundered and bored and tired out and sent home cross and miserable: do not these shew that people will snatch at anything, however uneasy, for the sake of change when their few whole days of leisure are given to them at long intervals on Bank Holidays and the like? If they had enough real leisure every day as well as work they would learn how to enjoy themselves. At present they are duffers at this important art. All they can do is to buy the alluringly advertized pleasures that are offered to them for money. They seldom have sense enough to notice that these pleasures have no pleasure in them, and are endured only as a relief from the monotony of the daily leisureless drudgery.
When people have leisure enough to learn how to live, and to know the difference between real and sham enjoyment, they will not only begin to enjoy their work, but to understand why Sir George Cornewall Lewis said that life would be tolerable but for its amusements. He was clever enough to see that the amusements, instead of amusing him, wasted his time and his money and spoiled his temper. Now there is nothing so disagreeable to a healthy person as wasting time. See how healthy children pretend to be doing something or making something until they are tired! Well, it would be as natural for grown-up people to build real castles for the fun of it as for children to build sand castles. When they are tired they do not want to work at all, but just to do nothing until they fall asleep. We never want to work at pleasure: what we want is work with some pleasure and interest in it to occupy our time and exercise our muscles and minds. No slave can understand this, because he is overworked and underrespected; and when he can escape from work he rushes into gross and excessive vices that correspond to his gross and excessive labor. Set him free, and he may never be able to shake off his old horror of labor and his old vices; but never mind: he and his generation will die out; and their sons and daughters will be able to enjoy their freedom. And one way in which they will enjoy it will be to put in a great deal of extra work for the sake of making useful things beautiful and good things better, to say nothing of getting rid of bad things. For the world is like a garden: it needs weeding as well as sowing. There is use and pleasure in destruction as well as in construction: the one is as necessary as the other.
To have a really precise understanding of this matter you must distinguish not merely between labor and leisure but between leisure and rest. Labor is doing what we must; leisure is doing what we like; rest is doing nothing whilst our bodies and minds are recovering from their fatigue. Now doing what we like is often as laborious as doing what we must. Suppose it takes the form of running at the top of our speed to kick a ball up and down a field! That is harder than many forms of necessary labor. Looking at other people doing it is a way of resting, like reading a book instead of writing it. If we all had a full share of leisure we could not spend the whole of it in kicking balls, or whacking them about with golf clubs, or in shooting and hunting. Much of it would be given to useful work; and though our compulsory labor, neglect to perform which would be treated as a crime, might possibly be reduced to two or three hours a day, we should add much voluntary work to that in our leisure time, doing for fun a huge mass of nationally beneficial work that we cannot get done at present for love or money. Every woman whose husband is engaged in interesting work knows the difficulty of getting him away from it even to his meals; in fact, jealousy of a man’s work sometimes causes serious domestic unhappiness; and the same thing occurs when a woman takes up some absorbing pursuit, and finds it and its associations more interesting than her husband’s company and conversation and friends. In the professions where the work is solitary and independent of office and factory hours and steam engines, the number of people who injure their health and even kill themselves prematurely by overwork is so considerable that the philosopher Herbert Spencer never missed an opportunity of warning people against the craze for work. It can get hold of us exactly as the craze for drink can. Its victims go on working long after they are so worn out that their operations are doing more harm than good.