The Problem of our Spare Time

Dominion, Volume 18, Issue 223, 20 June 1925, Page 13

The Problem of our Spare Time

Do we know what to do with Leisure ?

“ One of the outstanding defects in modern education is that it takes no account of leisure as a permanent factor in our life. Leisure itself, considered as the surplus of time not definitely required lor daily practical tasks, is for most of us a very recent affair. It is an essentially modern phenomenon. It is largely a by-product of man’s conquest of nature, his development of newly-discovered energies of nature to supplement or release his own. Leisure has come to us slowly, unevenly, unequally.” —Mr. George W. Alger, in the “ Atlantic Monthly.”

HOW are the peoples of the world spending their spare time ami leisure ? Always, an interesting question, Mr. George Algei tackles it in a vigorous and excellent essay which appears in the “Atlantic Monthly.” He goes on to observe:— “Science is continuously affording new methods of coitrol over the processes of nature which make for the existence of a social surplus of which no other generation dreamed—a surplus of products and of wealth created in such quantities that, given adequate and just distribution, it is more than sufficient to meet those age-old problems of poverty which pietists hardly a century ago believed to be an inevitable doom and a part of the inscrutable purpose of God.

“They considered it an unescapable fact that there was in nature not enough to go around; and Malthus’s theory of population was accepted as a disagreeable mathepiatical certainty. “Our ancestors considered not only poverty but continuous labour a necessary and unavoidable thing. ’I he present social surplus, due to the conquest of nature and the discoveries of science, was unthinkable. “While radical minds to-day are dealing with the injustice of the distribution of the social surplus of things, on the assumption that a better world is possible when the redistribution is made on different lines, practically no discussion has been devoted either by radicals or by conservatives to what is really an equally important aspect of the matter. The growing social surplus is not only of things but of time. The time surplus, for convenience of discussion, I call ‘leisure.’ “A very considerable and increasing body of leisure for workers in the industrial field has been due not only to humanitarian legislation but to facts concerning human capacities, ascertained by a cold-blooded modern industrial psychology applied to the study of work-fatigue. The long workingday is an anachronism. "Notwithstanding the slow process of its elimination in certain industries, its ultimate disappearance is inevitable. The battle for the shorter day is still on, and it is perhaps unreasonable to expect those engaged in the struggle to gain it to stop to discuss what they will do with it when they

get it. “The meagre discussion which the time surplus has received has been in the main due to the questionable assumption that leisure is a thing good in itself. Create the four-hour day—if this dream is not too remote—and it is assumed that the margin of leisure thus created will take care of itself, will prove beneficial to its recipients.

“The pressure for the shorter day never has taken into consideration what is to be done with the balance of the day when it is released from labour. That the newly created leisure should itself be a new and distinct problem has never been considered. It is not unfair to say that the assumption generally made is that leisure and happiness are practically synonymous, so that if we attain leisure and fail in happiness it is in some special way our own individual fault, for which no one but the sufferer himself is to blame.

“Leisure itself has been won, in large part, by the subdivision of processes, by specialisation and by increased mechanisation of industry and the development of the iron man. The tasks of countless thousands of our workers are to-day so uninteresting, so monotonous, so mechanical, that there is no happiness in the daily toil.

“One of the current problems of industrial psychology is that of evolving new incentives to make men work hard and effectually at these monotonous tasks. We have as yet evolved no sufficient philosophy by which the uses of leisure are given any special function as incentives to work. “The stimulus of what we want to buy, rather than what we want to be, is, in current theory, that which keeps us at work. “The people who can set before us a long list of new things to want, in a way to make us want them irresistibly, are the main contributors to our current squirrel-cage conception of progress. No doubt any theory of the use of leisure which should make it something else than principally an expression of the buying-power might be considered an alarming heresy because of its possible effect on sales. Is it not conceivable, however, that more leisure might come to all of us, and that we should try harder to get it for our fellows, if those who have it made it seem more valuable ?

