The World of Total Work

Dan Russ

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper, Translated by Gerard Malsbary with an introduction by Roger Scruton (St. Augustine’s Press [1948] 1998), $12.

Work is consuming our lives and—Josef Pieper would say—our humanity. I have recently observed cases of two disturbing instances of what Pieper calls the “world of total work.” The first is among friends and colleagues who are wired for vacations. By this I mean that they either choose or are expected to take their cell phones and laptops with them on vacations. They do so either because they are concerned about what their superiors or colleagues would think if they ignored the demands of the office, or because they fear missing something or someone that might be crucial to their professional lives. Indeed, a friend recently observed that as she and her husband take their annual pilgrimage to the shore, each year the beaches and coffee shops are increasingly filled with people on cell phones and laptops, doing business.

The second disturbing symptom of the “world of total work” can be seen in the obsessive ways we program and organize the lives of our children. Parents do it by signing them up for sports leagues, music lessons, scouts—anything that will keep them busy, off the streets, and give them (hopefully) a competitive edge. Schools do it with those reform movements that worry about “time on task”; many districts have in recent years reduced or abolished recess, the arts, and even some athletics. Most of this is driven by the real or perceived need to improve test scores, not only to evaluate the schools themselves but also so that we can sort and advance students—and so that they can be “productive” members of society. Indeed, the term most often used for the national movement to reform education into the likeness of business is the “accountability movement,” a term once used for measuring profit and loss.

Pieper (1904–1997), a German Catholic philosopher, foresaw our world. He warned us about the character of the world that was emerging after World War II, a world with no honor or place for the classical Christian understanding of leisure. Leisure: The Basis of Culture was first given as a lecture in the summer of 1947 and published in German in 1948. It is his description and critique of post-war Europe’s obsession with the business of rebuilding European society in such a way that everybody and every act must be practical and “useful.” How accurately this describes the global economy that pervades our world with its emphasis on productivity, profit, and doing away with “downtime.”

In contrast, Pieper reminds us that the very root and origin of classical and Christian culture has been to honor and make “a space of true leisure.” For example, the Latin root of our word for school, scola, means leisure. In other words, school was originally conceived as a place where young people could learn and contemplate what it means to be fully human through poetry and philosophy, mathematics and the arts. Yes, most of them would someday learn to do something practical and make a living, but they would first and finally know the meaning and value of being human, which includes but more importantly transcends the practical and the functional. Pieper makes a clear distinction between the universities, which are increasingly centers that train specialists to function in the marketplace, and traditional education, which “is concerned with the whole” of life, not just how to practice law, medicine, or accounting. Indeed, he warns of the danger of using the terms “intellectual work” and “intellectual workers” to justify doing philosophy and to avoid the new stigma of being “purely academic.”

While he is clear that he does not in this essay propose a program by which we can mitigate or reverse this march toward the pragmatic and functional, he does hold out hope that we are able to recover places and times of authentic leisure. Indeed, he says that all leisure that marks the fullness of humanity is rooted in religious practice, in festival, and—at its highest—in the worship of God.

Pieper suggests that those who practice such worship are witnessing to another way of being in the world, a way that sees life as, first and finally, a gift, a way that sees grace as life’s deepest value. He suggests that worship, festival, and philosophy can point us to a way of life that returns work to its rightful place: “We work in order to be at leisure.” One real difference such a perspective makes is to enable us to recover the idea that we take holidays—holy days—in order to commune with the Creator, the creation, and our culture, not vacations, in order to recover from and rest up for work.

My only disappointment with this penetrating essay is that Pieper does not incorporate more reflections from the Hebrew Scriptures, which give us a deeper and different understanding of both work and leisure from that of the classical Greek perspective. Working with one’s hands, as the life of Jesus demonstrates, is honorable in Jewish understanding, but so is the study of Torah, the discussions at the synagogue and the city gates, and the holy days and pilgrimages that marked the Jewish calendar and formed the rhythms of life. In short, I wish he had reflected more upon the epigraph he quotes from Psalm 46: “Be at leisure—and know that I am God.”

This slim edition includes a second essay, “The Philosophical Act,” which, while worthwhile, is a heavier read. It also includes an excellent introduction by Trinity Forum Senior Fellow, Roger Scruton.  

Dan Russ is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and editor of its curriculum, Children of Prometheus. He directs the Center for Christian Studies at Gordon College.

Reviews, Arts and Culture, Business, Meaning and Calling, Society, Thu 06 Sep 2007