If we are able to accept the automation of much of our existing work, and can agree to share most of the uniquely human work which remains, a key question lingers: are we ready for an increase in free time?
In the interwar years of the 1930’s, John Maynard Keynes, the famed economist, wrote The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a 1920 American bestseller, to argue that the fading trauma of war, combined with post-war industrial efficiencies, could result in enough comforts and necessities to allow Western man to exercise “his nobler faculties.” Human effort could be redirected from “work and the struggle for survival to leisure and ‘the graces of life.’”[1]
However, he and other supporters of this Higher Progress, such as Simon Patten, worried that centuries of habit necessary for survival in conditions of want and hardship would make a cultural shift from a mindset of “scarcity” to “plenty” extremely difficult. We would need to acknowledge and fight the urge to continue working as if we were still living an age of scarcity, and, perhaps more importantly, recognize and counter the human “maladaptation” that could “result in a generation of ‘gluttons’ who worked more and harder to consume ever more fantastic luxuries when they were already satiated with too many things.”[2]
Keynes added that “we have been expressly evolved by nature with all our impulses and deepest instincts for the purpose of solving our economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.” Without work to provide us with our traditional direction in life, we might find ourselves floating in an unprecedented ocean of freedom, an ocean in which we are not yet ready to swim.
According to Keynes, this realization could very well lead to a “nervous breakdown.” In this state of “not-work” (or much less work), the passive, decision-less necessity of reporting to our day to day job would be replaced with active, free choice. Instead of having the default, compulsory obligation to work, we’d instead have a daily decision regarding other forms of life and living and being. We’d have to independently determine when, where and how to occupy our time, with whom to occupy it with, and most importantly why to occupy it, the interrogative with the broadest and most challenging aperture for interpretation.[9] To many of us, this might be terrifying. To others, it could be incredibly boring.
When so many of us derive our only status, value, purpose, or meaning from our job, we may find our existence when freed of this necessity to be more like languishing rather than leisure, privation rather than privacy. We may feel as if it can be as tedious as work, except that it is now an inactive tedium, almost like a never-ending state of inertia. The initial burst of what we thought would be freedom could be quickly consumed and converted to idleness.[10]
Though many of us may dream to “do nothing for ever and ever” or envision heaven as a place to sing “eternal psalms,” Keynes points out that this sort of arrangement would only be tolerable, let alone satisfactory and joyful, for those who were doing the singing. And yet, he asks, how few of us can actually sing?
Keynes’ answer to the original query – if we are ready for gradual increases in leisure, or freedom from the necessity to work, or to live without work as our dominant obligation – is “not yet.”
To address this shortfall, one reformer spent much of his life focusing a potential solution: education.
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Robert Maynard Hutchins was born on January 17th, 1899 in Brooklyn New York. He came from an educated and religious family – his father was a Presbyterian minister, professor and college president, while his mother, the homemaker, was also college-educated, a relatively uncommon credential at the time.
While his father taught at Oberlin College in Ohio, Hutchins attended Oberlin Academy, a prep school, before enrolling in the college. His brief stint was interrupted by World War I, during which Hutchins served as a member of the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps in Italy, a powerful experience in which he experienced first-hand the irrational nature of mass human violence and began developing his belief that Western civilization depended on deep roots in reason, moral education, and shared intellectual heritage, not just shallow job skills and nationalism.
After the war, he enrolled at Yale University, excelling as a student, leader, and member of the Skull and Bones Society, a highly selective student society. He graduated in 1921, earning a B.A., but stayed in New Haven to attend Yale Law School, earning his LLB four years later in 1925. Recognized early for his talents, he served as a student secretary to the Yale Law School faculty, an assistant professor of law, and in 1927, at just 28 years old and two years after graduating, became Dean of Yale Law School, one of the youngest deans in the nation. He earned a reputation for intellectual brilliance and educational reform through his emphasis on interdisciplinary approaches to the case method and his core belief that education should form whole, thinking citizens rather than simply training technical specialists. Two years later, at the young age of 30, he was recruited to be the President of the University of Chicago, the youngest in its history and one of the youngest in America.
Hutchins wasted little time. He assumed this leadership role with a festering frustration with what he saw as higher education’s pivot from classic liberal arts to specialized, “trendy” vocational and professional education programs, something he deemed to be nearly impossible (professors simply don’t have the skills to teach students about the jobs they will hold) and irrational (by the time students graduated, anything they were taught would be outdated and/or replaced). Why, he asked, should colleges and universities be tasked with attempting to keep up with specialized job training, often at the expense of the federal and/or state taxpayer, when this job training could and should be provided by (and at the expense of) the actual employer more effectively?