“The use of our time for earning our daily bread makes most of us perform tasks which represent not our personalities but our necessities. If what we do with ourselves when we are free from our tasks is the criterion of what we really are-, how many of us would be proud of the way we meet the test of leisure? How many of us are yet fit for a leisure world? How many of us do use leisure so as to make the return of the twelve-hour day seem a consummation devoutly to be wished? Yet leisure is our doom, and even the four-hour day may prove to be a not impossible imagining. “Owing to the difference in the quality of work and the lack of selfexpression through work, our enlarged leisure to-day takes mainly a receptive instead of an expressive form. “A main defect—from a cultural point of view—of the movies, for example, is that the people who see them contribute nothing to them. They are simply receptive of what the miracle-workers of Hollywood prcduce for

their diversion. We are slow to realise that oue of the effects of the specialisation or mechanisation of our life in our zeal for enlarged production is this closing-in of the fields of self-expression for the individual, the mechanisation of what were formerly processes of self-expression. The mechanical piano, the phonograph, and the radio make the long toil of learning music as a personal accomplishment seem less worth while. . “We have before us, in a new and common form, dangers to which, as Hamerton said in his ‘lntellectual Life’ years ago, the rich were peculiarly eXP °-Ev"en his modestv, when he is modest, tends to foster his reliance on others rather than on himself All that he tries to do is done so much better by those who make it their profession that he is always tempted to fall back upon liis paying-power as his most satisfactory and effective force. “Any process whose most conspicuous result is an enormous increase of mechanical labour, involving a’constantly diminishing field for personal expression for man in the mass; any process which takes the educational factor out of man’s personal industry, which increases both the quantity of the things that support physical life and the quality of the mass of human beings, and yet diminishes the field of self-expression for the average. individual in his leisure as well as in his work, by failing to educate him to the use of leisure, and makes sterile his diversion-this is a process which hardly can be called progress. “Who can fairly deny the charge that it is our lack of adequate conceptions of the obligations as well as the pleasures of leisure which is at the basis of the difficulty? Science has given us more ways than we ever had before of frittering away our time. We are using them all and crying for more. “The reapplication'of love to life is the greatest practical problem before us, on the solution of which the future of Western civilisation depends. It is not a mechanical or a scientific problem; it is a cultural problem. Science adds little to the solution of cultural problems, for cultural progress depends upon a cultural theory of success. “It depends upon a system of education which adds to the capacity of the individual to be happy as well as efficient. Even the beginning of such a system of education is not yet apparent in this country, nor are the needs of such a system understood.”

Mr. Alger sums up in trenchant style: “A civilisation that creates a leisure which it cannot rationally use may well be in greater danger of destruction than one that has no leisure at all. A civilisation that bores its beneficiaries is perhaps even worse than one that overworks its slaves. A world fit for democracy is a far easier aim than a world fitted for leisure. Democracy can stand the test of war. Whether it can stand -the test of uninspired leisure and survive is quite another matter. At least we should begin to recognise the problem and the necessity for its solution. “Why do we not see that what is returning to us is slavery in a new form? The vital defect of slavery was not only what it did to the slaves but also what it did to their masters. History tells us of the softening and disintegrating influence upon civilisations having their work done, not by applied energy of their freemen, but by slaves who obeyed the masters’ bidding, leaving the masters to vice and the luxuries of a degenerating idleness. The slaves suffered, to be sure; but they destroyed their masters; for the civilisation of their masters perished as a tree that rots from within. “The danger of the new slavery is almost wholly to the masters, and in 'masters’ we include classes that in- no previous era considered themselves masters in any sense; some of them are, in fact, inclined to call themselves to-day wage slaves. Even the most ideal redistribution of wealth and of leisure under social justice will not and cannot change the essential quality of this danger in any particular. The iron men who work for us, the slaves mustered in increasing numbers to do our work, are no longer flesh and blood.

“In the old South not much over 10 per cent, of the population were slave-owners. We are all slave-owners to-day, and the slave-traders of our time are not akin to the pitliess people who once filled our South with black bondage. They are industrial engineers, electrical experts, chemists, and men of wisdom in the sciences.

“Our slavery conies not from the darkness but from the light, and the new slavery is called ‘progress.’ The old escape, moreover, is not open to us. These slaves we will never set free. For better or for worse they will serve us as long as our civilisation lasts. We have no intention of returning to the life of .toil from which they have released us. “Tlie genius of the magic lamp will for ever work for the hands that hold it. There is no way out but by meeting the remorseless test of the lamp, by proving that we can live in a slave world without succumbing to those insidiously enervating influences which have destroyed all the slavemade states of the past.

“The great problem before us to-day is to create a civilisation that does not degenerate under leisure. This can be done only by setting in operation forces making for a culture that recognises, as no civilisation since the fall of Rome has been required to do, that leisure is and must be a means and not an end; that its true value is measured by what we do with it—by whether it lifts us or lowers us in the great world of intangibles, the world not of material but of spiritual values.”