Though Hutchins arrived at the University of Chicago at the high tide of interest in education for leisure – educational journals were filled with articles on “the new leisure class” and how to prepare them for lives as democratic citizens engaging in intelligent, active, and “worthy uses of leisure” – it coincided with the debate on the future of work which shaped FDR’s early presidency. To deal with unemployment that had resulted from overproduction and a saturation point of consumption, would we reduce working hours and “share the work” that remained, or focus on work creation through deficit spending? Unfortunately for Hutchins, he faced a significant uphill battle in his support of the former, but one for which he was uniquely prepared.
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In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Committee on Economic Security (CES) published a report on the state of American education. According to the committee members, it was “tragically evident”[3] that the schools were failing the nation, and that “a good education was no longer a guarantee of a good job.”[4] In the words of the committee, our educational institutions required immense reforms in order meet the modern “economic needs of individuals.” We needed to restructure higher learning to focus less on “schooling” (general education and liberal arts) and more on practical “education” (job skills).
The leader of this educational movement and the “socially managed economy” it would directly feed was a man named Rexford Tugwell. Tugwell’s vision was simple: to sustain Roosevelt’s pivot towards “Salvation by Work”, full-time employment for all, and the perpetual creation of needs and necessity to sustain these new jobs, while burying the original American dream of living free in collective abundance in order to pursue and practice the ideals of Higher Progress. Leisure, to Tugwell, was not an ancient ideal – it was an archaic, useless dream and a prime example of time wasted and economic productivity lost.
Tugwell articulated these ideas succinctly in his 1933 book, The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts. To Tugwell, the most urgent and important question facing his generation of leaders and thinkers was not if or when or how quickly machines, inventions, and progress would take away work, but what to do about it. With “the release from labor” at the center of his thinking and argument, he foresaw two ways forward: one would be found in the reduction of work hours and work days with a rise in wages, leisure, and recreational activities. The other release and freedom could “take the form of new and better kinds of work, free from drudgery and routine and transformed by government and industry into something new.”[5] Given a choice between the two, Tugwell’s opinion was clear: a “release” into freedom through leisure was a “dead-end.”
Though he acknowledged that we all have a “playful restlessness” which ought to be channeled towards a variety of recreational and amateur activities, accepting and directing leisure and amateurism as the fundamental outcome and goal of human progress was childish. Share-the-work supporters discussing the promises of leisure were “nihilists.” Most of us aren’t seeking useless leisure – we are just desiring worthwhile jobs. To Tugwell, “true progress lay on the frontiers of new work, not in the backwaters of mass idleness.” [6]
This new, artificial work could provide common purpose in the public interest and would “multiply thinking tasks.” With the machine taking over increasingly repetitive operations, men and women could assume uniquely human employment. Tugwell envisioned more and more workers entering the “managerial range” controlling complex operations with innovations such as “paperwork,” so as to “enlarge the grasp of the human mind so that it [could] take in wider areas and more complicated problems than it could do unaided.” [7]
Furthermore, some new workers, “the cream of the crop,” would be provided the opportunity to find new and worthwhile work – they would get to “work on work”. In this future, workers could focus on creating a “third economy,” in which jobs were created and provided by the government whenever the private, free market failed to sustain a culturally accepted notion of full-time employment. In this way, “new needs” which never before existed would be created by government officials (including educators and academics), such as “problems to solve, collective goals, national purposes, and public goods.”[8] Once identified and agreed upon, the government could go about passing relevant legislation, identifying appropriate tax-payer funding, creating needed agencies, staffing with civil servants, and outsourcing implementation to private contractors. To students of history, it should come as no surprise that Tugwell’s ideas and arguments laid the foundation for New Deal public works legislation such as the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), and Works Progress Administration (PWA). Inefficient, unprofitable work, created for the sake of working, and for which there was no stated need or demand, was invented and funded overnight.
Most alarming to classic educators like Hutchins, Tugwell envisioned schools to play a pivotal role in this new, socially-managed economy. Once the “social managers” determined which problems needed to be solved, politicians would assist with the identification of public funding to create the necessary jobs to address these “problems.” With jobs created, universities and colleges could then modify their curriculum: adding “useful” degrees which might ready their students for future work, while removing “cultural” components of the classic liberal arts whose only defense was autotelic: a meaning in and of itself, as it was for thousands of years. The value of an education would rest solely on its utility and usefulness to modern economic needs, needs which would be increasingly identified, publicized and funded by the government and whose sole purpose would be through the economic rationalization of life. As Lawrence Cremin noted in American Education: The Metropolitan Experience, 1876-1980, education was now recruited into the service of politically defined social goals. During World War Two, for example, government funding went almost exclusively towards the physical sciences in American universities, establishing a precedent and tradition of a politically defined prioritization of knowledge in higher learning that exists still today.
Tugwell’s overarching argument was quite simple: in the face of the Great Depression, more work, not less, was the path to recovery. More work, not less, was the true goal and eternal provision of a mature industrial society. Idleness remained a threat, as “Satan still finds some ill for idle hands to do.”[9] To pursue leisure was to concede to the selfish, meaningless desires of isolated individuals. Work, and work alone, “was the expression of meaning and function within the social group.”[10]
To critics like Hutchins, this report and its overarching theories clashed with world history and the wisdom of our ancestors. Since its founding in Plato’s Academy, the original intent of university – and particularly the liberal arts – was what to do with freedom. The concept of utility, or ensuring that students are prepared to be productive members of a current and future workforce, was never part of the equation until very, very recently. Furthermore, the liberal arts were, by definition, about teaching free people the arts and skills of living free. Work was always for the sake of leisure, not for the sake of more work. Students should be taught to work in order to live, not to live in order to work.
Hutchins truly believed in the etymological roots of the word “school” and “scholarship” – scholé in Greek, meaning leisure, which in Greek culture was considered the ideal – and did not accept its diluted meaning in translation over time. And he viewed the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution as a fleeting, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to erase leisure’s legacy as an aristocratic, elitist privilege earned through the oppression of serfs and slaves and instead harness the blessings of industrial innovation – what he called “machine slaves” – to shorten the hours of work and provide a democratized, “abundant leisure for all.” To Hutchins, we had a choice – to allow this “mechanization” to reduce man “to a robot” or to use it to supply “the economic base and the leisure that will enable him to get a liberal education and to become truly a man.”[11]
Hutchins was not naïve, though. He fully acknowledged that Americans had a history of balking at genuine freedom when it came within reach and reiterated that there was no guarantee that any future freedom earned would not “squandered – forgotten or wasted on foolish things.”[12] He fully agreed with the notion that one could assess the true health of a nation not by examining how it goes about its work, but by how it goes about its leisure. And he was honest in his assessment that we, as Americans, seemed to be wasting our free time by watching television and pursuing other empty amusements, sharing no doubts that “the free market and its entrepreneurs were eagerly exploiting the situation, inventing new ways to waste free time: new products to consume, new passive and worthless recreations.”[13] These very same people, in fact, were seizing on the mass waste of free time apparent in American society to trivialize the entire leisure concept, using it as evidence that increases in leisure would result in cultural waste, “from which only more, new work could save the nation.”[14]
Walter Lippman, a fellow reformer, wrote about these trends. With mass production making life more efficient for many Americans, the advent of mass leisure had arrived to fill the void. “A dreary thing,”, this was purely “commercial, appealing to the lowest threshold of amusement, just before which boredom beckoned.”[15] These “second-handed” things, wrote Lippman, “destroyed the individual’s sense of control and even the exercise of will.”[16] Rather than serving as an outlet for human creativity or personal interest and growth, leisure was now filled with passive pleasures – spectator sports, movies, television – and served only as an “antidote to boredom.” But as the dosage “grew larger and larger,” a time would come “when it would fail to beguile; it would cease to amuse and finally become the disease (boredom) itself.”[17]
Instead of submitting to these passive pleasures, we would instead have to determine, individually, how to absorb this free energy actively and freely, independent of the commercial marketplace, “so that it intensifies rather than rights against the order of our being.”[18] This might be described as the feeling of finding “exhilaration in solitude…the sense of being…replenished.” Passive pleasures, on the other hand, were insatiable and often grow upon what they feed upon, therefore remaining eternally “unsatisfied.” Searching constantly outside of oneself for pleasure and satisfaction could lead to the point where the searcher “possesses whole provinces for his estates, armies for his retinue, museums for his toys, and establishments for his lusts.”[19] Instead of searching and spending and acquiring in an endless effort to satisfy desire, the remedy for free time, for leisure, was in finding and developing “desires which are themselves satisfying.”
With these frustrations, beliefs and observations in mind, Hutchins went about pursuing two urgent reforms: revamping the undergraduate program at the University of Chicago, and reinventing the concept of adult education in America. The next post will cover both.
- J.M. Keynes, Essays in Persuasion, 1931. 64 WWE ↑
- 34 WWE ↑
- Committee on Economic Security, Report to the President, 1935 ↑
- Hunnicutt, Free Time, 130 ↑
- 252, Work Without End ↑
- 253 Work Without End ↑
- 254 Work Without End ↑
- 130, Free Time ↑
- 260 Work Without End ↑
- 255 Work Without End ↑
- 126, Free Time: The Lost American Dream ↑
- 133, Free Time ↑
- 126, Free Time ↑
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- 262 Work Without End ↑
- Lippman, Free Time and Extra Money↑
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- Lippman, Free Time and Extra Money
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